Out In The Hills, Pitlochry Festival Theatre ★★★★★

What would possess any sane person/theatre lover to leave the warmth of their homes in the dead of winter to head into the wilds of the Scottish Highlands? That has been the challenge for Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s new artistic director, Alan Cumming, and one he is tackling with aplomb.

Out in the Hills, subtitled “a queer festival for everyone”, is the first new event of his tenure, and Cumming has ensured that his Pitlochry artistic directorship has started with a bang. With his sustained international career, he has built up quite the list of the great and the good of showbiz as friends over the years, and for this festival, he’s clearly been thumbing through his contacts book and assembled an impressive lineup of A-list queer talent.

The Recs editor Steve Coats-Dennis accepted an invite to head north and experience what Out in the Hills has to offer. This is his take:

What’s really striking as your train wends its way to the Highlands is how incredible the scenery from your window truly is. Birch, Scottish pine, hazel and the majestic Douglas fir tree line your route and set the scene for a dramatic experience. Because of the altitude – and what fun it is to track it on whatsmyelevation.com – you experience low hanging clouds almost parallel to you. There is a surreal, woozy thrill at seeing the towering Wallace monument pierce the mists like a mystical, dry ice fantasia.

More theatrical portents are suggested as you pass near Birnam Wood and before you know it, you reach quaint Pitlochry station.

Images by Steve Coats-Dennis

Rather shamefully as a Scot, I’ve never visited Pitlochry Festival Theatre, which this year celebrates its 75th anniversary. And more fool me for not exploring sooner. The first glimpse of Scotland’s only major, rurally located arts organisation from the wobbly suspension bridge is beguiling: the fast-flowing River Tummel beneath, the quartz-stone-speckled mountain Ben-y-Vrackie above, and the cultural hub nestled in-between.

The first theatrical cab off the rank is a rehearsed reading of Equinox, a new one-man play by Laurie Slade. Let’s face it – if you are unveiling a one-man play, you would want that man to be Sir Ian McKellen. The audience in the main auditorium, a generously spaced and yet wonderfully intimate 544-seater, hung on the every word of Sir Ian’s performance. Slade’s script is deeply poetic and consciously plays with verbal flow (or lack thereof), and what better conduit than McKellen with his mastery of pregnant pauses and peerless toying with syllables and stresses to imbue everything spoken with meaning unspoken?

“I’m too old. I’m angry about everything.” The isolation of his character, retracing the episodes of his life, naturally conjures up Krapp’s Last Tape, but in his channelling of Dylan Thomas’ injunction “do not go gentle into that good night… rage, rage against the dying of the light”, he is both Lear and Fool. The absurdity of blowing balloons and releasing them offer the last vestiges of the life’s mischief that has gone before but the dyspeptic yowls of fury as one enduring transient terminal dysfunction are utterly Shakespeare’s most tragic King.

As a first outing of a new play, Equinox remarkably lives up to it title by offering hits and misses in equal measure. Slade mines moments of such feeling, ably abetted by his extraordinary lead actor. Where it doesn’t work so well is in the episodic and uneven nature of the text. Some prudent revisions and reworking, and the script will hold the audience as firmly as its actor does. Meanwhile, no one will fail to appreciate enjoying the immense craft and theatrical dexterity of its 86-year-old lead in such close proximity.

The first Out in the Hills festival is peppered with In Conversation events, and what a hoot the chat between Alan Cummings and Graham Norton proved to be. Known as the genial chat show maestro, it was captivating to see the tables turned and Graham being the one being asked the questions for a change.

Speaking about his career, Norton joked that no-one dreams of being a chat show host. Trained at Central School of Speech and Drama as an actor, he had auditioned for Pitlochry Rep in 1989 but didn’t get the job. And while he did appear at Liverpool Playhouse that year in The Shadow of a Gunman, he soon swerved into comedy. As Mother Teresa of Calcutta, he admitted his act was limited, soon outgrowing explaining the Holy Trinity using Tupperware.

