Wild Rose - Royal Lyceum Edinburgh

There were all sorts of reasons not to see this production of Wild Rose. I initially got it confused with White Rose, a completely different musical with a completely different subject matter. I had other shows in London to see. I don’t care for country music – one of my favourite observations about it has to be the one about a country song played backwards. The singer gets (in no particular order) his house back, his wife back, his car back, and everything else. It’s yet another stage adaptation of yet another motion picture. Set largely in Glasgow, would I understand what the characters were goin’ onn aboot?

Wild Rose at Royal Lyceum Edinburgh. Photo credit: Mihaela Bodlovic

Curiosity got the better of me in the end, and with a four-day weekend and the final performance of Wild Rose’s world premiere theatre run looming, I ran out of excuses and got on the damn LNER train from Kings Cross to Waverley. The East Coast Main Line behaved itself – there had, in the days running up to my overnight trip, all sorts of issues on that line, including signal failures, track failures and a lineside fire. But there was no Delay Repay for me. Railway competency has a price.

It's always good to see Edinburgh outside of Fringe season, even if dwelling times at pedestrian crossings were a bit longer because the city wasn’t gridlocked and there wasn’t the sheer weight of fellow people on foot to carry you through regardless of what the traffic lights were doing. The best bit about Edinburgh when it’s in ‘normal’ mode is that bars and restaurants have a seat for you. Even on a Saturday night. (It’s actually better than London: there are places you can go, as I did, after seeing a show. London’s West End has the Hippodrome Casino and that’s about it.)

As for comprehending what people were saying, I fared better than a fellow theatregoer, who felt she could only properly understand Susannah (Janet Kumah) on account of that character’s middle-class English accent. This is, in the end, a Scottish show for a Scottish audience, and there were, to be fair, words and phrases that went over my head. I have a feeling the production team will deal with that if the show were to have another life somewhere outside Scotland. The theatre industry in the UK is very London-centric, but I accept there is the possibility of taking this show on tour – and might do very well on the road.

Wild Rose at Royal Lyceum Edinburgh. Photo credit: Mihaela Bodlovic

There are country-esque songs in here – and it is always simply ‘country’, and not ‘country and western’, although quite why Rose-Lynn (Dawn Sievewright) immediately hurls expletives at anyone who describes her style as ‘country and western’ was never made clear. Steven Hoggett and Vicki Manderson’s choreography also went beyond the boundaries of ‘country’ – some of the larger ensemble scenes featured what looked to me like line dancing, which isn’t solely associated with country (take, for instance, the film Saturday Night Fever, or the Spanish pop song ‘Macarena’).

I must reel myself in – in the end, my knowledge of country music is even more miniscule than my knowledge of British chart music. How ‘country’ even was this show? The guitar riffs from the on-stage band came across to me as being more like ‘prog rock’ than anything else, and there were more banjos in the 2016 Chichester Festival Theatre production of British musical Half A Sixpence than there were here. The narrative, it felt, had to repeatedly force an emphasis on country, by focusing on Rose-Lynn’s ambition to make it big in Nashville, which even included a visit to see Bob Harris, who still fronts a BBC Radio 2 country music show, and to Nashville itself. Quite who provides her the funds to do so, and how, and indeed why, wasn’t very convincing to me.

This was not, then, two and a half hours of country music, with sad songs about alcohol addictions, relationship breakups, relationship breakups as a result of alcohol addictions, and miscellaneous other adversities and adversaries. Rose-Lynn had had thrown heroin over the perimeter fence of a prison in Stirling, which led to her spending a year within the walls of that very institution, which in turn meant her two children, Wynonna (a role shared between Ayla Sherriff, Jessie-Lou Harvie and Lily Ferguson) and Lyle (a role shared between Calum Middleton, Leo Stephen and Alfie Campbell) had to stay with their grandmother Marion (Blythe Duff). I had no idea whether she was the maternal or paternal grandmother. Perhaps Wild Rose’s creator Nicole Taylor doesn’t think it’s important.

It’s always a good thing when pretty much the entire last night audience remains standing (having given the show a curtain call ovation) to hear the whole of the playout music. I also note from the show’s programme that this is the last show of David Greig’s eight-year tenure as artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, and it’s a glorious, beautiful swansong. I quite liked the stagecraft, too, with backdrops of various places sliding up, down or across a stage-wide canvass. The child actors and the vast majority of the 14-strong adult cast have opportunities to demonstrate their singing voices – and there wasn’t anyone on that stage that shouldn’t have been there.

A combination of upbeat tunes (without a ‘yee-haw’ to be heard, ever) and more poignant songs provided a broad mix of musical numbers to enjoy. It was interesting (at least to me) that ‘Peace in This House’ in Act One and ‘Top of the World’ in Act Two, both stand-and-deliver songs – or, in the case of ‘Peace’, sit-and-deliver – received the most sustained applause from the audience, for all the flashing lights, bright costumes and sparkling choreography of the dancefloor songs. An engaging and passionate adaptation, which stays faithful to the motion picture, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by Rose-Lynn’s journey.

Go on, theatre gods. Bring the show to London.

Four stars