Theatre reviews: There's a Place | Cassie And The Space Cowboy

Telling the story of four fanatical Beatles fans trying to catch a glimpse of their heroes in 1960s Perthshire, There’s A Place boasts some outstanding performances, writes Joyce McMillan
There's a PlaceThere's a Place
There's a Place | Mihaela Bodlovic

There’s A Place, Perth Theatre ★★★★

Cassie And The Space Cowboy, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★

Sixty years ago this week, the Beatles came to Scotland, and played concerts in Edinburgh, Dundee and Glasgow. They were at the height of their global fame, fresh from their first sensational US tour, and besieged by screaming mobs of fans wherever they appeared; and it's this special moment in the history of pop that forms the backdrop to Gabriel Quigley’s new play There’s A Place, which revolves around the Beatles’ appearance at the Caird Hall, Dundee, on 20 October 1964.

The play is set, though, 50 miles away, on the banks of Loch Earn in Perthshire, near the hotel where the Beatles spent the nights before and after their Dundee show. Four young Beatles fans from Perth have got wind of the fab four’s plans; and so here we find them, lying in wait in a tiny tent on the water’s edge, sporting fab four sweaters, peering through binoculars, and calling each other by the names of their favourite Beatles.

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In truth, my memory is that most of us Beatles fans were younger than Gabe Quigley’s four characters, and often too young to be allowed out to a gig. These young women, though, are 16 or 17, poised on the brink of adult life, with all its difficult choices; and over a day and two nights by the loch, while the Beatles come and go almost within reach, they argue and learn and begin to support each other into that new phase of their lives - even when their conversation is interrupted by a fellow Beatles fan from the big house nearby, a lost soul with a voice so posh they can barely understand what she says.

There are moments when Gabriel Quigley’s text seems to involve too much talk and not quite enough action; the play might work better as a 90 minute drama, than a two-hour show with an interval. Yet Sally Reid’s heartfelt and hugely entertaining production boasts outstanding performances from Tinashe Warikandwa as “John” and Leah Byrne as “Paul”, with strong support from Rosie Graham, Yana Harris and Elena Redmond; in a show that offers a fascinating follow-up to Quigley’s powerful adaptation of Muriel Spark’s Girls Of Slender Means, at the Lyceum last year, in its exploration of a postwar era when hope for greater freedom and a better world was the norm, and voices like those of The Beatles seemed to embody all these new possibilities, as poignant as they were thrilling, and powerful.

Ross Mann and Gowan Calder in Cassie and the Space CowboyRoss Mann and Gowan Calder in Cassie and the Space Cowboy
Ross Mann and Gowan Calder in Cassie and the Space Cowboy | Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

This week’s Play, Pie and Pint drama - by sharp contrast - looks forward from our own dystopian times to what looks pretty much like the end of the world, as experienced by an ill-matched pair of Glaswegians. Set a couple of years in the future, Paul F Matthews’s Cassie And The Space Cowboy features a splendid Gowan Calder as Cassie - a middle-aged Glasgow woman surviving an alien invasion in a basement flat - and Ross Mann as Malcolm, a fellow survivor whom she meets in the street and brings back for tea.

It soon transpires that Malcolm is a conspiracy theorist of the first water, convinced that the alien invasion is not real, but is being staged by the sinister cabals who run the world; which is unfortunate, since, as Cassie explains, she recently chucked her husband out for driving her mad with conspiracy theories during the pandemic.

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In Edoardo Berto’s production, the dialogue between the two about the post-truth world we now inhabit is fast, furious, funny and sometimes brilliant, with neither Cassie nor Malcolm yielding an inch; and if a highly entertaining twist in the tail of drama tends to nudge the argument in Malcolm’s direction - well, Cassie is not a woman to admit defeat, while there is still time to fire up her diesel generator, and make another cup of tea.

There’s A Place is at Perth Theatre until 2 November; Cassie And The Space Cowboy is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 26 October.

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