When they opened the floor for audience questions, The Recs was ready with a query: “On your chat show, one of the joys is the unexpected guest combinations, such as Lady Gaga and EastEnders’ June Brown.” We asked, “What are Graham’s favourite surprising guest combos and have any combination of guests not worked well?” Graham gave a terrifically unguarded and hilarious answer. He had enjoyed Gaga and June Brown but he recalled that Alan Sugar and Doctor Pamela Stephenson clearly loathed each other. Warming to the topic, he reminisced about the infamous encounter with Mark Wahlberg. “It was awful,” he exclaimed before suggesting that whatever his guest had taken had kicked in by the time he had finished plugging his latest film. He proceeded to interrupt every other guest and their stories – to the extent that the recording was running really long to try and find any anecdote that the actor hadn’t destroyed. Then, Michael Fassbender managed to get a whole story out, only for Graham to realise that Wahlberg had fallen asleep.

Looking back on the notorious incident, he hilariously admitted that, in the past, he had found the Annie Leibovitz 1993 portrait for Vanity Fair of the dog on the beach pulling Wahlberg’s pants down amazingly erotic, but now to have the actor sitting on Graham’s lap playing with the chat show host’s nipples was just annoying.

As well as celebrity anecdotes, it was also fitting, at this queer festival, that the conversation between these much-loved gay pioneers should turn to matters LGBTQIA+. In response to a question from an audience member, both expressed their disbelief that Scotland had not banned conversion therapy yet.

In the company of two such charming and funny showbiz legends, it was a thoroughly delightful and entertaining hour to spend in their company.

Where to Stay and Where To Eat In Pitlochry

One of the joys of heading up to Pitlochry is not just the cultural delights of the PFT, but it’s a chance to explore one of the most picturesque towns in the Highlands and breathe in such fresh air.

While there are several lovely hotels, we opted for more space and freedom by staying at the wonderfully well-situated Taigh Beag Airbnb. Just off Atholl Road (Pitlochry’s High Street), it’s minutes away from restaurants, bars, takeaways and shops – and importantly, just a short 10-minute walk to the Festival Theatre. Cosy and immaculately clean, The Recs couldn’t recommend a more ideal place that’s handy for the theatre but also for exploring the area.

#GIFTED Services in exchange for an unbiased review. All opinions our own

And exploring Pitlochry is something that should definitely be part of any trip to the Festival Theatre. Even in the coldness of winter, it has such sparatan beauty that lures and beguiles. Here are just some vistas from our Sunday morning walk.

Naturally, with all that walking, you will soon build up an appetite – and thankfully, Pitlochry offers some terrific eateries. We can highly recommend The Old Mill Inn (https://www.theoldmillpitlochry.co.uk/bar-and-dining/) where we stopped off for Sunday lunch. While locally sourced Angus beef, which their butcher Yorkes of Dundee has dry-aged on the bone in their Himalayan salt chamber for a minimum of 35 days, is simply delicious, their scrumptious Vegan Thai Green Curry will satisfy the appetites any non-carnivores!

Truly fed and watered, we returned to our second day at Out in the Hills with another mouthwatering menu of events ahead of us.

As a lover of mystery novels, what a deadly combo of Crime Queens awaited us for the Murder She Wrote In Conversation session. Award-winning novelist of The Cutting Room, Louise Welsh, and the inimitable and internationally renowned, Val McDermid, teamed up for a fascinating chat which explored crime, crime writing and queer women in these stories across the decades. From Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde navigating the city by night to the usually close relationship between Holmes and Watson, even after he marries (“nothing queer about that” pronounced our panelists, tongue firmly in cheek), the coded queerness in crime fiction becomes more obvious in the ’30s and ’40s. This whistlestop tour alights upon Nancy Spain, a closet lesbian of whom Noel Coward said would not “fool a child of two and a half” and Scottish Josephine Tey, “a character of great duality” who split her time and indeed her persona between Inverness and London.

