Theatre
WEE FREE! The Musical
Oran Mor, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
four stars
THE back projections tell us time and place: Glasgow 1984 – cool and happening, yes? Actually, Morna (a bright and breezy Neshla Caplan) can’t wait to get shot of the city.
“Me and my music” she sings in the opening number of this mini-musical by composer Hilary Brooks and lyricist Clive King. “Just wanna be free...” she continues, heading off to be a music teacher on remote Munst.
Her pink hair, ribbon-laced leggings and bovver boots promptly cause sanctimonious outrage – skirts and hats are the garb of modest women – while her music raises hackles in a community that’s in thrall to the Wee Free Kirk and its fire and brimstone minister (George Drennan, a monumental pillar of moral rectitude).
If the initial feel of the piece is quite light and skittishly funny, with Morna clashing merrily with the zealously upright minister’s wife (Pauline Knowles, dutifully drab in tweeds and woolly beret), the plot ventures into more serious and intrinsically controversial territory when Morna falls for her headmaster and marries him. Angus Headmaster is so smitten by Morna’s vivid energy, he almost shakes off the behavioural constraints imposed by his brother, the minister but – and Chris Forbes makes this dilemma powerfully convincing – he has grown up in the ways of Munst, and they’re not the ways of free-thinking 80’s woman like Morna.
Taking humorous pops at the shibboleths of a Kirk that counters modern laissez-faire attitudes might seem easy or indeed cheap, but this cleverly written mini-musical is really more about the mechanics of patriarchial power and control than it is about religious faith. You get the full force of that globally relevant confrontation in some great songs – the outstanding cast double up as a live band – and in Ken Alexander’s crisp direction that steers clear of caricature while giving the comedy a realistic bite.
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