One of the stories British cinema loves to tell is of working-class characters defeating the privations of Thatcherism using wit and creativity. In Brassed Off (1996), escape came in the form of communal music; in The Full Monty (1997), it was male striptease; and in Billy Elliot (2000), the romance of ballet.
Setting the template for all these was Restless Natives (1985), a cult Scottish favourite in which two Edinburgh dreamers turn highway robbers and, in the gentlest possible way, take to holding up coachloads of American tourists while disguised as a wolfman and clown.
Written by Ninian Dunnett, the whimsical comedy reflected on how a small nation could assert itself at a time of high unemployment, diminishing global significance and a tourist industry hungry for cliche. The land of William Wallace, Rob Roy and Robert the Bruce was no longer a country for heroes. With self-deprecating humour, the film imagines that role being taken on by two bumbling lads from a joke shop. The majestic music of Big Country, with Stuart Adamson’s yearning vocals and bagpipe-like guitar lines, was an ironic counterpoint to their amateurish scheme.
The Big Country connection seems to have inspired Dunnett, working with the film’s director Michael Hoffman, to bring Restless Natives to the stage as a musical. The band’s songs, such as Come Up Screaming, I Walk the Hill and Ships, now sit alongside new musical-theatre numbers by Tim Sutton, most rather different in style. They range from It’s Good to Be Bad, a bar-room knees up that could have been in Oliver!, to I Am the Wolf, a dark music-box lullaby that might have worked in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
They are sung brightly by a lively cast led by Kyle Gardiner as Ronnie, Finlay McKillop as Will and Kirsty MacLaren as Margot, Will’s Beauty and the Beast love interest.
But Restless Natives is not a story of high passions and grand dramatic moments. Little calls out for song. The pleasure is in its undulations and quiet observation. However briskly arranged, the songs – and there are many – only slow down the narrative. Extending the film’s 90 minutes by nearly an hour, the production drains the comic momentum and labours a delicate idea.
At Perth theatre until 10 May. Then touring until 28 June
