Theatre reviews: Frankie Stein | John Roy Stuart – Latha Chuilodair

Stellar Quines’ 21st-century take on the Frankenstein story does not disappoint, writes Joyce McMillan

Frankie Stein, Lochgelly Centre, Fife ★★★★

John Roy Stuart – Latha Chuilodair, Royal Scots Club, Edinburgh ★★★

There’s a content warning on the programme for Frankie Stein, the first show created by Scotland’s feminist theatre company Stellar Quines since its recent move to Fife. “Death, misogyny, flashing lights, swearing,” it says, sounding like an unintentional advert for everything that has been thrilling or compelling about theatre these last few thousand years.

And the company’s 21st-century take on the Frankenstein story does not disappoint, plunging with high theatrical flair into an 85-minute musical drama about an AI bot called Frankie, who finds herself rejected for mass production for showing too much emotion and sets off to find the Creator who gave her these human-like qualities.

In Julia Taudevin’s hugely varied, clever and entertaining script, Frankie’s search therefore takes her from the bot factory – where she inhabits a salon of rejects brilliantly conjured up, in Jennie Loof’s memorable costumes, by the company’s Young Quines Youth Theatre – to a post-apocalyptic version of Fife, where small remaining groups of humans, played with great intensity by the Quines Community Company, inhabit a drowned landscape.

There, Frankie meets Elspeth, former assistant (or partner) in the lab of Frankie’s creator, Dr Frank N Stein; and over a whirlwind few hours she discovers both the joys and all the grief and horror of human life, before the story spirals to a sudden, thought-provoking conclusion.

Yana Harris as Frankie and Amy Rodger as Cat Head in Frankie Stein | Stellar Quines

All of this is conveyed in fine style by director Caitlin Skinner’s 30-strong company, led by a professional cast featuring a radiant Yana Harris as Frankie and a hugely impressive Shona White as Elspeth, with strong support from Anthony Strachan as Frank, the self-hating failed scientist who, thanks to a childhood trauma, talks like a character in a Dickens novel.

The songs and lyrics, by Bethany Tennick, are passionate and powerful, Karen Tennant’s designs striking and eloquent. And if the show is sometimes subject to the ups and downs of performance and pacing that come with community work, it provides exactly the kind of professional support that raises the game of everyone involved in a memorable Stellar Quines Fife debut that deserves to be seen and discussed more widely, across the kingdom, and beyond.

April 16, meanwhile, marks the anniversary of the Battle of Culloden, which, in 1746, signalled both the end of all Jacobite hopes for the restoration of a Stuart monarchy, and the eclipse of Gaelic language and culture as a powerful force in the land. Gaelic language, clothes, songs and poetry were banned for years after Culloden; and this week, on the 279th anniversary of the battle, Michael Lewis gathered a small audience at the Royal Scots Club in Edinburgh to hear and reflect on the poetry of John Roy Stuart, a once-promising young soldier in the British army who – as a Gaelic-speaking Speyside man, and a Stuart by birth – took up with the Jacobite cause, and survived the defeat at Culloden to write a famous psalm of lament on the battle.

It’s a measure of how few Scots now speak Gaelic that Michael Lewis’s performance – delivered in well-worn military Highland dress, on a simple stage backed by an old battle standard – takes place almost entirely in English, using free versions of translations by various scholars.

Yet the profound sorrow of John Roy Stuart’s story, and the depth of his love for the Gaelic culture and language that met its greatest defeat at Culloden, sings clearly through his own poetry, and also through fine works by Willian Neill, Andrew Lang and Alfred, Lord Tennyson that reflect on the Culloden story. And it’s easy to imagine how this simple monologue could be developed, as the 180th anniversary of the battle approaches, into a slightly richer combination of live performance and visual presentation, which would help reintroduce the sound of John Roy Stuart’s Gaelic poetry to audiences, and with it a vital dimension of our history and culture, too long unappreciated, and denied.

Both shows, runs completed