Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 31 October 2011

IT’S STRANGE enough that one of Scotland’s most highly attended theatres is in one of the country’s smallest towns. What’s even stranger is that Pitlochry Festival Theatre now appears to be repeating its summer success in the autumn.

For the first time, the theatre in the hills has staged a production immediately after the end of its regular repertoire season and, even on a damp Monday night with Halloween parties for competition, there’s a sizeable audience turning up for the pleasure.

Michael Mackenzie, Gavin Wright, George Rae and Robin Harvie Edwards in Whisky Galore

It helps that the show has a bit of pedigree. Adapted by Shona McKee McNeil from the novel by Compton Mackenzie, Whisky Galore – A Musical! was part of the Scottish-themed season of 2009 and was nominated for a CATS award for best music and sound. At the time, it was the company’s most successful ever production. That accolade now goes to this year’s My Fair Lady, which only goes to show how well suited the company’s ensemble ethos is to the musical form.

Seen again, Ken Alexander’s staging still has the same bright and breezy charm as it tells the story of the wartime islanders whose frustrations about rationing are considerably eased when a ship, carrying a convenient consignment of whisky, is wrecked close by. Captain Waggett, the army chief, doesn’t like it; Mrs Campbell, the stern Presbyterian, doesn’t like it; and the man from customs and excise doesn’t like it either. Everyone else, by contrast, is delighted.

What Mackenzie sets up, in other words, is an archetypal battle between the ordinary people and authority. It’s hard to take the threat of war seriously on these remote islands and certainly not as seriously as Robin Harvey Edwards’ pompous captain. It’s hard to side with Carol Ann Crawford as the buttoned-up Mrs Campbell when her hard-line attitudes are standing in the way of her son’s romance with a Catholic girl. And it’s hard to believe the treasury will be much inconvenienced by the loss of duty on a few salvaged crates.

All of which means we can’t help but root for the islanders in their acts of minor resistance. Who could object to a community wanting to have a good time?

It is this communal spirit that the large Pitlochry company evokes naturally, the most so under the musical direction of Jon Beales who gets anyone who’s not on stage – and often some of those on stage too – to grab an instrument. This all-hands-on-deck approach creates much of the show’s energy. Particularly impressive is actor Dougal Lee, who never seems to have the same instrument twice, playing everything from bodhran to bagpipes.

Everyone sings well too. Ian Hammond Brown’s music and lyrics do a great job at forwarding the plot, only occasionally slipping into music-theatre platitudes and more typically driving the action in an accessible and melodic way. Along with the story’s multiple happy endings, it sends you home with a feelgood spring in your step.

© Mark Fisher, 2011

Links

• Pitlochry Festival Theatre
• Mark Fisher