Maggie & Me Walk and Talk with Damian Barr and James Ley

The Scotsman

National Theatre of Scotland announces adaptation of Damian Barr's memoir Maggie & Me - coming to Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in 2024  Author and broadcaster Damian Barr is adapting his award-winning memoir Maggie & Me for a new National Theatre of Scotland production, which will premiere in 2024.

Transcript

00:00 (gentle music)

00:02 - So James, Maggie and Me is my memoir.

00:05 - Yes.

00:06 - It's my life, I know what happens in it,

00:08 but how would you describe it to people

00:09 who don't know about it?

00:10 - Yes, well, it's the story of a little boy

00:12 growing up where we are now in Lanarkshire,

00:15 and the story of him surviving first his parents' divorce,

00:19 and then everything else that life throws at him,

00:22 school, being a gay kid at school.

00:25 - The closing of the Ravens' Cage.

00:26 - The closing of the Ravens' Cage,

00:28 the impact on his family, society,

00:32 you've got the advent of AIDS and the fear of that.

00:35 And yes, and of course, Maggie Thatcher.

00:39 - Yeah, so the Maggie of the title is Maggie Thatcher,

00:41 and she's this sort of constant, you know,

00:43 like in a stick of rock,

00:44 running all the way through the '80s.

00:46 You can't have the '80s without Thatcher

00:49 as something, as an unlikely icon,

00:51 someone to survive and sometimes be inspired by,

00:54 but also to rebel against.

00:55 - Yeah, like--

00:56 - You know, she was a weird constant.

00:57 - Totally, and her kind of brutal message

00:59 for a wee boy to be somehow a message of hope.

01:04 And why are we here?

01:06 - We're here because Kirfyn Grotto was a place

01:08 where I would come as a wee boy for solace.

01:10 It was a place that was safe.

01:11 Home was not always safe, very often not safe.

01:15 And so I could come to the grotto, I could find peace,

01:19 I could understand the stories of the statues.

01:22 This was a refuge, so it felt really important

01:24 to put that in the book,

01:25 and also for us to write such big parts of the play

01:28 that are set here.

01:29 - Yeah, that are set here, and they have a reverence,

01:31 they have a kind of, we have lent into the campness,

01:34 but they also have a real reverence

01:35 for the like solace and beauty of the place.

01:39 - This is a powerful place, and it's a meaningful place.

01:41 And I think that this is a story about survival.

01:44 It's a story about hope, it's a story about trauma,

01:47 and it's, but it's ultimately a story about joy,

01:49 about what it means to survive.

01:51 And it's stories that we use to survive.

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