Keli is a three-part audio drama about brass band contests and their connection to former mining towns. If that sounds like a history lesson on the legacy of Britain’s industrial past, it is, to some extent.
An audio montage of sorts, it begins as part documentary, part fable, part story-in-the-making, all these threads set to the rumble of brass sounds (music by Whitburn Band).
It is co-created by Wils Wilson and composer-writer Martin Green and we follow Green’s intermittent narration across Scotland. He combines his year-long research into brass band music with a fictionalised story of a working-class teenager, Keli (Anna Russell-Martin). She is a talented tenor horn player who has grown up caring for her mother, and Green builds her character, and voice, alongside various others.
Directed by Wilson, the metafictional framing sucks the life out of the first episode, which sounds like a series of confusing stops and starts. It is hard to keep track of Keli’s burgeoning story amid the jumble of other voices; there are snatches of vox pops from former mining towns spliced with Keli’s voice and parts of a fable (about a stranger in a village).
Green inserts his narrative alongside all of these layers, adds interjections and whimsical reflections. His words – occasionally self-indulgent in their lyricism – sound like waffling interruptions. “If I need a story, I need a protagonist. Who is this player?” he says, and later gives us a brief history of a power station when Keli takes refuge in it.
It is hard to navigate the patchwork of voices at the start and it is not always clear what is happening, or who is talking. But by the middle of the second episode the narrator’s voice begins to melt away, and the layers of music and dialogue become orchestral.
The piece becomes more gripping as Keli’s story takes centre stage, and this story has none of the bonhomie or light, fuzzy edges of Brassed Off; it is a hard story about the limitations placed on some working-class lives, capturing teenage desperation, depression and fulfilment through music.
There are powerful flashpoints and tensions between characters and the combined forces of dialogue, music and folklore harmonise to a riveting final episode that is wholly worth the wait.
Keli is available online from the Royal Lyceum theatre, Edinburgh, until 27 April.
