Hitting the road again
TIM CORNWELL

THE ACTOR TOM URIE DOES NOT HAVE ROBBIE Coltrane's height, but he certainly has his girth. Dressed in a huge, shiny blue and red Detroit Pistons T-shirt over camouflage trousers, the television actor and comic cuts a shambolic, unshaven, but warmly embracing figure in Aberdeen's McClymont Halls. "You're going to hear a band on a Monday morning," he warns, good-humouredly.

Under the strip lighting, against a backdrop of bookcases, table-tennis tables from yesterday's tournament, and Soviet-era blue gloss wall paint, The Majestics are back, belting out rock'n'roll classics like Tutti Frutti, Only the Lonely and Love Hurts.

Tom Urie is the confident lead singer and keyboard player, Danny McGlone. Monarch of the Glen actress Dawn Steele, as Suzi Kettles (Emma Thompson's role in the TV version), is more tentatively finding the chords on the guitar, but turns up her voice for Don't Be Cruel. Behind them John McGlynn, a veteran of television shows River City and Taggart, is crashing out the beat on the drums. Actor Barrie Hunter delivers a stirring version of You've Lost That Loving Feeling.

In John Byrne's famous six-part 1987 TV drama, the Majestics were a fictional Scottish rock'n'roll band whose lead singer, Big Jazza, has just died. His younger brother Danny, back from New York, is enlisted by the band's manager to step into his place for the 25th anniversary tour. His old art school flame, Suzi, is persuaded to come on board, while the band's lead guitarist, Vincent Diver, provides the other incendiary strand of the tale. Mayhem ensues in a story full of black Scottish comedy.

It is said that Urie, a club musician and actor in shows such as Chewin' the Fat, made as many as 50 calls to the National Theatre of Scotland when he heard it was putting Tutti Frutti on stage, terrified he had missed auditions for the role of Danny. "It's not often that a big theatre part comes up that requires a big fat guy to sing and play guitar," he tells me. "When I found out about this I did lay siege to them. I got my agent to keep pestering."

Steele, meanwhile, was being encouraged by Richard Wilson, directing her on stage at the Royal Court, to go for the part of Suzi Kettles. Wilson himself had appeared as the band's manager, Eddie Clockerty, in the original. Having secured the part, Steele has been taking a crash course in guitar. "I am playing it. I am still slightly one step behind but it's just practice, and I've only been doing it for three and a half weeks. It's practice, that's all it is."

The cast, with John Ramage now playing Clockerty, Kenny Bryans as Dennis, Julie Wilson Nimmo as Janice Toner and Tam Dean Burn as the combustible lead guitarist Vincent (played by Maurice Roëves in the original) looks exceptionally strong, with a maverick character that suits the play.

Tutti Frutti seem to have acquired a near-mythical status for Scottish television, partly because it has never been repeated or released on video or DVD. The theatre version potentially has the best of both worlds, building off a 1980s hit buried for nearly two decades. It also has the glamour factor, with the TV background of several actors, not to mention John Byrne's writing. All the ingredients for success are there, if the production can get the mix right.

The stage cast has been trying to steer clear of the original. "I don't want to watch it because I want to do it my own way, I don't want to do what Coltrane did," says Urie. The actors don't want to impersonate figures so embedded in the Scottish consciousness, he says. "It's like somebody else playing Basil Fawlty." John Ramage adds: "One is aware that Richard Wilson played the part, and I don't want to be tagged by what he did with it."

Director Tony Cownie and his cast have got about six weeks of rehearsals in Aberdeen, where the production will open at His Majesty's Theatre. The task facing him and Byrne has been to cut six hours of television to well under three hours of theatre.

"It's nearly there in terms of structure and coherence, but it's still a couple of weeks away. It's 99 per cent," Byrne tells me in a basement room, as Tutti Frutti echoes through the walls from upstairs. Mice have been seen skittering around the halls, and the crew joke that the noise has driven them out. Elsewhere in the building, signs offer classes in kick-boxing and salsa dancing.

Byrne has been in rehearsals every day for a month; he barely visited the television set in the 1980s. His stunning charcoal and pencil costume drawings lie on a desk upstairs, drawn on the train from his home in Nairn. Vincent should wear short "reptile boots", his notes say. For Eddie, he'd prefer brown shoes and a black camel coat, and "self-colour" ties. "For me it's obsessively fascinating, it is quite an undertaking," he says. "It's the same story, with a chalk-and-cheese medium. The plot is very much the same, it has exactly the same threads. It may be that one of the threads has more clarity about it."

