Sir Ian McKellen is on stage blowing up a red balloon. For a man of 86, he has impressive lung capacity. He lets it go and watches it take a satisfyingly theatrical trajectory, rising to a height, then plummeting. “Free the spirit,” he says, in character as Ed, an elderly gay man searching for release.
There was a lot of spirit-freeing over the weekend at Pitlochry Festival theatre. In a bold pre-season move by new artistic director Alan Cumming, the UK’s most idyllic venue launched its first LGBTQ+ festival in an atmosphere of exuberance. Programmed by Lewis Hetherington, Out in the Hills was a three-day compendium of talks, scratch performances and workshops that turned a sedate theatre into a buzzy social hive.
I arrived as the audience for Coinneach MacLeod, AKA the Hebridean Baker, was spilling out. A large and colourful group were posing for a picture in the foyer, while queues squeezed past for the bar. Many were on a high after the previous night’s Queer As Folk! ceilidh, led by the Malin Lewis Trio. Others were anticipating Sunday afternoon’s conversation between trans playwright Jo Clifford and her daughter Catriona Innes. I failed to find anyone who had done Finlay Wilson’s Kilted Yoga, but it was a thing.
McKellen was there for a rehearsed reading of Equinox, a new monologue by Laurie Slade, the playwright drawing on his professional skills as a psychotherapist to mix in reflections on Freud and the Oedipus complex. Written in a tone of spiky regret, it was about Ed’s abandonment of his family and attraction to a domineering younger man. Under the direction of Slade and André Agius, McKellen grabbed the mic from the table in front of him and held it close, the better to spit out the plosives of an irascible man struggling to find the right words at the bitter end of his life.
“Be slow to judgment,” Ed pleaded as he recalled an estranged daughter, a neglected wife and the desperate patient he failed to help. The relationship with the “midnight man” he picked up in a gay bar seemed no less humiliating.
McKellen got a second round of applause simply for sitting in the audience of the next event, a suitably frothy conversation between Cumming and Graham Norton about the TV host’s career.
With Cumming sporting the legend “Ae fond pish” on his black shirt and wearing a pair of ankle boots he got from the set of The Traitors US, the tone was frivolous and funny, even as he gently edged into questions about homophobia, representation and rights.
“I love that there’s this big gay thing in the middle of Scotland,” said Norton, delighted to be part of such a happy event. Sporting a zebra-striped fleece he picked up in New York, he fielded audience questions about difficult guests, awkward TV moments and, of course, the zebra-striped fleece he picked up in New York.
He spoke with his characteristic combination of wit, gossip and genuine affection for his celebrity guests, and was applauded as enthusiastically for his condemnation of conversion therapy as he was for his jokes about Cher and Tom Cruise.
