Lau's Martin Green on Keli, his new National Theatre of Scotland show: 'I fell in love with brass bands'

What happens when a composer becomes a playwright? Take the case of Martin Green. He is the accordionist best known for his work with Lau, the nu-folk band he plays in with Kris Drever and Aidan O’Rourke.

He is also something of a multi-hyphenate. In the 2016 Edinburgh International Festival, he brought together musicians and stop-motion animators to share stories of migration in Flit. During lockdown, he released The Portal, a richly crafted podcast for which he wrote and narrated a time-spanning detective story. Later, for BBC Radio 4, he made Dancers At Dawn, which made unexpected connections between Morris dancing and rave culture.

Now, for the National Theatre of Scotland and his own Lepus Productions, he is writer and composer of Keli, a play about a tenor horn player from a fictional Central Belt mining village who heads to London for a brass band competition. According to Liberty Black, who plays the title role, one thing you get with a musician for a playwright is extraordinarily precise feedback.

Liberty Black in rehearsals for Keli | Julie Howden

“He said to me, ‘I’ve rewritten some of these lines because you’re funny with consonants,’” says the Glasgow-based actor, who is in her final year at the Royal Conservatoire Of Scotland. “I asked him what he meant and he said, ‘Well, some people are vowel funny and you’re funny with consonants.’ I would not have known that about myself!”

Bryony Shanahan, the director, observes something else. She has no trouble describing Keli, but when she tries to define its genre, she is stumped. “This is not a play that has sections of brass music in between the scenes,” she says, sitting in the Glasgow headquarters of the National Theatre of Scotland, her poodle lying obediently on her lap.

“It is an underscore. It’s sort of like a musical without songs. Or is it like an opera? I don’t know! The music is a personality on its own. It is a twin to telling the story.”

Martin Green and Bryony Shanahan in rehearsals for Keli | Julie Howden

What Shanahan does know is the emotive power of the music in a show that features a live brass band, either West Lothian’s Whitburn Band or Fife’s Kingdom Brass. “There’s something about 25 people playing,” she says. “Last week, I was really trying to keep it together. It made me suddenly want to cry and I wasn’t sure exactly why. It’s a certain chord that gets struck or a peak they hit musically and it is this massive emotional thing.”

Green himself is uncertain where one job ends and the other begins. In the first week of rehearsals, he felt like a playwright because the focus was on the text; by the second week, he felt more like a music maker. “It certainly doesn’t feel like we’ve got a blueprint,” he says. “Even if we wanted to phone it in by numbers, it would be hard.”

The play started to take shape at the same time as Green’s three-part BBC Radio 4 documentary series, Banding: Love, Spit and Valve Oil. Living in Newtongrange, Green became intrigued by a Midlothian landscape shaped by coal fields and a popular culture that found expression in brass bands. Seduced by the mournful sound, and impressed by the musicians’ dedication to be the best, he determined to compose his own brass scores.

“I fell in love with the music but also just brass bands as a community-music phenomenon,” says Green, who programmed the Whitburn Band alongside Lau and Joan As Police Woman at Leith Theatre in 2018. “Radio 4 were the first people to bite, but the drama had started well before the completion of the documentary.”

Writing an original score – released last year as Split The Air – meant not only learning the characteristics of each instrument, but also going beyond pastiche and resisting the pull of Hovis-advert cosiness. “It’s so powerful,” he says. “As soon as you hear one tenor horn, you start floating off. I spent a long time trying to make the pieces of music not too nostalgic. The dialogue helps because it can put a bit of lemon juice in the sugar. Liberty said something really interesting, which is that the horn is a smooth and legato instrument, but Keli’s speech patterns are staccato and percussive.”

The story he tells is about a 17-year-old musician juggling with her final year at college, a job in Scotmid, a competition at the Royal Albert Hall and caring for her housebound mother. It is determinedly modern, even if the past hangs heavy over a post-industrial landscape that, 40 years on, is still haunted by the miners’ strike.

Liberty Black in rehearsals for Keli | Julie Howden

Making her professional debut, Black is drawing on the local knowledge of tenor horn player Andrew McMillan, a fellow final-year student who plays with the Whitburn Band. Despite being born decades after the strike, she understands a legacy that affects her generation even now.

“In Scotland, there is a hatred of Thatcher and everything that she represents that is almost genetic,” she says. “Before I had a concept of who she was, I had heard the phrase ‘Margaret Thatcher, the milk snatcher’. I don’t have any familial relations to the mines, but I have a lot of familial relations to industry and the seeds of individualism that were planted at that point are still affecting communities today. The play explores what is the modern young person’s relationship to that.”

Shanahan warms to the play’s vision of communal endeavour, one that recalls the camaraderie of Same Team: A Street Soccer Story, the Traverse Theatre hit for which she received a best-director nomination in the CATS awards.

“I love the analogy that being a brass bander is like being involved in a sport,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s football or music, it’s wonderful when people can come and be together. It can be tough as well. The play does not romanticise: the level that these bands are playing at is really serious and people can feel the pressure. But at its heart, it declares that music and coming together is good for us and should be protected – and it’s quite easy for me to get behind that.”

Keli is at the MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling, 10 May; the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 13-17 May; Dundee Rep, 22-24 May; Perth Theatre, 4-7 June; and Tramway, Glasgow, 11-14 June, see www.nationaltheatrescotland.com. This feature was produced in association with the National Theatre of Scotland