Written by Shonagh Murray
Directed by Tom Cooper
Review by Gabriel Rogers
For this week’s edition of the A Play, A Pie and A Pint series, the Traverse Theatre’s loyal audience was treated to an early Burns night, of sorts. Armour: A Herstory Of The Scottish Bard, directed by Tom Cooper, focuses less on the life of the omnipresent Robert “Rabbie” Burns and more on the lives of some of the most exciting and brilliant women around him. The musical, with book, music and lyrics written by Shonagh Murray, tells the lesser-known story of Jean Armour, Robert Burns’ wife.
The play simultaneously explores Armour’s wonderful relationship with her granddaughter, Sarah Burns, whilst also delving into Armour’s relationship with Burns’ lover and mistress, Agnes “Nancy” McLehose, who kept correspondence with Burns throughout his married life and wrote to him under the pseudonyms “Nancy” or “Clarinda”.
Sarah Burns, played by Karen Fishwick, opens the play with a direct address to the audience, explaining that she never actually met her grandfather as he died before she was born and that her grandmother had much more of an effect on her. Despite never making himself seen on stage, Burns’ presence is nevertheless felt throughout the performance. Irene Allan, who plays Armour, brings Burns’ words to life and provides them with a newfound sensitivity as she wonderfully recites “Jean”, one of the beautiful poems which he wrote for his wife. Burns’ presence is similarly found in the character of Nancy McLehose, played by Hilary MacLean, as she takes the role of one of his extra-marital lovers. Whilst Burns’ character is essential to the overarching plot of the play, he himself at no point feels like the central figure. Burns instead acts as a port through which the women in his life can interact with one another and provide the audience with a historiography that was otherwise unknown.
Fishwick and Allan work wonderfully together to create an authentic, tender grandmother-granddaughter relationship. By speeding up the delivery of her lines, drawing huge deep breaths and singing with a characteristically pre-adolescent voice, Fishwick smartly infantilises herself to play a young Sarah Burns. Allan bounces off her youthful depiction of Sarah and placates her young granddaughter, smiling despite her unsteady tone and describing her as having a birdlike “bonny voice”. The sincerity of their relationship is further strengthened by the actors’ chemistry with one another throughout the play’s musical interludes. Allan and Fishwick are brilliantly directed by Cooper, as they are just as effective in their spinning dancing as they are in slower moments of gentleness. When the two come together to sing about the return of Sarah’s father, who also happens to be Jean’s son, there is a lovely moment of inter-generational sensitivity. The two women sit side by side on a rocking chair, holding each other tightly as they both yearn for a loved one who now lives too far away. Jean and Sarah’s relationship was certainly a highlight of the production and spoke to the importance of strong mother/grandmother figures in a child’s development. It is Sarah’s grandmother who tells her to “be a doer”, and it is their delightful relationship that makes her into one.
Murray’s script interestingly explores the relationship between Burns’ wife, Jean, and his mistress, Nancy, as they are thrust together after “the bard’s” death. Whilst they agree to meet and talk over tea, there is little tea drunk, and they instead rely upon the loosening effects of whisky to ease the flow of their conversation – much to the audience’s delight.
While their meeting begins with tension, it reaches a climax when Nancy surprises Jean with half of a poem Burns had written to her when he was on his deathbed. The two women end up ‘getting into it’ over their competing love for Burns, and after a few more tumblers of whisky, the pair are able to laugh and sing a toast to “Rob the Scottish Bard, […] Rob the Scottish Bastard!” This is a hilarious moment in the play as two, seemingly at odds, women can briefly throw off the shackles of Burns’ perfidiousness and jokingly curse the ridiculous nature of his infidelity. However, this newfound understanding is fleeting as Jean and Nancy fall back into dislike for one another when Nancy requests the return of her and Burns’ handwritten love letters. Whilst Jean reacts badly to this request, she becomes the “doer” she wishes her granddaughter to be by relenting and giving her letters, emancipating Nancy from the exposure of her forbidden affair. Allan and MacLean are great in their respective roles as they intricately depict the love their characters have for Burns whilst also demonstrating the pain and anguish which he put them through. Their final scene, which sees them call one another by their first names, humanises them both and frees them from their differing yet similarly painful relationships with Rob “the Bard” and Rob “the Bastard”.
Armour is an enlightening play which, to its core, asks the audience: “Next time you toast the Bard, think of the women too”.
Realistic, Sensitive, and Genuine
Armour: A Herstory of The Scottish Bard runs at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, until October 5th.
Running time: Fifty minutes without interval
Photo credit – Tommy Ga-Ken Wan
Review by Gabriel Rogers (contact@corrblimey.uk)
Gabriel is an English Literature student at the University of Edinburgh heading into his final year of studies, where he has been involved in multiple dramatic productions. Whilst he has loved working on plays by Ibsen and Shakespeare, his favourite has been performing in Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe. Gabriel’s dramatic interests are broad, and he hopes that his own theatrical experiences will aid him in his role as a reviewer. He is extremely excited to see what Scottish theatre has to offer, be that new writing, improv or whatever absurd performances he can find
