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.
Bissett’s short snappy scenes, which grow more expansive over the evening, are exquisitely constructed, not one finishing without a sharp punchline. But the jokes are also a cover for reflections on sectarianism, asylum seekers, Scottish independence, inequality, Covid conspiracy theories and the isolation of the pandemic. Moira knows nothing of political correctness but has an unerring gift to tell it like it is.
Striking, too, is how thoroughly Bissett inhabits the part with the slenderest of means. His only concession to costume is a pair of black pixie boots (replaced by fluffy white slippers in lockdown), yet under the precise direction of Sacha Kyle, it takes nothing more than a crossed arm and a mimed cigarette for Moira to take shape. “Men are not like us,” says Bissett as Moira and you don’t doubt it.
Despite being a writer by trade, he has a keen instinct for physical comedy, his gags often visual as he switches through a rollcall of secondary characters, whom Moira variously humiliates and beats down and occasionally befriends. Seeing the three shows together could have been overwhelming, but instead paints a fuller, funnier picture of this singular character in a world not too far from our own.
