GARY McNair lies on the floor, listening to The Smiths’ 1986 landmark album The Queen Is Dead, just as generations of teenagers the world over have done.
The third in a trilogy of one-man shows exploring growing up in working-class Scotland, McNair says he’s wanted to make this piece for years, and it uses the letters he wrote to the singer as a conflicted teenager at the turn of the millennium to confront surprisingly profound issues of community, friendship and even the nature of good and evil itself.
It doesn’t matter that the town he grew up isn’t named: it could stand for almost anywhere. Against the backdrop of conformity and the cruelty and confusion of “problems stirring, thoughts whirring” teenagehood, the singer offered the alienated McNair a sense of validation, of escape.
“Bastion of the underdog, he dared us not to fit in,” says McNair, “that it was OK for men to be ‘a bit soft’.”
When 15-year-old McNair’s increasing introversion and problematic school work earns him the attention of the guidance teacher, he’s told to find someone to talk to. Lacking a true confidant, he writes to Morrissey instead, and asks the singer’s advice on an issue that reveals itself in a surprising – even shocking – way. Ostensibly, his best friend Tony is in some sort of trouble. The boy who once shared his meals and was kind to animals is now aggressive and erratic, and just one reprimand away from the “school with the cutlery tied to the table”.
McNair’s performances as his similarly confused peers and guidance teacher MacKinnon are at turns affecting, hilarious and disturbing. There’s often a backdrop of violence to his work, and in his Billy Connolly-like drawl, an undercurrent of salaciousness, even nihilism. But it’s the writing that most impresses. Concise phrases conjure whole landscapes, a well-placed detail here and there evoke a contradictory mix of emotions.
The choice of Morrissey is no coincidence. As well as obviously being a genuine fan, he says that like the misunderstood Tony, he’s never had to defend a person to others as much as the singer, a man variously accused throughout a three-decade career of standing up for child murderers, hating Britain and being a racist.
But what appears to be a tale of nostalgic idol worship, the search for community and the conflict between the person we present to the world and the person we really are, is revealed as a tale of something more insidious and disturbing.
With the wit and intelligence that characterises Daniel Kitson’s storytelling shows, many of which have premiered here, Letters To Morrissey is a real step up from McNair’s acclaimed Gambler’s Guide To Dying, and the complex issues it raises will stay with you for longer.
Letters to Morrissey (four stars), until Aug 27 (not 21), Traverse, (V15), various times, £19.50, £14.50 and £9.50 concs. Tel: 0131 226 0000. edfringe.com
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