Musical celebration of Muriel Spark will be part of Scottish showcase at the Fringe
A new musical celebration of the literary legacy of Muriel Spark will take centre stage in an official £550,000 showcase of Scottish work at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Shows inspired by an actor’s experiences after arriving in Britain as a 11-year- old Kos - ovan asylum seeker, the reality of life as a military dr one worker, and an exploration of colonialism and slavery by a Kenyan storyteller who has relocated to Scotland will feature in the programme.
The “Made in Scotland” initiative, now in its 11 year, will feature 22 different music, theatre and dance producti ons across the Fringe.
Other highlights include the creation of a multi- sensory, audio-visual pop-up playground, a“little top” circus experience for babies and a new 100 -seater music venue made out of upcycled pianos.
Saxophonist Raymond Macdonald is behind the musical tribute to Spark, which is inspired by some of her most memorable novels, themes and characters. It is one of several productions selected for the Made in Scotland programme which are being staged at the pop -up Piano - drome venue, which will operate throughout the Fringe at The Pitt market in Leith.
Macdonald’s show, Lie Still My Sleepy For tunes, which will best aged for the first time in Spark’ s home city by a nine -piece band against a backdrop of specially- created visuals, including images of Spark and her books. It has been unveiled as par t of the Scottish Government-funded initiative in the wake of a year of special events to coincide with the 100th anniversary of her birth in 1918.
Macdonald said he got the idea for the show after bumping into Colin Mcilroy, curator of a Spark centenary exhibition staged at the National Library of Scotland last year, during a late-night train journey between Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Macdonald said :“Colin is also a guitarist and I played with hi min a band called Future Pilot A.K.A. Just before we got off the train when we met up on he told me that there a call had gone out to artists for projects inspired by the centenary of Muriel Spark’s birth.
“I’m a big fan of Muriel Spark and had read a lot of her books, but the great thing about the project is that I’ve really re - connected with her work. When I got some initial funding to develop the project I really immersed herself in her novels, short stories and poetry. I even downloaded audio books which I read when I went out running in the morning.
“Translating one par ti culara rt form into another is fraught with ambiguities, but I also think it is important to celebrate those ambiguities.
“Some pieces have been based on fragments of text in Sparks work, while in others I am really just trying to evoke her spirit. It is also well known that had a huge interest in music. She would think nothing of travelling hundreds of miles to go to a concert.”
Edinburgh-based Mar a Menziesw ill be unveiling Blood and Gold, a show about a dying mother’s gift of a box to her daughter containing clues to a priceless treasure, which will beat the Scottish Storytelling Centre.
How Not To Drown, which is part of the Traverse’s Fringe programme, will see Dritan Ka strati recall his perilous journey from Kosovo to the UK with a gang of human traffickers and his fight for survival in the country system.
Drone, which will be staged at Summerhall, will deploy a mixture of theatre, music, video and poetry to examine how unmanned aerial vehicles have become “the technology of a neurotic century.”