A History of Paper, Pitlochry review: 'wonderful moments of stage magic'

A History Of Paper, Pitlochry Festival Theatre ★★★★

When the stage version of A History Of Paper premiered at the Traverse Theatre two years ago, the whole team involved in its creation were still reeling from the death of the play’s writer, Oliver Emanuel, some months earlier.

Ollie Emanuel was only 43, and a much-loved playwright and teacher in Scotland; and the strange collision between his untimely death, and the story of sudden, shocking bereavement that shapes A History of Paper, lent an almost uncanny intensity to the intimate Traverse 2 world premiere of the play, a light-touch and beautiful two-handed drama with songs co-written with Emanuel’s close friend, the composer Gareth Williams.

It’s impossible, of course, two years on, to recreate the precise atmosphere of that moment in the much larger space of Pitlochry Festival Theatre, even though original director Andrew Panton also directs this new Pitlochry staging, and the show is still co-produced by its original producers, Dundee Rep. Back then, the story’s two leading characters, known simply as He and She, were played by beautiful young actors of the age – late 20s – at which the two first meet and fall in love, back in 1999.

At Pitlochry, though, He and She are played by Pitlochry’s artistic director Alan Cumming and his colleague and friend Shirley Henderson, as people of the age the characters would be today, well into their 50s. It’s a shift that lends a thoughtful and elegiac twist to the story, emphasising how catastrophic loss can reshape whole lives. Yet it’s a joy to discover that the change does not diminish the beautiful poise of a show that, like much of Ollie Emanuel’s work, strikes a profound balance between a deep recognition of human mortality and the pain it brings, and a profound appreciation of the sheer joy, fun and beauty of life.

The shift in the age of the actors also unexpectedly enriches the play’s intriguing and powerful leitmotif, which features paper as the default medium through which we recorded and remembered all our personal and social history, in the civilisation that perhaps ended at the millennium, or on 11 September 2001. Born in the 1960s, Cumming and Henderson are old enough to have, and to communicate, their own deep emotional connection with the kinds of paper mementoes – bus and theatre tickets, postcards, letters – that already barely exist, for younger generations.

All of this, of course, is beautifully captured and expressed in Gareth Williams’s music, and the show’s playlist of witty and poignant songs, played live on an onstage white grand piano by inspired musical director Gavin Whitworth, who also sings the odd song himself. Ana Ines Jabares Pita’s design, and Bruno Poet’s lighting, likewise create some wonderful moments of stage magic.

READ MORE: The Scotsman Sessions #436: Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson with Gavin Whitworth (piano)

In the end, though, the magic of this show exists mainly in two characters who find one another in the world only to be separated again, and in the music through which they express the joy and laughter of their togetherness, and the grief of its loss. Cumming and Henderson achieve that beautifully, he acting and singing with a fine, communicative showbiz energy, she capturing a quirky and forceful female character in her trademark soft-voiced but sharply defined style. And if Cumming could perhaps use a shade more support in modulating his performance towards its outbursts of extreme grief, those are brief moments of slightly overpitched emotion; in a beautiful show that should encourage all of us to value the pure magic of life and love, for as long as we are lucky enough to have it.

A History of Paper is at Pitlochry Festival Theatre until 12 September, then at Dundee Rep from 16-19 September

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