A Funny Valentine

7 Jul 2009 in Dance & Drama, Music

Birnam Arts & Conference Centre, Birnam, 1 July 2009, and touring

Mike Maran and Colin Steele (The Photographic Unit).

MIKE MARAN’S love of jazz goes all the way back to his student days in Edinburgh, and his theatre work has often drawn very directly on collaborations with musicians. Indeed, he confesses that he is a frustrated jazz musician himself, and that musicality constantly emerges in his theatre work.

In this dramatisation of the story of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, he is joined by trumpeter Colin Steele – who has studied Baker’s music in minute detail – and pianist Dave Milligan (who also worked with him on the earlier Did You Used To Be R D Laing?).

A Funny Valentine (which takes its name from Baker’s biggest hit, his early 50s version of ‘My Funny Valentine’) is pitched somewhere between theatre piece, concert and story-telling session, and combines all of these elements in absorbing and entertaining fashion.

Maran stalks the stage in a white suit as the narrator, who in turn is a personification of a major factor in Baker’s troubled but artistically productive life (it would spoil things to specify the details). A simple set provides a frame for the narrative, which opens with the trumpeter’s death in Amsterdam in 1988, and tracks back and forth through his life, returning frequently to his imprisonment in Lucca in Tuscany in 1961.

It is a poignant, moving and often poetic tale, in which Maran unpicks some of the myths surrounding the trumpeter (many of them seeded by Baker himself – the trumpeter was not averse to a bit of myth-making), and provides a highly sympathetic account of his achievements in thrall to the twin driving forces of his existence, music and heroin (with women not far behind).

His trump card lies in that on-stage collaboration with two of Scotland’s best jazz musicians. Music is an almost constant presence in the show, whether as the focal point of the action or as a muted complement to Maran’s narrative (and his delivery of the words carries it own musical timing and rhythms in any case), and adds immeasurably to the emotional impact of an enjoyable and well-worked piece.

Mike Maran is currently being treated for cancer, and has sent up a fund-raising effort with musician Alison Stephens with the aim of raising £100,000 to help people affected by cancer. Details can be found at www.ccccc.uk.com

A Funny Valentine returns to the Highlands & Islands for a more extended tour in September (see tour details below)

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