Letters to Indie idol give much to savour

Letters to Morrissey Meditative and funny

That Morrissey biopic England Is Mine just so happens to have gone on national release at the same time as Gary McNair premieres his latest show is a coincidence you feel sure the Scots writer and performer will take great delight in.

In fact, McNair’s younger self would no doubt have seen it as a sign from above that the stars were realigning themselves to bring him and the former Smiths frontman together in the same orbit.

after all, back then McNair, living in ‘a s **** town’ notable only for its suicide black spot, and riddled with a corrosive, uniform masculinity, enjoyed a special relationship with his Indie idol, spilling out all his teenage angst to the singer ‘who dared us not to fit in’ in missives signed the Boy With the thorn In his Side.

true, it was a one-sided conversation, – ‘this isn’t fan mail, it’s correspondence’ says McNair to a Barrowlands bouncer with all the desperate tunnel vision of fandom. But they provide the framework for McNair to explore and reflect on his younger self, and the events and circumstances that helped shape him.

If that sounds like the sort of self-indulgent, narcissistic navel gazing Morrissey would approve of, the show is anything but. What McNair offers here is a touching, meditative and funny first-person monologue examining themes of friendship, domestic abuse, pop culture fandom, and trying to negotiate the shifting sands of adolescence.

Directed by Gareth Nicholls and played out on a simple, sparse set, (Morrissey posters on the wall; vinyl stacked on the floor) the starting point is that dramatic staple, the return home. But it isn’t long before we’re reeling around the fountain of McNair’s youth as an introvert trying to connect with a world where ‘some labels just stick’.

the wheel on which the piece turns is the cooling off of his friendship with troubled best mate tony, and the dark circumstances beyond either’s control that facilitate it. Into this are injected diverse misfits – the school psycho; Jan the lesbian; indiscreet school counsellor McKinnon whose charges fall into two camps – bed wetters and nutters. and while the show doesn’t quite have the focus or emotional charge of McNair’s 2016 Fringe hit, a Gambler’s Guide to Dying, there’s still plenty to savour.

Traverse until Aug 27