Alan Cumming to play Robert Burns in solo dance-theatre show

Alan Cumming will play Scotland’s national bard Robert Burns this summer in a solo show that will delve beyond “the traditional biscuit tin image” of the great poet.

Burn, a dance-theatre production, was announced on Tuesday amid preparations for the evening’s traditional Burns suppers celebrating the poet’s birthday. It will be staged as part of the 75th Edinburgh international festival (EIF) in August.

Burns, an 18th-century tenant farmer who became an excise collector, wrote passionately about his country in vivid poems and songs including Tam o’ Shanter, Auld Lang Syne and Address to a Haggis, which is recited at commemorative Burns suppers. His work “tells us the absolute truth of who we are as Scots” said Cumming. “But the more I researched him, the more I realised I didn’t know the absolute truth of him.”

With Burn, Cumming aims to tell the poet’s story “using my whole body” and he said: “If I have one regret in my artistic life it would be that I did not become a dancer.” The actor will collaborate on the show with the choreographer Steven Hoggett whose productions include Black Watch and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Burn is co-produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, the Joyce theater in New York and EIF, which said the show explores his personal struggles and spectacular successes.

Cumming is no stranger to Edinburgh’s annual arts jamboree. He was a roof-raising Dionysus in the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of The Bacchae at the 2007 festival and had a cabaret residency, Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs!, in 2016. Towards the end of last year’s festival – which was dramatically scaled down because of Covid – he presented a show called Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age.

Burn was announced alongside a revival of Liz Lochhead’s contemporary Scots-language adaptation of Euripides’ Medea, which will be directed at EIF by Michael Boyd and will star the actor and playwright Adura Onashile whose play Expensive Shit was staged at 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 but was postponed due to the pandemic. Further programming for this year’s EIF, which runs 5-29 August, will be announced in spring.