Sunshine on Leith
Dundee Rep to 12 May, then touring
Abba, Queen, Madness ... the Proclaimers?! Well, why not? Dundee Rep's much-hyped new 'jukebox musical' lets others discover what we devotees have long argued: that the Reid brothers are the best songwriters in Britain. The uninitiated will still enjoy a show that hijacks the band's music to tell the story of two squaddies returning to Leith from Iraq. But I love the Proclaimers so much, my heart wears NHS specs, and to me, this is absolute bliss.
There's nothing cynical about the enterprise, which honours both the emotional and political forthrightness of the Proclaimers' lyrics. It's about a young nurse (spirited Gail Watson) disillusioned with the privatising health service, and her brother (Keith Fleming), pitched from a middle eastern desert to a Scottish one, whose barren landscape is broken only by call centres.
Stephen Greenhorn's script is in the unsentimental and funny Scots demotic, as celebrated here in that gloriously bolshy defence of the local accent, 'Throw the R Away'. Sometimes the songs are too idiosyncratic to shoehorn in. And the show has less twinkle in its eye than, say, Mamma Mia about the contrivance required to get from one number to the next.
But less self-consciousness equals more emotional clout. 'Letter from America' gains on the original, now that it's delivered by parents bidding their emigrant daughter goodbye. And the titular ballad, sung by Ann Louise Ross's Jean at her dying husband's bedside, is heartbreaking. If a 500-mile walk is required to get to this heartfelt, unpretentious musical, it'd be well worth it.
