Joan McAlpine: Dumfropolis celebrates reinvention of the Bard

When Graham Main, a young playwright who worked with the Teatro Nacional – the national theatre in Madrid – returned home to the less balmy climes of his native Dumfries, his first thought was to join the local Burns Club. The poet had spent his later years in the town, wrote much of his best work there and is buried in St Michael’s Kirk. You can still drink in his favourite howff, The Globe Inn, accessed from a tiny wynd just off the high street. The Globe has changed little since Burns’ day and visitors can still see the verse to “lovely Polly Stewart” and a version of Comin’ through the Rye scratched on the inn’s window pane.

The romance of Burns is written all over historic Dumfries, a corner of Scotland once compared to 19th century Liverpool with its bustling trade. For Graham, the Burns connection was one of the attractions of coming home – he grew up in the council estate of Lochend. Having worked in the arts in Ireland and England as well as Spain, he developed something of a reputation among his network of friends and acquaintances for staging “alternative Burns suppers” where haggis and whisky were on the menu, but everything else was open to interpretation.

Unfortunately he was unable to join the Burns club, being told it was full up but he could put his name on the waiting list. Undeterred, and noticing that there was no major Burns festival in the town despite its intimate association with the bard, he decided to stage the kind of event that his friends outside Scotland had so enjoyed – a celebration of Rantin’ Rab that did not require a membership card and ownership of a dinner suit.

The result will spring to life this weekend in Dumfries – or as Graham’s publicity literature recasts it “Scotland’s Vibrant Southern Capital”. The Big Burns Supper, which takes place this Friday and Saturday, will reconnect the bard with the locals who inspired his work and in whose language he wrote his verse. As well as involving the native Doonhamers, the festival should make Dumfries a national destination for Burns Night activity, offering the authenticity of a real, Scots-speaking community with a contemporary spin. Dumfries is the first major town across the border, so is well placed to welcome party-goers from the northern English cities as well as Glasgow and Edinburgh. The aim is to be the first-foot of festivals, both geographically as well as the first in the calendar.

Burns himself never reached douce middle age and his attitude was pretty rock ‘n’ roll – live fast, die young – in his case at 37. The Big Burns Supper has recruited dozens of young volunteers to promote the festival and welcome visitors. The poet’s hedonism, lust for life and lassies makes him a recognisable and attractive figure for today’s under 30s – as does his commitment to social justice, his passion for the underdog, his love of nature, animals and his social mobility – he moved among all classes without compromising the essence of himself.

So it is appropriate that the opening play, written by Electric Theatre and projected on to giant screens at The Whitesands beside the Nith on Friday, throws Burns into a time warp with another two artists closely associated with the town, the Peter Pan author J M Barrie and Calvin Harris, the phenomenally successful songwriter and record producer whose current single with Rihanna, We Found Love, has been in the UK singles charts for months. One cannot help feeling that Burns would have very much approved of Rihanna, who has been criticised for her sexually explicit lyrics, as well as Harris’s other diva collaborators Kylie Minogue and Leona Lewis. A great admirer of the female vocalist, he would have also enjoyed Eddi Reader’s interpretations of his work, which will feature in a concert at festival.

What he would have made of the Gaylie Ceilidh hosted by Dumfries Drag Queen Ivana at the Lesbian, Gay Bi-sexual Transgender Centre is a matter of speculation – though the description of the evening – “Studio 54 meets Braveheart” would set any creative imagination in train. Calvin Harris himself will only make it there in fictionalised form, but one of his session musicians, Sean V, hosts a musical mystery bus ride through the town, mixing memories of Dumfropolis with anecdotes about the American singer and socialite Kelis, with whom he also worked. There’s a tartan party with the young band Finding Albert – who also wrote the score for the opening show – and even Kentucky Fried Chicken opens its doors for a free concert by Nicola Black whose album Moonstruck mixes the Scots of MacDiarmid and Burns with work of her own. The Stand Comedy Club has moved south for the occasion to allow Vladimir McTavish to take a wry look at Scottish history in Our land for a’ That

As someone who spent much of the Christmas break re-reading MacDiarmid, whose attempt to revive the Scots language and literature in the early 20th century, met with mixed success, the Big Burns Supper offers a different way to celebrate the local in a globalised world. A Dumfriesshire man, hailing from Langholm, MacDiarmid had a love hate relationship with the bard, whom he regarded as a second rank poet but a genius song-writer (though, as with most things, his judgements fluctuated over time and he celebrated inconsistency).

MacDiarmid bemoaned how Burns had been hi-jacked by the establishment, whose cult of Rabbie had stripped him of his radicalism and resulted in his fossilization. A notorious elitist, MacDiarmid disliked the couthy, anti-intellectualism of the Burns Supper scene – though he rarely missed an opportunity to address one. Were he alive today, however, he would surely have approved of this imaginative attempt to reconnect the poet to his people, particularly the young, and the new art forms they enjoy.

• Joan McAlpine is an SNP MSP for the south of Scotland

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