Andy McGregor

Working on a Scottish classic Image by David McGarvey My most recent project is a very interesting one, I am co-directing (alongside Prof Maggie Kinloch) the John McGrath classic 'The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil' for the Largs Players community drama group, also featuring the mod-winning Largs Gaelic choir (you can see photos from our production here ). The play was first performed by 7:84 (pictured below) who toured it all around Scotland and, in doing so, created a classic piece of Scottish theatre. It is an interesting experience to work on this play for a number of reasons. The most obvious being the text itself, it's unlike any play that I've ever come across and I doubt will come across again. Here's a little snippet of the opening number. The Play The play was first performed 40 years ago, in 1974. It tells the story of the Scottish Highlands from 1746 up until - the then - modern day. It looks at how the people and their la...

I have spent the last few weeks working on a show called 'Notes to Self' with the 2nd year Musical Theatre students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. The brief is simple in principle, create a show where the students generate all the material themselves. In practice this kind of work has a number of significant challenges but l have a lot of experience working on projects with multiple writers and, sometimes, hundreds of participants. I thought it may be helpful for anyone else who is looking to devise with large groups if I documented how we did it, the techniques used to create ideas and how modern technology can really make life easier. We are transported back into the 1950's. Photo by Kevin Robertson Generating Ideas We started in traditional devised theatre territory. I asked everyone to bring in a photo and a object, these were then left together in a little pile. Another actor would look at these objects, some which made sense (e.g. a picture of a sn...