Theatre reviews: Gallus in Weegieland | Strangers in the Night
This year’s Tron panto is low on satire but still big on laughs, writes Joyce McMillan
It can’t be – but oh yes it is! It’s the first pantomime of the 2025 season in Scotland. And a riotous evening it is, as the Tron revives Johnny McKnight’s 2017 hit Gallus In Weegieland in a new version by McKnight, directed by Sally Reid, and starring the astonishing Louise McCarthy as a luridly wicked and alarmingly athletic Queenie of Hearts.
Panto fans will search in vain, in this show, for the deeper themes of class war and rebellion that often shape traditional panto tales, with their tyrannical giants and struggling villagers.
What the Tron serves up, though, is a deliciously daft journey through a world fully as absurd as Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, and stuffed like a piñata not with big satirical themes, but with McKnight’s myriad 21st-century micro-satires on bad TV shows, junk celebrity culture and the familiar divisions and pretensions of Glasgow life – not least between the wee panto at the Tron, and the much-mocked big one at the King’s.
In this story, Jorgey Scott-Learmonth’s delightful Alice is the neglected scapegoat of her local ballet class, about to give up on her dreams of becoming a dancer, when she suddenly encounters the charismatic Star Penders as a white rabbit-boy called Knavey of Hearts.
READ MORE: Kirsty Findlay on starring in The Sound of Music at Pitlochry: 'it's a show that tells a huge story'
They instantly fall in love, and on Kenny Miller’s magnificent black-and-white candy-striped set, they jump down a hole and land in Knavey’s native Weegieland, where his mother Queenie presides over a cowed population of sycophantic guards, a mad hatter who is also a dormouse and a quiveringly nervous and needy giant caterpillar, played in lavish style by Marc Mackinnon.
What happens after that is hard to say; it’s enough to know that Alice goes in search of her courage, her imagination, and her love, and finally finds all three.
The whole show remains, as ever, an object lesson in what can be done with a talented cast of seven, working as one to give the audience a helluva night out. With composer and musical director Uncle Ross Brown keeping the many song and dance numbers on track, Gallus In Weegieland roars to a merry conclusion, in a riot of wildly inventive design, outrageous one-liners and true Christmas spirit, fully reimagined for the age we live in.
The quest for love also features in this autumn’s final A Play, A Pie and A Pint show; but the pace of Strangers In The Night is very different, as Oran Mor stars Juliet Cadzow and William McBain – supported by Lola Aluko as care worker Christine – work their way through Alan Muir’s slow-moving 75-minute tale of two elderly retirement home friends, May and Jimmy, finding the courage to start a new chapter together, despite the frightening challenges of later life.
The play’s main problem is that it rambles around for 20 minutes or so looking absolutely shapeless – although thoroughly charming, as the two share brilliant anecdotes of their earlier lives – before it arrives at its own main plot, which involves an attempt by May’s good-for-nothing son to snaffle her assets and move her down south.
There’s also – in the final 15 minutes or so – a sudden rushed exploration of Jimmy’s inability to help her because of past traumas of his own, and of Christine’s urgent need to do so.
Despite this lop-sided narrative, all three actors make a fine, richly observed job of developing their characters, with Jimmy’s sharp-edged stories of a working class Clydebank childhood providing a fine counterpoint to May’s vivid memories of her career as an actress.
It would be easier to enjoy these stories, though – and to sense their deeper significance – if they came in a setting that developed more narrative shape at an earlier stage, instead of waiting until perilously late in the day to set out the scale of the obstacles these two wonderful characters face before they can finally reach for their happy ending.
The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today
Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here.
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.