Week one: Peter Mullan is in the room!
This is a massive show. After two years of working on Zoom, we are finally in a room, with 15 live and kicking cast members, the writer Douglas Maxwell, composing team Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly, designer Emily James and a gang of other fantastic humans. I am buzzing off the passion, eagerness and sweat of this gang. They are all like racehorses champing at the bit. Everyone just wants to do their job, properly, not from a cupboard at home, not in isolation, but with other sweaty creative balls of fire.
We have had a full week just purely singing already. That was week zero. There are 22 songs, many with four or more part harmonies, and 13 dances. One of our leads, the brilliant Reuben Joseph, was off all through the singing week with Covid, so loomed on a large screen, picking up his harmonies as we went. But now he is here and slips in seamlessly.
Peter Mullan is in the room. This is no small fact. Our show is based on his award-winning film of the same name, which became a cult classic. Peter is an icon to so many actors and directors here in Scotland. To the younger generation in the team, he’s that grizzly actor in Ozark; to the youngest, he’s that guy your mum gets a bit starstruck about. To most of us, he’s the artist you wanna be when you grow up.
He watches intently, laughs his gravelly laugh a lot, and doesn’t seem to want to slay any of us at the end. Huge sighs of relief.
Week two: One of our leads tests positive
Exciting developments in the dance sessions. Vicki Manderson is an incredible choreographer and has managed to turn a 1990s funfair, a knife scene played out against speeding cars and a man falling into a river into seamless choreographic magic.
One of our actors is a wheelchair user, and it has been really fun playing with ways in which we can harness the individuality of that. Amy Conachan rocks her chair, spins on it and does wheelies as part of a poptastic song, One of Us.
Paul Donnelly, the fight director, is fresh from filming Outlander and comes in and nails a huge bar fight in an hour or so. Paul waltzes off to go be some big Highland warrior again, and everyone catches breath.
I’ve just done the school run when I see a text from the producer. One of our leads, Dylan Wood, has tested positive for Covid. So has another one of the cast. The understudies step up and start learning all the leads’ moves. We film every scene as we work through them, and send them to the cast who are off with Covid, so they can keep watching the updated details and get new moves in their heads.
My other production is opening in Canada and I’m getting WhatsApp messages about the position of a skylight hanging above the set. I forget my daughter’s parents’ evening call is happening in the tea break. I feel like a terrible mum, and my brain is about to combust.
Week three: Deputy stage managers should run the country
We shoot a promo film in a church in the East End of Glasgow. All good, we are managing this. Rab Florence and Amy are phenomenal. Rab delivers a perfectly judged performance of Safe With You, one of the first songs Roddy and Tommy wrote, which captures the fragility and humorous perspective of a man in a church, standing vigil by his mother’s coffin, in conversation with God, trying to get assurance she will be OK.
On Sunday night I am finally grabbing a glass of wine when I get a text. Dylan can return on Monday. Hallelujah. But the deputy stage manager is down. Gaaah. Emma is my second in command. Any director knows, really it’s your DSM who holds the whole thing and you together. Countries should be run by these meticulous, quietly genius humans.
Week four: This feels kinda bangin’
The set arrives. It’s unbelievably big. The designer Emily was inspired by Avril Paton’s epic painting Windows in the West, which captures Glasgow tenement life so brilliantly; where you can see across the street little snatches of all the different worlds being lived, like rows of tiny theatres.
We do a stagger of the whole show by the end of the week. This is usually the part where you realise there are big chunks of the play that just don’t hang together, it’s three hours too long, that really poignant moment you thought was profoundly moving is actually just a bit dull and the whole rhythm of the piece feels like a jolty ride on a rollercoaster. However, for reasons belonging to the gods of theatre and a pretty phenomenal team, this feels actually kinda bangin’.
Weeks five/six: A frenzy of things need to happen
We move to Greenock to go into tech. That’s where you get on a stage and try to piece the whole giant jigsaw together.
Roddy and Tommy are still in the studio working on the album tracks. They are up until 3am most nights as they try to complete tracks for the show, but also make an entirely separate mixed album of all the songs to release for opening night. They juggle this with late-night calls to producers in the US whom they are working with. Always gotta have one eye on the next job.
There is a frenzy of things that still need to happen. A painter is out in the car park painting a head to look like the deceased mother. She can’t get the lips to glue shut and it looks creepy. At the first dress rehearsal, Douglas darts around like an excited expectant father waiting for the birth of his child. He showers morale-boosting vibes wherever he goes.
The creative team all talk through notes until midnight. There’s a slew of things to address. I stay up till 1.30am making lists of the priorities. I wake at six and already we are back and forth between sound, design and everyone else’s late-night emails as to what to address first. Then it’s the day of the first preview. We work through a heap of notes from the dress run. Three years’ work in total, a pandemic survived, an industry battered, a country in financial meltdown and a show must go on. Jesus … I hope folk like it.
