To Save the Sea: Andy McGregor & Isla Cowan on their new eco-musical

Ruari Barber-Fleming

When you think about musical-theatre writing partnerships, you imagine earnest young people hunched over a piano in the Brill Building, batting musical phrases and lyrical ideas across the keys. You picture them living and breathing every moment together until the score is complete.

That was not how things were for Andy McGregor and Isla Cowan. Their work on To Save The Sea, a musical touring Scotland from this month, began in lockdown. Cowan, the Edinburgh playwright, had seen a tweet by McGregor, composer and artistic director of Glasgow’s Sleeping Warrior theatre company, looking for a collaborator for a large-scale sung-through musical. 

“I was researching environmental activism and came across the story of the Brent Spar in 1995 when Greenpeace activists scaled and occupied the oil store,” says Cowan. “The story of what happened at the Brent Spar is so spectacular and theatrical – there are people hanging off the oil store, giant water cannons, the police arrive and it turns into an international political saga. It didn’t feel like something I could capture in a play. It needed the heightened reality of a musical. We had a Zoom call and Andy loved the idea as much as I did.”

Forget about living in each other’s pockets: at the point when they completed the first draft, Cowan and McGregor had never even met. “We started by writing one song to see how it went,” says Cowan. “We used Google Docs and sent voice notes, singing bits and pieces back and forth. We thought if we met in person we might hate each other.”

Matthew McKenna and Nathan French in rehearsals for To Save The Sea. | Ruari Barber-Fleming

Today, they are happily in the same room. Not only that, but they are staging To Save The Sea as a joint venture. As well as being co-writers, they are co-directors. “What’s nice is our brains work differently,” says McGregor. “Isla enjoys research and I enjoy making something and moving on. That works really well because we don’t get stuck.”

As far as theatregoers are concerned, To Save The Sea is their second collaboration. Last year’s excellent Battery Park, about an aspiring 90s indie band, was written second but made it out of the traps first. In that one, Cowan wrote lyrics to McGregor’s songs, her brief to be as elliptical as a real Britpop act. “That was the note Andy kept giving me for the Battery Park lyrics: ‘No, this makes too much sense,’” she laughs.

For the tang of authenticity, McGregor wanted something more like She’s Electric, the Oasis song that rhymes “she’s got a sister” with “on the palm of her hand is a blister”. “The way you write lyrics for musical theatre is totally different from a pop song,” he says.

This time, Cowan’s lyrics needed to be unambiguous. “It has to make sense,” says McGregor. “If someone says something and it sounds nice, it would be a great pop lyric, but if it doesn’t make sense in a dramatic situation then it needs to go.”

“Every line needs to have purpose and motive,” agrees Cowan.

With a cast of eight, To Save The Sea pitches environmental activism against big business. At untold ecological cost, Shell had planned to sink the defunct rig where it stood. The activists grabbed headlines in their attempt to stop them. “This is a way of making an environmental story engaging and exciting,” says Cowan. “The activists won their fight and Shell agreed to dismantle the structure properly on land. Hopeful stories that show people can make a difference, even against big corporations, felt important to us.”

“It’s interesting watching this through a modern lens,” says McGregor. “It wasn’t about global warming at the time and there wasn’t this idea of protests being illegal, but an audience can’t help but bring that knowledge to it.”

The characters are fictionalised, although McGregor and Cowan have consulted Greenpeace and even met one of the original protestors. In keeping with the show’s ambition to be entertaining, McGregor has written a score in which the opposing parties inhabit contrasting musical worlds. “The activists are more like Jesus Christ Superstar rock music,” he says. “They’re guitars, a bit grittier and they’re real. The Shell executives are more panto baddie, doing Broadway-esque show tunes.” 

Brent Spar was a PR disaster for Shell and a triumph for the protestors, but its impact went further. It was a political hot potato. Helmut Kohl, the chancellor of Germany where an oil boycott was under way, told John Major, the British prime minister, that he could not let Shell proceed with its plan. Major resisted and accused the board of Shell of being “wimps” for bowing to pressure from the environmentalists.

“John Major does a burlesque number called Drill, Baby, Drill,” laughs McGregor. “It’s that classic thing where the baddies have the best songs.”

McGregor and Cowan are in no doubt about whose side they are on, but they were attracted to the story as much for its comic potential as its example of a successful environmental intervention. Cowan is dedicated to the green cause – she recently had a reading at the Traverse of The Smallest Thing, a dystopian eco-thriller about the death of pollenating insects – but the two of them also want to give the audience a good time.

“The environment is important to the story but it’s not agitprop,” says McGregor. “It’s a fun night out that happens to have this important story at its core. You will come out enthused and ready to take action, but also thinking, ‘I had a lot of fun tonight.’”

To Save The Sea is at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 25–28 September and touring until 2 November.