Byrne, well-known for speaking his mind on issues like smoking on stage, aims his anger today at modern rock. "The best of rock'n'roll is as good as anything you'll get and better than most things you will get in a creative sense. Look at this so-called art that's going on now - compared to Elvis, it's absolute and total crap." Rock'n'roll, he says, "changed the way we think, and changed the way we lived".

With Urie playing Danny, he enthuses, Coltrane's role has been "reborn". He wrote it for Coltrane, whom he'd worked with in an Edinburgh pantomime. "It never occurred to me that anybody else could play him. But then it's 20 years on. We had a policy that it had to be all new."

Cownie says his central concern was keeping the narrative clear and direct enough to hold an audience. The television series, by contrast, could afford to be quite meandering in its approach. The other big issue has been the acting out of the story, that runs to car accidents, stabbings, wife abuse and suicide, between performing some 23 songs or excerpts. How good would the Majestics have to be? "When it comes to do it, we can't really be bad. It's different on television," says Dawn Steele, "because you can see what the audience are like, and the crappy halls that they played in. Whereas here, if we start playing bad, the audience is like, 'they're rubbish.' And you can't put in your programme, 'PS: the Majestics are supposed to be rubbish'."

There is talk in the rehearsal hall that Cownie initially considered miming the whole show, but dismissed the idea. "I found it very hard to find actors that were the right age, right for the parts, Scottish and play the relevant instruments. It was just something that I had to consider. Fortunately enough, we found a cast that can do all things. It wasn't a serious option."

Rehearsals have been divided in two. Aside from stage rehearsals, the actors who sing or play have been practising every day under the eye of music director Neil MacArthur, formerly of Harvey and the Wallbangers. He takes pride in the fact that the Majestics not only play live, but have recorded all the other music that's heard on stage, in an Aberdeen studio. "They are a good rock'n'roll band, they know what they are doing, they have been around 25 years," he says. MacArthur voice-tested Urie and sized up his piano-playing before he got the part. He went to see McGlynn on the drums.

The two men are the core of the band. Urie studied singing, piano and guitar at Perth Rock Music College, and afterwards toured Scotland in a mini-van with his band, Squirrel Mafia. He performs as a singer and pianist in Jumpin' Jaks, in Glasgow and Dumfries. Early in his career, McGlynn kept switching between acting and drumming, performing with the theatre company Wildcat. He has recently concentrated on TV, but is the sole link in the cast between the old Tutti Frutti and the new, as he played a DJ in the original. "This is the first time I have played drums in earnest since 1994, so there's a lot of catching up to do," he says. "I haven't been on stage as an actor since 1992. "You should have heard us a couple of weeks ago. It didn't sound like a band. It sounds like a band now."

The choice of Aberdeen for rehearsals and the opening two weeks of the show, for a cast that mostly hails from Glasgow, looks like a clear case of regional correctness by the National Theatre. But the cast have apparently been bonding at local watering holes. The Majestics' first gig came on an open mic night, at the Noose and Monkey pub.

Urie joins in from a sofa, as the Shoobedoo girls, as Byrne called them, practise their harmonies. They are actresses Pauline Knowles and Clare Waugh, with their own parts in the play. Helen Mallon, just graduated from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, is Vincent's crooning girlfriend.

The secret weapon is the guitarist and actor Alan McHugh. He plays Suzi's husband, a wife-beating dentist who meets his just desserts, but at the same time, both on and off the stage, he will help Steele and Burn by playing the guitar leads.

Steele sung in drama school, and before eight million people in Comic Relief. She has been taking guitar lessons with McHugh, but admits she can't approach the kinds of solos that take years to learn. "All the difficult chords I've been going, maybe I'll just not play that bit," she said. I've still got that part to play, all those lines, so I can't be too tough on myself."

"When she came in, she could play two chords with ten minutes between each chord," Urie says of Steele. "She practises the whole time. I think she will end up like KT Tunstall."

Burn may have the part of the Majestics' lead guitarist, but by most accounts does not play at all. "I'm improvising it as it goes along," he says. "To be learning a guitar at my age is just amazing."

Cownie says: "I compromised, because Tam is such a great actor. Vincent is such a key character, and Tam very obviously could play that part. He doesn't play in a lot of gigs; for one reason or another Vincent can't make it, or is in too bad a state to do anything terrific. So it does actually work."

• Tutti Frutti is at His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, 21-30 September, and at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, 3-7 October.

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