An Overture to 2012

With Christmas gone and the New Year begun, we can all think of 2012 as a reality and not something that’s always coming, like the Olympic Games in London. My thoughts are now on the Burns shows that will happen during the upcoming Burns season in Dunblane, Alloway, Tarbolton and Glasgow.

Meantime, I can reflect on the successful opening of ‘The Nine Lives of Burns’ painting exhibition in Alloway and the bonus we had in the launch of ‘Burnscripts’, the compilation of my Burns’ theatre scripts, excellently produced by Luath Press in Edinburgh. That makes five books on Burns altogether, so I think it can be said that I’ve had my say on our Bard. This, along with my performing record, was recognised by the Robert Burns World Federation, who made me an Honorary President.

I’m now bracing myself to begin another commissioned painting project involving the fourteen Stations of the Cross. I think I’ll need to get down on my knees and pray for that one, but it is wonderful to look ahead creatively over such a wide span. Because another book will emerge, I know it, but what it is yet, I’m not quite sure.

Nine Lives of Burns

All eyes are fixed now on the opening of ‘The Nine Lives of Burns’ painting exhibition opening at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, Alloway, on Thursday 01 December. It will be launched by a performance of ‘A Life with Robert Burns’, which is my new show based on the inspiration for the paintings and linked with stories about my playing Burns around the world. The exhibition will run to January 25, 2012, when we will close it with a performance of A Burns Experience with Alicia Devine on song and a wonderful dinner to boot.

 It’s astonishing how many guises one can find to dress Robert Burns in. He is capable of any kind of artistic treatment, because at heart he is solid gold and indestructible. God bless him, he has seen me through ‘mony a weary fitt, sin auld lang syne’. This is but the latest milestone.

 As if to celebrate, I have compiled all my Burns scripts and material in one volume, entitled ‘Burnscripts’, which Luath Press of Edinburgh is publishing in December. Everything I’ve ever done on stage about the Bard is here between bound covers: the solo play, the musical with composer Geoff Davidson, the various readings and the plays for children, ‘The Boyhood of Burns’. My own lyric, ‘There Was a Man’, to the tune of ‘The Star o’ Robbie Burns’ is also added for good measure. What more could I ask?

The response to ‘The Sevenpenny Gate’ has been heart-warming. The hour-long podcast on Celtic Underground did the trick and the articles in The Sunday Mail and The Celtic Quick News haven’t done any harm either. Everyone tells me they’re buying it for someone else for Christmas. ‘Follow, follow, we will follow on!’

Printing & Painting

As an actor by habit, I have been taken aback recently by the fact that for the last three months most of my attention has been given to writing a book and painting a series of canvasses in oil. The book, The Sevenpenny Gate: A Lifelong Love Affair with Celtic FC was actually signed off this very day and will be in the shops in October. The research allowed me to re-live the many happy hours I spent queuing up at the Boys Gate to see a very ordinary Celtic team play, but I loved every minute of it and was able to be part of the Lisbon Lions triumph and even to see them through the Stein years until the new stadium rose up all around us and pointed the way to football days to come.

The ‘Nine Lives of Robert Burns’, which is the painting project, is due for exhibition at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway on December 01, 2011 and will run to January 25, 2012. This project has been long talked about and has been on the easel for the last year, but I see the end in sight at last. I’ll be at the opening of the exhibition on December 01 to tell the Robert Burns story by means of the narrative implicit in each of the frames. It will be a new way of outlining the themes I’ve lived with for the last four decades. To mark the closing of the exhibition on January 25, I’ll be playing A Burns Experience with my dear friend, Alicia Devine, and her songs, so please note these two dates and book early.

A new approach to Burns was allowed me by the Carnegie Trust in Dunfermline, who invited me to give a lecture on Carnegie’s relationship with Robert Burns. It is yet another strand to be explored, another instance of the impact had and continues to have even on tycoons.

I’m now looking forward to appearing again at the Wigtown Book Festival with the new Celtic book and Greasepaint Monkey: An Actor on Acting and 25 and 26 September respectively. I’ll also be talking about Greasepaint Monkey at the Strathearn Library on November 26. In no time it will be Christmas.

No 1 Nostalgia Place

This is a warm invitation to the world to join me in my blog at No. 1 Nostalgia Place just off Memory Lane in Everever land to tell me your first memory. http://www.john-cairney.com/nostalgia-place/ It should come right out of your head without thinking, the very first image you can recall. It’s part of the anchor-basis, which ties you to the sub-conscious, which is only another name for the inner space we all have within us.

            My own first memory is of a very high wall, which was gradually pressing in on me In fact it was the perambulator in which my mother was pushing my little brother gradually crushing me against the wall. My mother didn’t seem to notice. She was walking along singing quite happily until my shouts alerted her. She immediately laughed, pulled the pram to the left and carried on singing.  I can feel the scrape of that stone wall on my bare arm yet.

            Memories are important. They are the little pockets of nostalgia we dip into now and again just to remember what the past tasted like and sometimes it was good. In this way, we can build up a whole ladder of memories and reach a whole other world whenever we want it. It’s comforting, it’s an escape, but why not?

            By the way, I returned to the scene of that wall recently to find that it is no more than waist-high. Such is the mist of memory.

Shaking all over

In order of importance, I have to mention immediately that Alannah and I missed the Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand by just over half an hour. We arrived at the airport there round 11.30am. We were met by car and, after some delay at a petrol station, we decided against having lunch in Christchurch itself, and instead drove on to our accommodation at Oxford some 30 miles from the city centre. We arrived there at exactly 12.51pm, because as I tried to get out of the back seat, the car tilted to my left. I thought it must have been a hole in the drive, but in fact it was the tremor which had extended from Christchurch city centre to the doorstep 30 miles away. It was only later we realised our near miss and thanked God. However our thoughts were then with the ones who didn’t survive in Christchurch’s business district and are still with the survivors who are finding it tough to this day. Then, on our return to Glasgow, the Japanese earthquake happened – horrendous - and I gather the tsunami had also hit the beach in Honolulu. I’d been there only six weeks before doing a Burns show for the Caledonian Club, when everything had seemed so normal, sunny and exciting. 

Now we’re back in solid, stable Glasgow and I’ve already done two of my ‘Conversation’ shows, one for the Aye Write book festival, which was more an improvised stage memoir and the other for the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, soon to be called the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. The show was a more academic version of ‘Greasepaint Monkey’ to celebrate Sixty Years of the College, dating from my time at the College of Drama, as it was called in 1950. Performing in the Chandler Theatre, named for my very first director, Colin Chandler, I had the eerie feeling of having been there before. It was heartening to receive the welcome I did and to know that sixty years of professional work has not been wasted.

Now that I have found my land legs again, I can get back to writing my Celtic book and painting my Burns canvasses.