Across the Arts speaks with David MacLennan about the current season of A Play, a Pie and a Pint.
Oran Mor continues to feed the minds (and stomachs) of mid-day theatre goers with its new spring season of plays. Its regular offer of A Play, a Pie and a Pint kicks off today with a performance of Kieran Lynn’s new work Bunnies.
As the new season unfolds, Across the Arts will contribute a weekly feature on each of the plays as they go into production. The features, prepared from interviews with writers, directors or cast members, will provide a firsthand insight into that week’s performance.
Across the Arts recently spoke with A Play, a Pie and a Pint producer David MacLennan about the upcoming season.
As we have come to expect the new season sees some rather exciting things happening, particularly in its collaborations. “Yeah, I’m actually very thrilled about this season.” says MacLennan. “It’s very exciting. We start with this play by Kieran Lynn called Bunnies, which is a very sharp and funny satire. It’s an allegory about immigration.”
MacLennan continues. “Then right after that we have six plays which I am producing in association with the National Theatre of Scotland. In fact it’s seven, because there is a double bill of plays from Argentina. We’ve a fascinating play called Columbia. We’ve plays from the Argentine, plays from Brazil and three from Venezuela. I am very, very excited about this season. All credit to Vicky Featherstone, who suggested first of all that we work together. Vicky suggested in the first instance that we do ‘World Theatre’ and I came back with the idea of concentrating on Latin America... to narrow our focus a little and she responded very enthusiastically to that. I think it would be fair to say, that the vast majority of the plays are politically engaged in one way or another. Some more directly than others, but there’s comedy, there’s tragedy and there’s a mixture of both. There’s music and they are all very different… I hope that it will be interesting for Scottish audiences to hear these other voices.”
This coming season will also see MacLennan, for the first time, co-produce two productions with Dundee Rep: St Catherine’s Day by Michael Marra and What Love Is by Linda McLean. MacLennan explains “The idea of these collaborations came from Jemima Levick, who is associate producer now at Dundee… they are going to produce one up there in Dundee and we are going to produce one in Glasgow, which Linda is going to come down and direct. Then one will open in Dundee and one will open in Glasgow and then they’ll swap over.”
And what else can we expect on the menu?
MacLennan enthuses, “There’s a mixture of established writers and younger, newer writers. For example, we are maintaining our relationship with David Ireland [The End of Hope, The End of Desire], also James Ley [I Heart Maths] who is a new writer, Rob Drummond [Table Top]… Helen Kluger’s play The Dacha is a really interesting piece… We round off the season with a new play by Patrick Harkins, which David Hayman will be performing in."
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