by If you come up with a list of Scottish playwrights who least write a musical about William Wallace, Rob Drummond’s name could be somewhere near the top. Musicals about icons in Scottish history were no longer his thing than games over the bagpipe and highland cows.
Drummond is the entrepreneurial playwright and performer who has made the audience invent a piece every evening in MR Write. Who asked someone to turn a weapon in the Bullet Catch and staged a real-time speed dating event. He climbed around the cloudy world of slight entertainment in the quiz show and trained with the Scottish wrestling Alliance to perform wrestling.
Everything was wonderfully unexpected, but nothing that indicates that he would turn his attention to the hero that was shown by Mel Gibson in Braveheart. “Hitchcock once said that it is just self -planism to have a style,” says Drummond. “Maybe I am bored and I want to try something completely different.”
The Drummond employee, Dave Hook, is a slightly less surprising candidate for this topic, although Wallace is not the first time that his work has asked questions about cultural identity. The rapper, poet, songwriter and producer is the man behind the hip-hop collective Stanley Odd, a band that cultivated a sound in downtown New York and gave him a defiant Scottish spin.
“Yes, in the past I wrote pieces of music that openly discussed the Scottish nation, culture and society,” says Hook. “But above all, I was always interested in stories and storytelling – and the opportunity to ask how we see a story.”
Is your national hero real at all? How was he?
Perhaps her William Wallace musical is no less likely than the time when Drummond adapted the Broons and gave the DC Thomson comic a grade of existential doubts. “I am not a theater – nob – I enjoy giving a audience a really great time,” says the playwright. “And that will be an hour of theater with jokes, history, funny characters and incredibly original new music. There is nothing you don’t like.”
Not that your show is produced by raw material in Glasgows Lunchtime Theater A Play, A Pie and a Pint-Völlig starry clear in the Scottish warrior from the 13th century. Yes, it will rehearse the story of how this knight defeated the English in the Battle of Stirling Bridge, and was executed in 1305 by Edward I of England. But there will also be questions where the man and the myth are different.
“I am interested in what it means to be Scottish and whether the national identity in a country harms more than benefits,” says Drummond, who, like Hook, voted for independence. “At the same time, we have what we all have in common at the beginning of the play. We know what William Wallace means, we know the feeling of being proud of being Scottish. If you have a reference point to which the whole room can access in the first five minutes, you can play with the audience.”
Drummond and Hook are not the first to combine hip-hop and history, the example that Hamilton is difficult to ignore. Regardless of one another, both decided not to see this global hit before this project was taken out for fear of influence. But like Lin-Manuel Miranda you recognize the theater potential of hip-hop as a form of storytelling.
“Hip-hop is folk music with caps instead of cardigan,” says Hook, who plays alongside Patricia Panther and Manasa Tagica in Orla O’Loughhlin’s production. “This is a funky statement, but it indicates that folk music is a vehicle to tell a story, and hip-hop also has this descent.”
Drummond takes up the topic: “Folk music is about passing on the story. But it is unreliable because the next man will add a verse and make him his own. Some of this piece is about gently nasting and saying:” Is your national hero even real? What was he liked? “We don’t know that much.
By giving hook hip-hop a Scottish voice and in this case bringing into the world of William Wallace, he believes that he remains true to the political roots of the genre. Hip-hop, he argues, has never replicated, but always adapted to new circumstances: “Hip-hop is a black American art form, but it is about local stories. It represents place, space and origins. Because it was not homogenization, but a revitalization of local culture.”
It also gives a play a kick. “Hip-hop is all about pun,” says Hook. “This playfulness is infused throughout the show.”
