A blue skied Edinburgh, with all the optimism that brings, played a sunny host to the Lyceum Theatre’s new season’s announcement. Mirroring that optimism was Artistic Director David Greig who spoke with a quiet and modest enthusiasm for his upcoming programme that is pleasingly both literary and Scottish. He did this while acknowledging the impact of the tough recent times to budgets and subscriptions yet this exciting new season is the biggest since 2018. The new season sees collaborations with theatre companies across Scotland and England as well as internationally containing universal themes in new plays along with adaptations of classics giving the sense of a rising phoenix.
Opening in October in Edinburgh after premiering at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, is Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape written by award winning Scottish playwright Peter Arnott and directed by David Greig. The play is set in a Perthshire country house during the Scottish Independence referendum of 2014 and is an exploration of a way of life that is coming to its end, a family struggling to connect in the wake of political pain, grief and the beginnings and ends of great love affairs.
With dates yet to be announced is the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh and Stellar Quines co-production And Around And Around We Goby Apphia Campbell that is a larger scale reimagining of Campbell’sScotsman Fringe First Award winning show an original soundtrack of live gospel and blues.
Yuletide would not be the same without the Lyceum’s legendary Christmas show and this year sees a new adaptation with a Scottish slant of Hans Christian Andersen’s chilling fairy tale The Snow Queen from Morna Young and directed by Cora Bissett that like last year’s An Edinburgh Christmas Carol puts an Edinburgh twist on the classic tale.
Then what better for a chill January night than a real Scottish take on The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson? This comes in the form of Jekyll & Hyde, a one-man adaptation by Glasgow performer Gary McNair, directed by Michael Fentiman and presented by Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh with the Reading Rep Theatre.
A co-production with the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh and Malmö Stadtsteater brings Two Sisters that is David Greig’s first wholly original play to be staged for several years and will allow another collaboration between Greig and Wils Wilson after the now legendary Strange Undoing of Prudentia Hart. The production involves a youth chorus and lots of music and movement.
In a co-production with Wise Children, Birmingham Rep, HOME Manchester, Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh and York Theatre Royal , we have in March a very musical adaptation of Blue Beard from Wise Children’s Emma Rice who also directs and was named by Sky Arts as being amongst Britain’s 50 most influential artists of the last 50 years.
Another major Scottish writer, Muriel Spark, is celebrated with an adaptation by Gabriel Quigley of her novella The Girls of Slender Means that’s directed by Roxana Silbert. The Girls of Slender Means follows the adventures of the women in 1945 who live in a hostel for the ‘Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years, who are obliged to reside apart from their Families in order to follow an Occupation in London.’
The season closes with a co-production with Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh and Dundee Rep Theatre to an adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic novel Sunset Song, by Morna Young. With rich Scots language text, dynamic and physically charged staging, and raw and vivid live music from Finn Anderson of Islander fame, Sunset Song is a celebration of Grassic Gibbon’s astounding and ever-relevant novel.
Morna Young , who like Grassic Gibbon, hails from the North East, was 2019 winner of Scots Language Awards and features strongly in this season’s productions. Both she and Gary McNair write boldly and unapologetically in their own dialect of the rich and broad language that is Scots, so full marks to the Lyceum for promoting and supporting them.
Before this tremendously exciting programme kicks off later in the year, Caitlin Moran is back on the road in July to discuss her new book while the October school break brings Stick Man from Freckle Productions, based on the book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Schleffer.
In August there is of course Edinburgh’s International Festival when the Lyceum will host four shows with Fringe events in the Studio that comprise Tim Crouch’s international hit The Oak Tree; the premiere of Obehi Janice’s Casanova-inspired Nova;Seamas Carey’s comedy show Help! I Think I’m A Nationalist,and artist and welder Rachel Mars’ performance installation Horizon Showcase: FORGE.
For coloured girls… A Scottish adaptation is a Work in Progress, with dates to be announced, by Hannah Lavery and other Scottish poets, after Ntozake Shange and is a Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh and Stellar Quines co-production.
With special deals for subscription holders, what are you waiting for? The Lyceum beckons!
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 