Anna Burnside reviews a production with a flawed script but ‘a vivid performance’.
Bonnie, with her ponytail and trackie top, pure loves talking. As she bounces around the tartan patchwork stage, giving the ‘dressing gown vs housecoat’ debate a workout, we see a bright, sparky young lassie with lots of ideas who expresses them clearly and fluently in the language in which she is immersed.
This soon gets her into trouble. Invited round for dinner at her boyfriend’s Mrs Hinchesque home, she’s dropped the f-word before they have resolved whether juice means squeezed oranges, squash or Irn-Bru.
On the surface, writer and director Fraser Scott is looking at language and the forces that have downgraded Scots into slang. What Common Tongue is actually about is class, explored via young Bonnie’s journey from Paisley to the rarefied tutorials of St Andrews University then on to her year abroad in the comparatively classless US.
Having not fitted in at university, she finds herself back in Paisley, living with her Burns-reciting, doggerel-writing Papa once again. With her vowels and vocabulary modified by her life-expanding experiences, she doesn’t really fit in there anymore either.
This is a common experience, explored by everyone from academics such as Lynsey Hanley to Sally Rooney in Normal People. Scott neither illuminates this in a new way nor brings anything fresh to the discourse. The chat around Len Pennie’s book poems annaw is more illuminating.
What Common People does bring is a vivid performance from Olivia Caw. She handles the subtle evolution of her accent and language brilliantly and code-switches among different characters as well as a middle-class kid in the playground kidding on they come from the ghetto.
Scott does a great job in bringing this out—it’s a shame that he couldn’t write similar nuance into his script.
Common People is on tour until October 18, 2025. For futher details, go to the production’s website.
Photo by Peter Dibdin.
RSS