What A Joy To Be Back At Macrobert
What a joy to come back to the Macrobert Centre! I have a looooong history with yer gaff. I started at the University of Stirling in September 1993 and was thrilled to find out that there was a cinema/theatre right on my doorstep that was showing movies – both old and new – that went beyond the generic blockbuster fare I’d been used to seeing at the Falkirk ABC picture-hoose when I was growing up. In that first year I saw, at the ‘Macbob’, for the first time, Hellraiser, Reservoir Dogs, Withnail and I, True Romance, Falling Down, The Wicker Man and The Exorcist, all of which are now among my favourite films and three of which were banned on home video at the time. My mates used to drive through from Falkirk to join me, as they couldn’t see these films anywhere else, and the excitement as the lights dimmed, and something almost-forbidden flickered to life, was palpable. My best pal even fainted during The Exorcist, and I’ve never forgotten the raw, watching-through-your-fingers tension of the ear-cutting scene in Tarantino’s incendiary debut.
Also at the Macbob, I saw Brian Cox – Logan Roy himself – in Ibsen’s The Master Builder, and took my own, first hesitant steps into theatre. First came a bit-part in Stirling University Musical Society’s production of Grease in 1994, and another in West Side Story in 1995, a show that was so lavishly expensive and which failed so colossally that it almost bankrupted the Student Union. I even served as a producer for 1996’s Little Shop of Horrors, which, I’m pleased to report, righted the ship after we’d become, because of the West Side Story debacle, the most hated Society on campus. The thrill of being onstage in front of a full house that was going absolutely wild (well, for two of those shows) came back to me thirteen years later when I decided, almost counter-intuitively, to abandon my thriving career as a novelist and take to the stage as Falkirk’s Hardest Woman, Moira Bell, in my debut play The Moira Monologues (2009).
Now here I am, fifteen years after that, bringing Moira back to the theatre where it began for me: the Macrobert Centre.
Moira Bell came from within my own family. She’s based on some of aunties and cousins, with a dash of my sister and my Gran: women who told great stories but who you wouldn’t mess with. I’d rarely seen such women onstage, their wit, their stoicism, their canniness, and so wrote the part initially for a female actor. However, once the script was done, I felt somehow close to Moira, close enough that I decided – with no real training behind me – to take a punt and don the high-heeled boots myself to portray Moira . Something about that high-wire act appealed to me, and to audiences, because the initial run of The Moira Monologues at the Edinburgh Fringe was a huge success and audiences kept asking me to bring her back.
I did so twice, with 2017’s More Moira Monologues and 2020’s Moira in Lockdown, completing an accidental trilogy. It was only then I realised that I had on my hands, essentially, one three-hour long show, charting the course of aScottish working-class woman’s life, from the ages of thirty five to fifty, as well as the course of Scotland and Britain through some tumultuous years: the financial crash, the Scottish independence referendum, Brexit and, finally, the Covid-19 pandemic. The Moira Trilogy is a comedy – entertainment comes first, always – but if you squint hard enough you can spy some rough political waters out there, behind chain-smoking, straight-talking Moira dominating the foreground.
I don’t know what it is that resonates with audiences about her. Many people tell me that they ‘know a Moira’, and even people who are initially repelled by her sweary, aggressive exterior eventually warm to the softer layers that she reveals over the course of the evening. Moira’s not always in the right. But she always tells it like it is. As she herself says, to her ever-faithful best pal, Babs: “Mibbe I am a bully. But I’m a bully wha fuckin hates bullies.”
So settle in your seat for three hours (including intervals!) of the character that I’m most proud of creating, throughout what’s been a relatively long career. Every writer will tell you that you only hit the artistic target dead-centre once, maybe twice, throughout your life, and create something that turns out to be way bigger than yourself. If I never do anything else of note throughout my entire writing career, at least there’s been Moira, in all her tough, nae-messin, high-heeled glory.
It’s a pleasure to bring her back to the place where it all started for me.
The Moira Trilogy is on at Macrobert on Saturday 27 April.
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