Alan Cumming wants us to know that we’ve got Robert Burns all wrong. The Scottish poet was not, he explains, “this strapping ploughman who just happened to knock off a few fabulous poems every now and then, and then shag everybody”. The truth is more complicated: “He was very fragile and delicate and a hot mess. Terrible things happened to him,” he says, running his hand through his flick of grey hair so that it stands up like a question mark. This summer, the actor is turning the life of his nation’s hero into a dance show for the Edinburgh International Festival. “And still my motto is: I dare!” said Robert Burns. It might be Cumming’s own.
He is, after all, making his dance debut at the age of 57 – something most would consider pretty daring. Burn is a piece of dance theatre choreographed by Steven Hoggett, who created the movement for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, but it was Cumming’s idea. “It first started in 2015, when I finished doing Cabaret [for the second time],” he says, drawing out his words. “I had just turned 50 and felt I would never be that fit again in that way. I felt, ‘Oh God, this is it!’ – yet I felt I had got one more dancey thing left in me. That was the start of it. I put that out to the universe. I didn’t know it would be this...”
