'It's a dream job' - Laila Noble on programming the Play, Pie and Pint autumn season at Oran Mor

Laila Noble in rehearsals at Oran Mor | Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

Last year, when Laila Noble joined the team as a resident director at Glasgow’s lunchtime theatre, A Play, A Pie And A Pint, on a Marilyn Imrie Fellowship, she was supposed to stay for three months. She clearly did something right because when her boss Jemima Levick announced her departure to take over the city’s Tron Theatre, they kept Noble on. And because of the gap before the arrival of incoming artistic director Brian Logan, it is Noble who has programmed the autumn season as associate director. It is, she says, her dream job.

“It’s been an amazing and unexpected treat,” says Noble, a graduate of Edinburgh’s Queen Margaret University and a playwright as well as a director. “To get the interim position and to programme a season is wild. It feels like my natural home.”

Because this is the 20th anniversary of the phenomenally popular Glasgow institution, she has taken the chance to look to “past, present and future”. Looking backwards has been hardest. The fly-by-night nature of the company in its infancy made it “exceptionally difficult” to track down the scripts from the first season. Luckily, the Playwrights’ Studio Scotland had held onto a copy of Poker Alice by Still Game star Greg Hemphill.

Luckily too, Annie Grace, who performed the play in September 2004, was keen to reprise it. “I wanted to have a celebration of where we were and a vision of what we can move forward to,” says Noble, who will direct the monologue to kick off her season. “To have voices like Greg Hemphill on the same platform as emerging voices is part of the joy of A Play, A Pie And A Pint. He was so excited about reviving it as well. It is wonderful how much it means to people.”

The monologue, which was the second play in the inaugural season, is about a widow whose late husband has saddled her with his gambling debts. Rather than wallow in her misfortune, she takes up poker herself and enjoys a lucky streak that takes her all the way to Las Vegas. “It will have a really different texture than it had 20 years ago,” says Noble, pleased to catch Grace before she joins the cast of Macbeth with David Tennant in London.

When it came to the present, Noble was overwhelmed with possibilities. “It’s so frustrating there are only 12 plays, because I could programme it ten times over,” she says, relishing the chance provided by the fleet-of-foot organisation to pick up on topical issues. “I’m really fond of Cassie And The Space Cowboy by Paul F Matthews, which is about a post-truth, post-Trump world, which feels really relevant.”

The 12 plays she has settled on have been written by a typical mix of familiar names and newcomers. Jonny Donahoe, co-creator of Every Brilliant Thing, revived on this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, is the brains behind Anna/Anastasia, a comedy about Anna Anderson who claimed to be the only surviving member of Russia’s executed Romanov family.

Noble herself will direct Lost Girls/At Bus Stops by newcomer Róisín Sheridan Bryson whose love story takes place against the backdrop of the Edinburgh festivals. “It’s about a lesbian love affair and it’s important that we’re platforming queer voices,” says Noble. “We don’t often see queer women on stage, not sexualised, not sensationalised, just spoken from an authentic place.”

Elsewhere, there is a spooky farce, a musical about Jean Armour and a drama about the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on disabled people. Several of the shows will tour to venues in Aberdeen, Ayr, Edinburgh and elsewhere.

“We have a lot more licence than some because our audiences are so up for an experiment as long as we don’t break our unwritten promise to give them good examples of what they are,” says Noble. “Our audience respond really well to things out of their comfort zone when they can see why we’ve picked it and the artistry of it.”

She adds: “They’re also very vocal when they don’t like stuff!”

The future comes in the form of the final play in her season, Jellyfish by Katy Nixon, winner of this year’s David MacLennan Award. Named in honour of the company’s late founder, the award is for people who have never written a professionally produced play before. Jellyfish is about a woman trying to connect with her son in Berlin, the city she had found herself in as a teenage mum in an abusive relationship. It is the first to be directed by Brian Logan, who returns to this native Scotland after running Camden People’s Theatre for many years.

Noble says it felt natural to end the season with its incoming artistic director: “And to start the season with something from 20 years ago and end it with something from right now. Katy as a writer hasn’t had that first bite and that was exactly what David MacLennan was about. The form of Katy’s play was to me a great example of something different and new. She uses forms of storytelling in a fresh and exciting way.”

With that, the company is in a strong position to thrive for another 20 years. “A Play, A Pie And A Pint is like the establishment now, which is wild considering its roots,” she says. “It’s exciting what the next chapter will hold. It was always about identifying the need within the artistic community. Now it’s the same aim but the needs are different, so it looks different.”

Poker Alice, Oran Mor, Glasgow, 2–7 September