Cairney Burnscripts

Dramatic Interpretations of the Life and Art of Robert Burns
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-909912-76-2
Verlag: Luath Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 264 Seiten

This publication is actor John Cairney's life with Robert Burns in theatrical terms. Since 1959, he has been involved with Burns as actor, director and writer. Over the years, Cairney has taken the opportunity to investigate different aspects of Burns as they relate to performance in the theatre. For the first time he has brought all these working playscripts, which have already been tested before a live audience, together in book form. Others interested in the prismatic attraction that is Scotland's Bard can now see how one Scottish actor-writer has dealt with a national icon theatrically. The scripts, written by Cairney, look at Burns' creative work, his everyday life, and his relationships, to build a full picture of the man so important to Scotland's cultural heritage. The plays are followed by an appendix which features a selection of plays written about Burns' life since his death at the age of 37.BACK COVER The overall impression gained in studying Burns' work as a whole is that, given the brevity of his life, it is extraordinary not that he wrote so much, but that so much of it was good. JOHN CAIRNEY Burnscripts is a collection of dramatic scripts by John Cairney interpreting the life and works of Robert Burns.Cairney, as actor, author and scriptwriter, has been connected professionally with Robert Burns for nearly half a century. He has performed as Burns all over the world and consequently knows him better than most. This personal exploration of Burns' life and work in performance helps to build a fuller picture of the poet and is an insightful celebration of one of Scotland's most important cultural icons.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cairney, John

