Theatre
This is Memorial Device
Tron Theatre, Glasgow
*****
Second comings are all the rage these days, as pension plan heritage rock tours cash in on a band’s influential legacy to claim their place in history. While such a fate is unlikely to befall the long lost quartet of David Keenan’s epic novel about the most famous band you’ve never heard of, judging by this scaled up revival of Graham Eatough’s bold stage version, they are already the stuff of legend.
Or at least Ross Raymond seems to think so. As brilliantly brought to life by a wide eyed and restless Paul Higgins, Ross is the former fanzine writer who was at the centre of what passed for a music scene in Airdrie between 1983 and 1985, and witnessed the convoluted crash and burn of local anti heroes Memorial Device. Greeting the audience as if giving a library history talk, Ross unpacks a lifetime’s litany of reminiscences about Big Patty, Richard, Remy, and especially the mercurial power of band frontman and driving force, Lucas Black, represented in Anna Orton’s set by a row of showroom dummies.
READ MORE: This Is Memorial Device stars Slow Horses' actor Paul Higgins
As with any pop life Greek tragedy, there is much more going on in Keenan, Eatough and Higgins’ rendering than first appears, and which here says much about the eternal need to break on through to the other side, with all the ultimately self destructive exploration that entails.
Originally seen in Edinburgh College of Art’s Wee Red Bar during the 2022 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Eatough’s Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh production condenses things into an interval free 75 minutes, throughout which Higgins flies without a safety net.
As Ross attempts to recapture a magic moment he never knew he was living through, the show erupts into a blissed out eulogy for all the small town lost boy heroes who took the leap and changed everyone’s lives, especially their own. Only the Ross Raymonds of the world are left behind to carry on living enough to tell the tale.
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