Smooth Rabbie Burns guides Cupid’s arrow
A drama to well and truly celebrate Burns Night with a playful fresh perspective of the Scottish bard comes to East Kilbride Arts Centre for January 23.
‘The Ghosting of Rabbie Burns’ is a comedy written by Irish talent, Gillian Duffy.
This new work has given attention to the loving side of Mr Burns - not so much familial love or platonic love, but the super-charged romantic love that seems to have been the man’s reason for living.
Gillian Duffy’s play, with musical director Alyson Orr, has Rabbie Burns as an interloper on modern day internet dating who proves very good at coming up with a baited hook for the opposite sex.
Duffy based herself in Glasgow to write the teasing piece: “I had to do my research. The thing about Rabbie Burns is he was not someone I’d grown up knowing all about, so I was down at the library on Glasgow’s south side, and if you’d wanted to borrow a book on him, you would have found it was already taken out by me.
“In Ireland we have big figures like James Joyce, but he is in no way as accessible as Burns was. There is a global sharing of the output of Burns, be it Auld Lang Sang or Bob Dylan admitting the influence of ‘My Love is Like a Red Red Rose’ on his songs.”
In ‘The Ghosting of Rabbie Burns’,the Scottish icon spookily provides some 21st century tips on winning over the lassies when heartbroken author Ariel Winters is feeling down.
Ariel stays in her aunt’s old cottage in Ayrshire for a bit of solitude to get on with a writing project. But on her first night alone, when everyone else is celebrating Burns Night, Storm Tam comes along and kicks out the electricity, leaving the cottage cold and full of shadows.
As she tries to write by candlelight, quietly wishing that one day the right man will show up, she gets a ghostly visitation slightly different than what she’d hoped for.
“The play demonstrates that romance in the 21st century isn’t so different from 200 years ago after all,” explained Gillian.
She told the Advertiser that she’d really enjoyed writing this comic, affectionate, piece and it had been a joy to also feature the songs and poems of the great man himself, including ‘Green Grow the Rashes’, ‘My Love is Like a Red Red Rose’ and ‘Charlie is my Darling.’
The part of lothario Burns is played by James Mackenzie, who some will know as River City’s Gary Trenton. James has also been in Outlander, Rebus and Taggart. In theatre he’s appeared in a wide range of productions from Macbeth to Sunshine On Leith.
Morna Young plays Ariel and as well as a host of plum parts in theatre, she’s the writer of Lost At Sea, a major production coming soon to Perth Theatre.
Get a new take on chat up lines with a visit to The Ghosting of Rabbie Burns at Birnam Arts on Wednesday, January 23. Tickets from www.birnamarts.com