Photo Credit – Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

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Out In The Hills: a midwinter queer uprising with tartan edges

There are January weekends that drag like wet tweed, and there are January weekends that feel like a defibrillator to Scotland’s cultural heart. Out In The Hills is decisively the latter: a concentrated blast of theatre, conversation, music, and gloriously camp communal mischief, staged at Pitlochry Festival Theatre and curated to prove that “rural” and “radical” can share the same postcode. Running 16–18 January, it plants a rainbow standard in Perthshire and refuses to budge—three days dedicated to LGBTQIA+ stories that insist on joy as resistance.

Curated under the watchful, mischievous eye of Alan Cumming; a man who has never met a spotlight he couldn’t seduce, the festival arrives not as a tentative pilot but as a fully‑formed declaration. A manifesto in festival form. The range is the point: an everything-everywhere-all-at-once blend of rehearsed readings, headline conversations, exhibitions, ceilidh, yoga (kilted, naturally), and a late-night disco, stacked so densely you’d need an endurance hit to catch it all. The results are deliberately maximalist: queer lives are not seasonal, they’re perennial—and Pitlochry, frankly, looks better for it.

Big beasts, bigger heart

The line-up has star wattage to spare. Sir Ian McKellen gives a rehearsed reading of Equinox, Laurie Slade’s new one-man play—an event that, unsurprisingly, sold out faster than a Highland gale takes off with your cap. While the merit of Laurie Slade’s scripting, and the qualiy of the production is better suited for a full run (hopefully still with André Agius and Laurie Slade‘s direction), audiences are given a firm reminder to McKellen’s prestige in the craft: a masterclass in emotional control. Meanwhile Cumming leads Me and the Girls, a fresh stage adaptation by Neil Bartlett of Noël Coward’s 1964 short story, promising that Coward’s velvet glove still conceals a knuckle-duster. While the lack of the venture’s repertoire has drawn ire; it was particularly touching to see a swansong from regular Pitlochry faces like Fiona Wood return, and it’s nice to see Blythe Jandoo and Shona White on stage together following their Gypsy triumph a couple of years past. Now, toss in Graham Norton for a conversation with Cumming, and you’ve an axis of charm and acid wit that could strip varnish. The conversation threaded a needed line of entertainment, and call-to-action, with a reminder of the vitalness of the festival as Norton, Cumming, and the audience muse of Scotland’s continued silence on Conversation Therapy. None of this is stunt casting; it’s a strategic collision between marquee names and a rural stage hungry for national attention.

What distinguishes Out in the Hills from other festivals isn’t just its star power — it’s the way it centres community. Not as an afterthought, but as the beating heart of the event. Panels like Match of the Gay, featuring Scotland’s first openly gay footballer Zander Murray, tackle the intersections of identity and sport with humour and honesty. Family Pride, a conversation between playwright Jo Clifford and her daughter Catriona Innes, offers a deeply personal exploration of love, transition, and generational understanding. These events aren’t just informative; they’re connective tissue, binding audiences together through shared vulnerability and curiosity.

The programme also threads in Jackie Kay, Val McDermid, Mhairi Black, Evelyn Glennie, Armistead Maupin, and Niall Moorjani (among others), aligning canonical voices with contemporary conscience. It’s a roster that argues for breadth rather than brand, giving the floor to artists whose work sits in conversation with community as much as with critics. It’s also proof that “queer festival for everyone” isn’t a slogan; it’s an operational brief.

The rural turn: not a detour, a destination

What’s radical here isn’t only the who, but the where. Pitlochry isn’t an annex of the central belt; it’s its own weather system. Planting a major queer festival in the Highlands reframes the old urban exceptionalism—no more pilgrimage to the big city to find kin. The theatre becomes a civic commons: foyer chats tumble into studio debates; a “big gay ceilidh” slings elbows with drop‑in art sessions; exhibitions on Camp Trans Scotland, Football v Homophobia, and Portraits of an LGBTI Generation quietly assert that history isn’t a museum piece—it’s a living archive you dance past on the way to a show.

That civic pulse matters in 2026. The festival’s ethos is not coy about its politics: solidarity, visibility, and a very Scottish insistence that joy is a public good. Cumming’s framing is blunt—in times when queer and trans communities are policed, belittled, and legislated against, building a weekend of celebration is not frivolity; it’s strategy. This is art as weatherproofing: a roof of light over a long winter.

From baking to ballads to the Beautiful Game

Out In The Hills is curated like a mixtape that refuses to repeat the chorus. Coinneach MacLeod, the Hebridean Baker, turns autobiography into balm and bite, packing out an event so quickly it had to be moved to the main auditorium; rural queer narratives, it turns out, sell tickets just fine. Zander Murray’s features in “Match of the Gay”, boot stereotypes back over the halfway line. And there’s Kilted Yoga with Finlay Wilson, for anyone needing to stretch the hamstrings you pulled in the ceilidh. It’s eclectic by design, slyly building a thesis: queer life isn’t a niche—it’s the Venn diagram’s busy middle.

Beyond marquee moments, a quieter through‑line emerges: the work of memory. Readings from Juano Diaz’s Slum Boy, punctured and buoyed by Dame Evelyn Glennie’s percussive sorcery, explore adoption, belonging, and reclamation. Conversations braid family, politics, folklore, and food into a tapestry that feels—finally—adequate to the weather of lived experience. If you came for the famous faces, you stayed for the way these rooms held people.

The craft of a festival that knows what it’s doing

Credit where due: this is not a scattergun schedule. The curation (by Lewis Hetherington) balances pace with palette—studios and foyers reconfigured to feel porous, movement across the building encouraged, and the day’s cadence landing you, more often than not, at a shared gathering where the point isn’t a single headline but the afterglow of proximity. Even the timing is smart: mid‑January, when locals need something to look forward to and Scotland needs reminding that candlelight beats candlemas.

The theatre’s own materials articulate the “why” with refreshing clarity: this festival says the arts are for everyone, and “everyone” is not a euphemism for majority taste. It’s a promise to spotlight under‑heard stories without apologising for the party.

What lingers

Festivals can be sugar highs—glitter, Instagram, then the bus home. Out In The Hills has the bones for longevity. It anchors big‑ticket events to community‑centred practice, and it gamely rejects the false choice between populism and purpose. By Monday morning, the headline images will have done their circulation, but the persistence will be in the conversations sparked between strangers in the foyer, the teenagers who clocked themselves in a photo exhibition, the rural elders who realised none of this is “new” so much as newly amplified. That is culture change, not just culture content.

If Scotland’s winter is a test, Out In The Hills passes with a smirk and a sidelong quip. Scotland’s new Queer beacon in the Highlands; it’s not perfect—nothing this ambitious ever is—but it’s necessary, deftly made, and proudly welcoming. The message is simple: the hills are alive, and they’re singing. Singing, laughing, arguing, remembering—and inviting you to join the chorus.

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