“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” is a saying attributed to a Yiddish linguist and its sentiment lies behind this Fringe debut of Common Tongue from writer and director Fraser Scott.
On a simple set made up of multi tartan covered boxes, actor Olivia Caw gives an impassioned, authentic performance as Bonnie McKay, a less than confident lassie who tends to ‘lets her mooth run away wi her’ and who lives in Paisley with her bowling champion, poetry-writing Papa. She may be shy in front of the wide social mix of her classmates, but in her own working-class environment she is confidently sweary and speaks on equal terms with boys.
Bonnie’s acute awareness of the fluidity of language, the power of words and their nuances is vividly expressed through’s Scott’s script where the clichéd views of Scots as a language and people are addressed with sharp humour and balance. Her leap to going to a thinly veiled St Andrews University to study her ain leid of lowland Scots means her mixing with yet another strata of society. Caw enacts multiple other characters from these posh English students to Embra folk, said Papa, her teacher, her middle-class boyfriend’s family and Americans, with slick linguistic skill. Scots, like any language, has its own subsets or slang but remains a language in its own right as is evidenced in the introduction to The Concise Scots Dictionary. The ability to switch register, to be multilingual, is a universal asset and Caw displays this powerfully.
When Bonnie’s course allows her a year in the USA, she accidentally comes to realise the universal power of her Mither Tung after listening to a crude US rendition of Burns’ Auld Lang Syne and turning it to a positive opportunity to teach and learn.
It can be no accident that Bonnie’s Papa is given 1946 as the year of his birth as it is the year that the Act came in to reinforce the effective end of non-English medium education, with pupils being punished for speaking Scots Gaelic or indeed lowland Scots in Scottish schools and so contributing to the sense of Scots being on a linguistic cleft stick.
Common Tongue is a fast paced, funny show that articulates the contradictions that it is to be Scottish through the prism of a gallus, class conscious young woman who addresses the Scottish cringe with clear eyes. It is a real skill to create a piece that is both educational and entertaining. Juist braw!
Common Tonguepremiered at The Lanternhouse, Cumbernauld in September 2024, before going on a national tour in 2025.
Dates and time: 07th – 31st August @ 14.45
Running time: 70mins
Age recommend: 12+
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 