Alan Cumming will play Scotland’s nationwide bard Robert Burns this summer time in a solo present that may delve past “the standard biscuit tin picture” of the good poet.
Burn, a dance-theatre manufacturing, was introduced on Tuesday amid preparations for the night’s conventional Burns suppers celebrating the poet’s birthday. It will likely be staged as a part of the seventy fifth Edinburgh worldwide competition (EIF) in August.
Burns, an 18th-century tenant farmer who turned an excise collector, wrote passionately about his nation in vivid poems and songs together with Tam o’ Shanter, Auld Lang Syne and Tackle to a Haggis, which is recited at commemorative Burns suppers. His work “tells us absolutely the reality of who we're as Scots” mentioned Cumming. “However the extra I researched him, the extra I realised I didn’t know absolutely the reality of him.”
With Burn, Cumming goals to inform the poet’s story “utilizing my complete physique” and he mentioned: “If I've one remorse in my inventive life it will be that I didn't develop into a dancer.” The actor will collaborate on the present with the choreographer Steven Hoggett whose productions embrace Black Watch and Harry Potter and the Cursed Little one. Burn is co-produced by the Nationwide Theatre of Scotland, the Joyce theater in New York and EIF, which mentioned the present explores his private struggles and spectacular successes.
Cumming is not any stranger to Edinburgh’s annual arts jamboree. He was a roof-raising Dionysus within the Nationwide Theatre of Scotland’s manufacturing of The Bacchae on the 2007 competition and had a cabaret residency, Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs!, in 2016. In direction of the top of final yr’s competition – which was dramatically scaled down due to Covid – he introduced a present referred to as Alan Cumming Is Not Appearing His Age.
Burn was introduced alongside a revival of Liz Lochhead’s up to date Scots-language adaptation of Euripides’ Medea, which will probably be directed at EIF by Michael Boyd and can star the actor and playwright Adura Onashile whose play Costly Shit was staged on the Edinburgh fringe in 2016. Lochhead’s Medea was first staged in Glasgow in 2000 by Theatre Babel. Boyd’s revival starring Onashile had been due at EIF in 2020 however was postponed because of the pandemic. Additional programming for this yr’s EIF, which runs 5-29 August, will probably be introduced in spring.
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