Leseproben

Introduction Burns and the Stage IN 1789, Burns wrote to Lady Cunningham: I have some thoughts of the Drama... a Scottish audience would be better pleased with the Affectation, Whim and Folly of their own native growth, than by the manners which, to by far the greatest of them, can only be second-hand… if, after a preparatory course of some year’s study… I should find myself unequal to the task, there is no great harm done… Three months later, to Peter Hill, the bookseller, in Edinburgh, I want... as you can pick them up, second-handed or any way, cheap copies of Otway’s Dramatic Works, Ben Jonson’s, ditto Dryden’s, Congreve’s, Wycherley’s, Vanbrugh’s, Cibber’s, or any dramatic works of the more Moderns – Macklin, Garrick, Foote, Colman or Sheridan. A good copy too, of Molière in French I much want – tho’ I should wish Racine, Corneille, & Voltaire too… This is a formidable list by any standards but the art of the drama isn’t learned by reading about it. It is a ‘doing craft’, a practical business arrived at by trial and error for the most part, and even then, there is no guarantee that it will work until it is performed before an audience. It must be borne in mind that the boy Burns had come to plays originally as literature, in pieces to be read, if not seen, as in Masson’s Collection of Prose and Verse from the Best English Authors. Here he read excerpts from plays, mainly Shakespeare, and was enthralled. The Stratford Bard was rich feeding for an isolated, book-minded country boy, and led to his life-long love of Shakespeare. Although, Burns’ first experience of a Shakespeare play was not happy. John Murdoch, the young schoolmaster hired by William Burnes to teach his two sons in the rudiments of grammar and punctuation, brought a copy of Titus Andronicus to read aloud to the Burns boys. The plot so incensed the seven-year-old Robert that he snatched the book from Murdoch’s hand and threw it in the fire. Mr Burnes quickly plucked it out of the flames and restored it to Murdoch who just as quickly brought out The School for Lovers by the deservedly forgotten William Whitehead, and no doubt our young critic was appeased. When Murdoch became a master at Ayr Academy, the 14-year old Burns walked into Ayr for a term’s lessons in French and English Language. It was not for long but it gave Burns his first glimpse of boys of his own age who were not from his peasant class – and this small playground collision gave him his first chip on the shoulder. He wrote: I formed many connections with many youngkers who possessed superior advantages… youngling actors busy with rehearsal of parts in which they were shortly to appear on the stage (of life), where, alas, I was destined to drudge behind the scenes. His use of stage metaphor here could not be more pertinent. If he hadn’t yet been drawn to write a play, he certainly was to acting a part. Even on the limited stage offered him in Ayrshire, he showed from the beginning all the signs that he was a ‘natural’, as we say in the theatre. As the late David Daiches once told me, ‘The man was a role-player, there was no doubt of that,’ and I tended to believe what Professor Daiches told me. The budding performer was already evident in the youthful Burns. Indeed, considering his father’s constant struggles with money, Robert, at 16, with his tied hair, buckled shoes and saffron plaid, was already something of a dandy. He even attended dancing classes at Dalrymple in defiance of his father. It was as if the farmer’s son was preparing himself for another kind of future other than the agricultural. He was constantly on the look-out for a platform. He acted as gobetween on behalf of friends in their pubertal amours, playing their part, like a Mauchline Cyrano de Bergerac, with great style and effect. He founded the Bachelors’ Club at Tarbolton so that he could practice his speaking skills in debate with his peers. He clearly had an inner agenda that had little to do with remaining a ploughboy. Girls were particularly impressed, although he warned them, Beware a tongue that’s smoothly hung, A heart that warmly seems to feel. That feeling heart but acts a part ’Tis rakish art in Rab Mossgiel. He knew from the beginning he was different from his fellows but was uncertain as to who he was supposed to be, which is why he tried to write his way into an appropriate identity. If the writer was in the boy, the actor was in the man, but he had yet to find the right part to suit his emerging talents. It can now be seen that his early manhood was a studied, self-imposed rehearsal for a living dialogue that was to come, whatever that was to be. All he knew was that it would not be on the land. He always felt he had been miscast there. Forever at odds with his own background, the beginnings of the radical were already showing. Yet he never gave way to any impropriety or overt nonconformity until after his father died in 1784. Significantly, the very next year, 1785, was his annus mirabilis. Coinciding with the family’s move to Mossgiel Farm, the poet in him sprang into life at almost the same time as the birth of his first illegitimate child, and not long after, he met the real love of his life and future wife Jean Armour at a penny-fee dance. Burns played all three parts – poet, parent and suitor – with aplomb even adding an encore as a justified sinner taking his rebuke for his bastard wean on the cutty stool. Complication piled upon complication thereabouts but, ironically, even as his private affairs disintegrated around him, his Poetic Muse soared. He ought to have flown with it but was forced to attend more prosaic concerns at ground level. He willingly turned the farm over to his brother, Gilbert, but was forced to give up Jean, for a time, to a weaver in Paisley. Depressed and rejected, Burns decided to get out of Mauchline, out of Ayrshire, out of Scotland, out of his whole unhappy personal dilemma, caught as he was, between barren fields and fertile women. At the time, an outlandish plan was put to him to emigrate to the West Indies to become, as he said, ‘a poor negro-driver’ in Jamaica. This was improbable casting by any standards. It wasn’t Burns at all. The scheme wasn’t his idea, but that of a Mauchline friend whose Douglas family had an estate there. Burns didn’t really care where he went or what he did, he just wanted out of the place and out of himself. Then, Farewell Scotland, I shall never see you more. To raise money for the sea passage, he arranged to publish some of his poems by subscription and thanks to Masonic friends, this was done at Kilmarnock, his Poems in the Scottish Dialect being published there by John Wilson on 31 July 1786. 612 copies sold out in weeks and put ‘near on twenty pounds’ in his pocket. A second edition was called for immediately but Wilson was busy on a hymn book and couldn’t do it, so Burns packed his trunk for the Atlantic voyage. He must have been just a little bit excited. For any young man, this was a whole new script. Then, quite unexpectedly, a letter arrived at Mossgiel from a Dr Blacklock in Edinburgh, who suggested Burns should try for a second edition there. Edinburgh? As foreign to him as Jamaica. Why not? He had little to lose, so Burns cancelled his passage and, with the character now of poet in ‘guid black print’, he headed for the capital. In his Kilmarnock Edition, Burns had cast himself somewhat over-modestly as an unlettered ploughboy. Everything about him palpably contradicted such an image. Edinburgh had expected him to speak in the dialect of his poetry but he upstaged them completely by speaking better English than they. He looked like the actor he was, and his vocabulary was that of a don rather than an obscure rural rhymer. This peasant was seemingly at home in any kind of social situation and what was more telling, his conversation was brilliant at all times. In short, he was a sensation. I am in a fair way to becoming as eminent as Thomas a Kempis and John Bunyan and having my name in all the almanacs along with Black Monday and the Battle of Bothwell Brig. What society didn’t realise was that he was acting his head off while getting used to walking across a carpet for the first time. Thanks to my Lord Glencairn, he got his second edition and this was put in hand by Creech, the publisher. Once his proofs were checked Burns had nothing to do but enjoy being famous. Something he had always wanted. Between appearances at the supper tables, he worked with James Johnston on Scotch songs but there seemed to be no place for plays in all this ‘performance’ so he gave himself over to charming the ladies at their afternoon teas and entertaining their men folk in the evenings with another side of himself. His love of the congenial hour earned him the label ‘drunkard’ despite the fact that his capacity was less than half of the five-bottle a night men he consorted with. He hadn’t the stomach for strong drink. His boyhood saw to that. The drunk was not one of his favourite roles and violent mood-swings were often the result. However, Burns, the sober salon entertainer was well-received. Obviously, all those hours of youthful rehearsal had paid off. The highborn ladies, and those who pretended to be, loved his company because he was a novelty. He also looked well, spoke well and had wit. Their men-folk distrusted him for the same reasons....