If the idea of a musical about grief sounds unlikely, it can only be because we have a limited idea of what that emotion should look like. The grief in Peter Mullan’s 1998 movie Orphans is not of the maudlin, greetings-card kind. Rather, it is raw, dangerous and off-kilter.
So it is in this National Theatre of Scotland staging, directed by Cora Bissett and scripted by Douglas Maxwell with songs by Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly. It amplifies Mullan’s emotional states into the raucous, the ribald and the plaintive.
