Orphans

Peter  Mullan’s ‘Orphans’ is late 90’s cult classic of Scottish film making. For those who love it, they clutch their chest when they say ‘Aw Orphans, best film ever!’ The film was first shown at the 1998 Venice Film Festival, out of the main competition, but gaining four awards for Mullan: the Cult Network Italia Prize, the Isvema Award, the Kodak Award and the Prix Pierrot. Yet  he is probably best known for his Cannes Award winning performance as a actor in Ken Loach’s ‘My Name Is Joe’ amongst a zillion other high profile roles. 

But here in Scotland, many first came to know him as the maker of this gem. It’s dark, darkly funny, heart aching, and very very Scottish.  Some London Reviews at the time called it bleak. They didn’t get it. It’s Scottish humour. And beneath the gruff, foul mouthed language are characters loaded with repressed emotion. A family of siblings adrift on an ocean as they try to keep their shit together for their Mother’s funeral.

Huge emotions, brilliantly flawed characters, a dark night of the soul in Glasgow dealing with death, fear, grief, revenge, misplaced honour and the longing to know where you belong. Add The songwriting double headed writing genius that is Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly and one of Scotland’s best Playwrights Douglas Maxwell  and we had  a dynamite team.

I laid the idea on the table at NTS way back in 2019, but a global Pandemic kinda slowed production dates down. However we continued to develop the piece throughout lockdown, online, with 15 actors singing to tracks on their phones in their bedrooms and kitchens and somehow, slowly pulled this epic beast of a show together.

The songs: I came across Tommy  and Roddy’s work when I saw the zombie rom-com ‘Anna and the Apocalypse’. I am neither a fan of zombie films nor particularly rom coms but found myself laughing out loud and crying simultaneously and instantly wanted to know what dark wizardry was behind the songs which were confusing and exalting my  being. After an instant connection when we met, we knew we wanted to work on an offbeat Musical together. Orphans was the baby of that instinct.

We are currently developing a more tour friendly version and NTS , along with Independent producer  Sam Julyian are actively looking for partners to Create the future life of this show.