The playwright and novelist Alan Bissett has been moonlighting as Moira Bell for the past 15 years. His alter ego is a working-class Falkirk everywoman, a hilarious mix of parochialism and honest good sense, anger management and generosity. She is in her element singing karaoke in her local or leading a party in a half-forgotten folk song. Anywhere beyond the Falkirk wheel and she is all at sea.
What strikes you about Bissett’s single-sitting staging of the three instalments of his Moira Monologues is how much they reflect the times. The laughs come as Moira tells her best friend Babs about her run-in with a rottweiler in The Moira Monologues (2009), about necking a bottle of vodka on the train to Inverness in More Moira Monologues (2017) and about fighting over the loo roll in Moira in Lockdown (2022). But as she reaches her 50th birthday, the exuberant cleaner-cum-cannabis-farmer is an accidental mouthpiece for a nation in flux.
