To Save the Sea, Glasgow review: 'fast-moving musical agitprop blazing with life'​

Common Tongue, Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh ★★★★

It was in 1995 that four young Greenpeace activists occupied the Brent Spar oil storage platform in the North Sea, in a campaign to prevent Shell, its principal operator, from blowing up the now disused giant tank, and ditching it on the ocean bed.

“The sea is not a dustbin!”, ran their slogan; and now, a generation on, theatre makers Andy McGregor (songwriter and composer) and Isla Cowan (playwright and lyricist) have transformed the story of the occupiers’ immense three-week adventure – as dangerous as it was purposeful, and eventually successful – into a 90-minute musical for our times, demonstrating how high-profile direct action on the world’s mounting environmental crisis can shift public opinion, and even force some of the planet’s most powerful politicians into action.

Cowan and McGregor have conjured up a fictional group of five occupiers, including three women. One of them, Brianna, is an environmental journalist covering the occupation; another, Rachel, is an apparently ordinary Scottish wife and mother consumed by the need to offer her two young sons a more hopeful future.

Meanwhile on shore, assorted oil executives and politicians – including John Major, and the then German chancellor Helmut Kohl – squabble in fine grand-guignol style over the mounting crisis, as German public opinion turns against Shell, and boycotts spread across Europe like wildfire; and with a cast of nine almost always on stage, the show comes together in a breathlessly fast-moving piece of old-fashioned musical agitprop, as heartening as it is energetic, and blazing with life.

The show could perhaps use a shade more attention to the actors’ voices, and the quality of sound. Overall, though, this is a hugely entertaining and thoughtful good night out of a show, featuring outstanding performances, not least from newcomer Kaylah Copeland as Brianna, and the hilarious team of David Rankine, Helen Logan and Ewan Somers as the onshore wheelers and dealers. And three decades on from the “battle of Brent Spar”, the questions this show asks could still hardly be more timely.

Also taking a few risks, over this weekend, was new Scottish company JG Productions, billed as “a team of young, Scottish, independent theatremakers dedicated to thinking about what it means to show Scotland on stage.” Working with Cumbernauld Theatre at Lanternhouse, producer Jennifer Galt and writer-director Fraser Scott this week launched Common Tongue, a fierce and brilliantly vivid 75-minute monologue about “imperfect Scots”, featuring the experience of a young woman called Bonnie, from Paisley.

Bonnie speaks in a strong modern urban Scots, but feels stranded between a world which still often demands standard English, and a Scots language – the kind written by Robert Burns – to which she feels drawn, but which she does not fully understand. Olivia Caw’s wonderful, infectiously communicative performance holds the audience in thrall, as Bonnie progresses from school to university, and on to some tough questions about class, education, nationhood, and the judgments we impose on people, purely on the basis of accent and voice; and to judge by the cheers that greeted it, Common Tongue is a show that will soon return to delight audiences far beyond Cumbernauld and Edinburgh.

To Save The Sea is on tour until 30 October, including dates in Perth, Stirling, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen; for details see https://sleepingwarriortheatre.com/to-save-the-sea. Common Tongue, run completed.