Cheers! Pub lock-ins bring the national theatre to your loca

[D.H]

Cheers! Pub lock-ins bring the national theatre to your local

I wonder if a pub in Kintyre would host this?
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/cheers-pub-lock-ins-bring-the-national-theatre-to-your-local-1.1007997


Following in the footsteps of A Play, A Pie And A Pint at Oran Mor, above, the National Theatre is exploring a whole new type of venue.
Phil Miller, Arts Correspondent

Published on 19 Feb 2010

Scotland’s national theatre is inviting its audiences to a series of pub “lock-ins” as part of its new season.

The Border Ballads, some of the most memorable works in the Scots language, are to be performed in a new series of performances by the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) – and set in public houses.

The Strange Undoing Of Prudencia Hart, written by one of Scotland’s leading playwrights, David Greig, will see a play being performed in locations including Coatbridge, Ullapool and the Borders, in the first series of NTS events held in pubs.

Four pubs – Big Owens Bar in Coatbridge, The Maltings in ­Berwick-upon-Tweed, The Pheasant in Jedburgh and The Ceilidh Place in Ullapool – have been confirmed, but more are to follow in a tour that will take in more than 20 establishments nationwide.

The shows will attempt to take the traditional Scots art form, exemplified by Sir Walter Scott’s collection of ballads published in 1802, and tell a “good old-fashioned ghost story to pub audiences across Scotland”.

The pub performances are part of this year’s main season, along with Little Johnny’s Big Gay Wedding, which is part of a trilogy of plays, and Beautiful Burnout, a play about the ­boxing-club scene in Glasgow. This will be the NTS’s appearance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, appearing at the Pleasance theatre.

As part of the NTS programme in 2010, its biggest success to date, Black Watch, will be staged at the SECC in Glasgow. The NTS will also stage a major production as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. More details are set to be revealed on March 17.

Border Ballads often involve a mixture of historical events and supernatural stories, and the performances will include song, prose and also “magic” as the audience is treated to a traditional “lock-in” experience, directed by Wils Wilson.

In The Strange Undoing Of Prudencia Hart, audiences will see Hart, a collector of folk songs, trying to find the famous “lost song” of the Border Ballads, and discover what happens to her when she does. The play, says the NTS, is “of supernatural ­storytelling, music and theatre inspired by the Border Ballads, Burns and the poems of Robert Service”.

Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of the NTS, said: “One of the first conversations I had when we formed the company was with David Greig about the Border Ballads and how we could portray the living

languages of Scotland. We have been looking for a way to present them theatrically ever since.

“You really feel like you are in an informal lock-in experience – and then it turns into something else.

“It will absolutely go to other places than [the locations] we have released, but we have never done this kind of performance before and we want to get it right. I have a great belief it will go on and on.”

David Greig is a playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. His play Midsummer has recently finished a sold-out run at the Soho Theatre in ­London, and his new work Dunsinane, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, has just opened at Hampstead Theatre.

His work for the NTS includes a new version of J M Barrie’s Peter Pan and a version of Euripides’ The Bacchae.

Ms Featherstone said Beautiful Burnout – written by Bryony Lavery and directed by the Frantic Assembly theatre group – is a “visceral piece of theatre” that will include real boxing. “We have been wanting to work with Frantic Assembly for some time,” she said. “It is set in ­Glasgow’s boxing scene and it is a very, very physical production.

“It has real boxing because we decided at the outset that we could not fake it. You cannot just pretend and let the audience down.”

In addition, Black Watch will play at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre, Glasgow, from September 15 to October 9 and at Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre from October 13-23.