Fringe 2024 Morag, You're a Long Time Deid Zoo Southside 7th August Review
“Morag, You’re a Long Time Deid” is at ZOO Southside, and unlike many Fringe shows this one is already scheduled for a post-Fringe tour.
Sam (Claire Love Wilson) inherits her grandmother Morag’s piano along with an intimate letter inside it, some old family skeletons start to rattle around a little bit, and some until now carefully guarded family secrets start to whisper then speak louder.
Sometimes, the best thing you can do in a review is let the publicity describe a show, so here we go – “Inspired by the grandmother she never met, Scottish-Canadian multidisciplinary queer artist Claire Love Wilson and Austrian performance-maker Peter Lorenz bring their show Morag, You’re a Long Time Deid to ZOO Southside for this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe”.
This show is produced in partnership with An Tobar and Mull Theatre and frank theatre in Vancouver, the oldest professional 2SLGBTQ+ theatre company.
On paper this sounds an interesting place to start any story, and interweaving this narrative through re-imagined traditional ballads and dance is certainly a unique approach to telling this story, while also re-interpreting them for voices that in many cases could not speak out during their lifetime, or if they did, were silenced for generations to come.
The problem for me is that we never really get to discover who Morag was, or who her lover, was in any detail. We never get any information from Sam’s grandfather (Morag’s husband) that helps us unlock any mysteries. Instead the show takes a sharp turn to the present day and we get more involved in Sam’s current life and her latest encounter at a disco. The fact that Sam can openly talk about and express her sexuality whilst her grandmother in her time could not seems to be an opportunity that has been missed in this story too.
Morag may now be a long time deid, but a lack of clarity over her life in this script means that too many opportunities have been missed and that Morag has taken most of her secrets with her to the next world.
I just wanted to know a lot more about Morag, find out more about her as a human being, more about her secrets, and how they affected both her and those closest to her in her lifetime, and sadly that never happened in anywhere enough detail for me.
Review by Tom King © 2024
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
Sam (Claire Love Wilson) inherits her grandmother Morag’s piano along with an intimate letter inside it, some old family skeletons start to rattle around a little bit, and some until now carefully guarded family secrets start to whisper then speak louder.
Sometimes, the best thing you can do in a review is let the publicity describe a show, so here we go – “Inspired by the grandmother she never met, Scottish-Canadian multidisciplinary queer artist Claire Love Wilson and Austrian performance-maker Peter Lorenz bring their show Morag, You’re a Long Time Deid to ZOO Southside for this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe”.
This show is produced in partnership with An Tobar and Mull Theatre and frank theatre in Vancouver, the oldest professional 2SLGBTQ+ theatre company.
On paper this sounds an interesting place to start any story, and interweaving this narrative through re-imagined traditional ballads and dance is certainly a unique approach to telling this story, while also re-interpreting them for voices that in many cases could not speak out during their lifetime, or if they did, were silenced for generations to come.
The problem for me is that we never really get to discover who Morag was, or who her lover, was in any detail. We never get any information from Sam’s grandfather (Morag’s husband) that helps us unlock any mysteries. Instead the show takes a sharp turn to the present day and we get more involved in Sam’s current life and her latest encounter at a disco. The fact that Sam can openly talk about and express her sexuality whilst her grandmother in her time could not seems to be an opportunity that has been missed in this story too.
Morag may now be a long time deid, but a lack of clarity over her life in this script means that too many opportunities have been missed and that Morag has taken most of her secrets with her to the next world.
I just wanted to know a lot more about Morag, find out more about her as a human being, more about her secrets, and how they affected both her and those closest to her in her lifetime, and sadly that never happened in anywhere enough detail for me.
Review by Tom King © 2024
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com