The Pieman cometh home – to Tynecastle
The renaissance of Hearts and Scotland’s other “back from the brink” clubs will be celebrated in a play to be staged at Tynecastle on Friday and Saturday. Co-written by financial consultant Bryan Jackson and journalist David Belcher, The Pieman Cometh is a comic tale of administration told from the point of view of the man who has to spell out the bad news. “Writing the play was quite therapeutic – in lots of different ways,” said Jackson who, as well as helping Hearts in 2013 also played his part in saving, among others, Motherwell, Dundee and Clyde. “It is a serious business, people do lose their jobs, people do lose money. “At the same time there are lot of good things about the process, with the affection people feel for clubs and the way they respond to a crisis. “So I tried to pack a lot of that in, some of the humour you encounter, too. “My daughter is a stage manager and, through her, I met one or two people in the industry and I had been encouraged to think about putting something together. “So when I ended up on a holiday on short notice I was lying on the beach and thought, ‘I have got a scene one of a play here’ and just started writing. By the end of the week I had written a draft play.” The Pieman, appropriately sponsored by McGhees Bakers and Pars Foods Limited, begins with that first scene when accountant Alan Ledger meets the chairman of Dunwearie to give him the bad news. “That is why staging this play at Tynecastle is so important to me,” said Jackson. “In 2013 I was in at Hearts and the situation was giving me sleepless nights because I thought they were fractionally more likely to go to the wall than survive. “There was £7,000 in the bank, a month’s arrears of wages, 10,000 season tickets sold and all the money gone from that and no friendlies arranged. “If somebody had said to me then, ‘Don’t worry, not only is this club going to survive but post-administration they will spend £12 million on a stand and you will be back with a play you have written,’ I would have thought they were bonkers. “You couldn’t make that up, it is too incredible.”