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Never too old to rock'n'roll John Byrne is turning into an elder statesman of Scottish theatre. Now 66, his credits as a writer include one of the best Scottish dramas, The Slab Boys trilogy, about a group of young men growing up in a carpet factory in Paisley. As an artist, he designed the sets for another mould-breaking work, John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil. But his finest hour so far was arguably the six-part TV series that he wrote for BBC Scotland in the mid-1980s. Tutti Frutti, the bittersweet story of a touring rock’n’roll band called the Majestics, won six Baftas, launched the careers of Emma Thompson and Robbie Coltrane, and gave Richard Wilson a breakthrough part that paved the way for Victor Meldrew. Apart from an instant repeat, it has not been seen since, on TV, video or DVD. If you want to make friends in Scotland, come up with a bootleg — but don’t be surprised if the BBC lawyers come calling. It is safer to head for Aberdeen, where the new National Theatre of Scotland, fresh from its spectacular success at this year’s Edinburgh Festival with two new shows, Blackwatch and Realism, is putting the finishing touches to a stage revival of the show. Byrne himself has rewritten it, cutting the original six hours down to around two and a half, and redrawn his own original costume designs for a younger generation of actors, some of whom, such as Dawn Steele, who plays Thompson’s character Suzy Kettles, were barely out of primary school when it first appeared. It has not been easy, Byrne concedes. “The main narrative plots and the subplots are still there because we wanted to condense it without losing the flavour or the detail,” he explains. “On TV we had the chance to do a bit of meandering, but you can’t do that in the theatre. Television and the theatre are like chalk and cheese.” The narrative, he says, is much tighter now. But the Majestics still have to replace their lead singer, Big Jazza, who dies just before the tour begins. They draft in his brother Danny, and set off with their dodgy manager Eddie Clockerty on their improbable journey from the Bon Accord club in Shotts to the Club Paradiso in Ardrossan, belting out rock’n’roll numbers and finding skeletons in everyone’s closet. Those locations sounded so authentic then, but Byrne admits that he made them up. “I had never been to any of those places,” he says. “I deliberately got the map out and planned the tour to places that I didn’t know, and let my imagination run riot.” Which is an extraordinary revelation because one of the many layers on which Tutti Frutti works was this sad roll-call of small Scottish towns. Places that, in the 1960s, had been thriving enough to have a Club Paradiso, but were now little better than post-industrial, jobless ghost towns. “I never meant that to happen,” he says now. “To be honest, it was just intuition.” Overall, Byrne has rather enjoyed revisiting material that he had not thought about for quite a while. “It wasn’t so much remembering things from the finished show, but it did bring back memories of actually writing the show. I remember lying on the floor of my coal-shed in Newport in Fife howling with laughter as I wrote one scene. It was like listening to the story as I wrote it, almost like taking dictation.” Steele, who appeared in a recent revival of The Slab Boys in Edinburgh, is happy that the stage version will be its own entity, and that she doesn’t have to copy what Thompson did. But she has to manage those playful Byrne lines, full of wordplay. “You have to really look at them, find where to breathe, that sort of thing,” she says. “If you get one word wrong, it can really throw you out because the writing has its own rhythm.” As do the Majestics, and this time, at least, they are playing the big theatre in Aberdeen and not the Oil Slick as they did back in the 1980s. From here |