The Herald - The Herald Magazine
A Glasgow Breaking Bad...with added chips
IT’S UNLIKELY that Andy McGregor had Jacob Rees-Mogg’s investment successes emanating, allegedly, from Brexit and the PPE crises in mind, or Shell’s $19bn profits last year, when he wrote a comedy musical about uncontainable avarice. . .
If only because McGregor had already written his sizzling black comedy success Spuds before ReesMogg was wheelbarrowing his millions to the bank.
Nevertheless, audiences certainly won’t fail to spot the allegorical lines running through this hit show that began life in Glasgow’s Oran Mor.
Spuds follows the misfortunes of the utterly dejected David MacGonigle, (Richard Conlin), a struggling newsagent whose wife has died recently.
David has developed a reliance upon getting banjoed every night and filling his face with chips and an Irn Bru-type ginger.
But one night, somehow his chips become sozzled with this bogus Bru – and the result is a fried orange potato platter with hallucinogenic properties.
Now, David sees the opportunity in these easily manufactured drugs and sets out on a Breaking Bad adventure, becoming the West End of Glasgow’s answer to Walter White.
He does a deal with local chippy owner Toni, (Ewan Somers) and soon the pair have the community out of their heads and in their pockets.
But there’s so much more to this play than big songs and psychedelic experiences.
David’s late, minted wife had been the real provider in the family and having been used to so much money sloshing around, we learn his indolent daughter Daisy (Joanne McGuinness) has become more spoilt than an angry voter’s polling card.
David, with his new drug money, reckons he has the chance to put a smile on his big spender daughter’s face.
But of course, no amount of money, to the morally bankrupt, is ever enough.
“I love stories that follow the goodguy-falls
template – think Macbeth or the Godfather – sometimes referred to as a riches-to-rags story arc,” says writer Andy McGregor.
“And here was an opportunity to write my own.”
The writer was aware that a one-hour lunchtime play about chips and ginger wouldn’t offer quite enough sustenance for an evening theatre production, and so it was re-fried in the Cookeen of his imagination.
“I have written a whole new bunch of stuff for the show.
“I wanted to make David’s journey to the dark side a little more justified – in his mind – and I wanted to do more with the reporter in the show, Jonathan Smith, so the middle section
of the show regarding him is brand new.”
McGregor adds; “Towards the end of rehearsals, I felt that Daisy and Toni sort of disappeared for a while, so I write No More Crying, a pastiche of a modern musical theatre ballad.
“It’s one of my favourite moments in the show, it slows everything down and is, very strangely moving.”
This play also plays out close to home.
We should worry how we can all become a little materialistic.
And as sure as Ed Sheeran writes his own tunes, it won’t fail to strike a chord.