Our literary hosts marvel at how, in the ’50s, Patricia Highsmith debuted with the incredible crime novel Strangers on a Train only to worry her publishers with The Price of Salt, a lesbian romance that became the movie, Carol. By the sixties, queer depictions were naturally getting bolder. Ruth Rendell’s debut novel, From Doon With Death, hinges on a lesbian subplot. The premise that the two preeminent writers succinctly advanced is that the crime genre of fiction blazed a trail of queer representation – one that’s hard with which to disagree.

Opening the floor to audience questions, we asked both women: “Stephen King has said the road to Hell is paved with adverb. Are there any foibles in your own writing that you might want to jettison?” Val was the first to answer. “There was…” or “It was…” she revealed that annoys her when she writes. Louise admitted that an overuse of adjectives was a bête noire about her own writing. Expanding on the topic, she divulged that at one time, her editor would have suggested that her overuse of certain adjectives were slightly florid. Now, because of digital technology, she gets told “Did you know that you’ve used the word cautiously 38 times?”

Our final Out in the Woods event was Me and The Girls, a new adaptation by the always-engaging Neil Bartlett of a lesser-known 1964 Noel Coward short story, which is coincidentally another end-of-life tale. It relays the story of George Banks, who now finds himself dying in a Swiss hospital. He reminisces about his salad days in showbiz, touring as George Banks and his Bombshells. He recollects the highs and lows as manager of a dance troupe (“his girls”) and their ever-changing rota. And naturally, his thoughts also turn to Harry, the love of his life and his most tragic loss.

One of the clever conceits of the show is the blurring of the present and the past, where hospital staff morph into the dramatis personae of George’s life. The stern hospital matron (Shona White) transforms into the kind and loyal dancer Mavis, and the hospital orderly Felix (an excellent David Rankine) becomes Harry in the blink of an eye.

What may surprise audiences is that Me and The Girls isn’t the coy, coded Coward whose bon mots and champagne witticisms hint at homosexual undercurrents. This is a very unguarded, unfiltered playwright speaking openly and sympathetically about queerness. You can’t imagine Present Laughter‘s Gary Essendine or The Vortex‘s Nicky Lancaster delivering as direct a line as George Banks’ “I was never someone who made a great production about being queer.“

It shouldn’t really come as a surprise given his five Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards and Laurence Olivier Award, but Alan Cumming‘s performance as George Banks is heartbreakingly good. Oscillating between the twinkle of the cabaret star and the pain of the dying man, Cumming gives layer upon layer, nuance upon nuance. It’s a charismatic, warts-and-all performance, made all the more touching by seeing the Aberfeldy-born actor returning to the Perthshire stage. His final rendition of one of Coward’s most wistful songs of longing, If Love Were All, guaranteed not a dry eye in the Pitlochry auditorium.

If there were another chance for a fully staged production of his queer gem, to borrow George Banks’ words…don’t mind if I do!

One of the most striking things about this inaugural Out in The Hills festival is that, while the starry line-up may have lured audiences to the Pitlochry venue, what a warm, friendly and accessible experience it was. Audience members, both gay and straight, chatted easily with each other as they filed out or filed into each event. Ideas thrown up by the In Conversations or the shows were exchanged freely and comfortably as we queued for the bars. (And boy, did we have to queue for the bars! Seriously, add more tills or have satellite bars around the foyer – this is our heartfelt plea to PFT. ) At a time when there are efforts by bad actors online to divide the LGBTQ community and set us against one another, you could do better than head to a queer festival such as the fabulous Out In The Hills and enjoy a healthy dose of fresh air and real life.

Out in the Hills is a queer festival for all that should be rightfully proud of itself – ★★★★★ 5 stars.

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Tickets

Pitlochry Festival Theatre has a range of tempting events coming up including the literary Winter Words Festival, the Scottish premiere of the musical Once, the world premiere of I’ll Be Seeing You by Martin Sherman and perhaps juiciest of all, Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady will be revived, directed by Maria Friedman and starring Alan Cumming as Professor Higgins.

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