Theatre

Sunshine On Leith

Pitlochry Festival Theatre

Keith Bruce

four stars

THE first essential for a successful Jukebox Musical, after a back-catalogue of stonking songs, is a good script – the “book” in the parlance of the genre. That ingredient separates the really successful ones from the also-rans; Catherine Johnson’s storyline for Mamma Mia! compared with Ben Elton’s for We Will Rock You.

Stephen Greenhorn’s book for The Proclaimers’ musical he wrote for Dundee Rep 15 years ago is in the former category, and may well owe a debt to the Abba phenomenon, in tone and structure if not in detail.

What makes this new production – the first professional one in Scotland since the original – particularly interesting is that Greenhorn is back on board for the revival. Pitlochry and its co-production partner Capital Theatres Edinburgh are not performing the script amateur companies and schools are doing, but a newly revised version that the writer has honed in the rehearsal room.

There are contemporary touches throughout the dialogue, as well as more subtle tweaks that move it beyond a specific time-frame. It still has to be in a recent past for Davy and Ally to be returning to the gentrified Edinburgh port from service in a war zone, but it is one where the Jenners department store is still open. The political edge of the script seems keener, but that may be a product of our fractious times.

Connor Going and Keith Jack are an instantly likeable pair as our heroes, with good singing voices even if the east-coast Scottish accents are not sustained into the second half, and Rhianne Drummond and Blythe Jandoo match them well as Yvonne and Liz, their battle-scars being on the frontline of the NHS. The parallel storyline with Davy and Liz’s parents Rab and Jean – a hidden secret scuppering their 30th anniversary – is more standard soap fare, but well served by Keith Macpherson and Alyson Orr.

A fine two-level set by designer Adrian Rees is full of nicely precise details – like the Scottish Parliament lectern used to suggest the whole building – and works especially well to serve the excellent band. David Shrubsole’s new arrangements of the Reid brothers’ songs never steer too far from a soft-edged rockabilly/bluegrass style that works particularly well.

Greenhorn relies heavily on “the pub” as a venue for the commentary on life experience in songs like Over and Done With and Let’s Get Married, but the explosion of violence there at the end of Act One is not dramatic enough here to explain the fall-out from it that drives the plot. There are also problems of pacing immediately after the interval that this production needs to iron out, and that dip partly excused a first night audience slow to find its clap-along mode to the most familiar hits.

But even as it is finding its feet, Elizabeth Newman and Ben Occhipinti’s often zippy, well-cast and beautifully harmonised production of this refreshed version seems the ideal choice for the Theatre in the Hills to re-open after the hiatus of the pandemic. With the first phase of the building’s redevelopment resulting in a bright, airy foyer space named for retiring chairman of the trustees and newly appointed Honorary President Colin Liddell, Pitlochry looks well set for a glorious summer season.