Letters to Morrissey, Edinburgh Festival review: A funny and touching piece

It’s 1997, you’re 11, living in small-town Scotland and you feel “other”; a lad who desperately wants to fit in, but who is careful not to do anything that brings attention to yourself in this hopeless place. Then one day you see Morrissey on television singing: “I am human and I need to be loved.”

That’s the rather bleak-sounding starting point for this funny and touching piece written and performed by Gary McNair, crisply directed by Gareth Nicholls, on a stage strewn with Morrissey LPs, the childhood bedroom that’s a shrine to the singer.

It’s about the slew of letters the young McNair wrote to Morrissey, seeking answers to his problems. When the singer doesn’t reply to his first few missives, an exasperated McNair writes: “Don’t make me ask Bono!”

McNair tells Morrissey about his friendships with Tony, who once gave him a Blue Peter badge but at whose house he’s no longer welcome, and “Jan the lesbian” (as she insists on being called), and his indiscreet school counsellor, whom he lives in fear of outing him as a bedwetter — it being marginally less embarrassing to be thought a straightforward “nutter” as boys wait to be called into his office.

McNair neatly evokes the hero worship that pop stars attract and why this gender-fluid(before the term was coined) beautiful young man singing of heartbreak and angst was so alluring. He was all things to all people, says the adult McNair, a blank canvas on which to draw our own stories.

The story climaxes as Jan the lesbian takes the teenage McNair to Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom to see their idol perform and, while all the strands aren’t fully tied up, it’s an engaging hour.

Until Aug 27, Traverse (edfringe.com)