Magic Island Storytelling Theatre: Strange Tales From The Isle Of Arran: Ghost & fairy tales & more.

After the mysterious disappearance of Tam's wife, Kate, the scene is set for a charged confrontation between Tam and Morag Soutar, after which things may never again be the same at the old ruined, witch-haunted kirk, in this fourth (and penultimate) chapter of my radically reimagined version of Robert Burns's classic Ballad Of Tam O'Shanter, as recently performed on stage here on the Isle of Arran - next best thing, I hope, to actually seeing me live.

So... Tam's passion has got the better of him and he is now involved in a potentially dangerous relationship with Morag Soutar, meeting her night after night in the ruins of the old kirk. Just so long as his wife Kate never gets to hear what he has been up to....

Here's the third part of this recording of my recent live show here on Arran,

Here's the second part of this recording of the live show which I performed a couple of weeks ago here on Arran,a show which reinvents the classic ballad of Tam O'Shanter by Robert Burns as a very contemporary psychological thriller. Property developer Tam has just taken ownership of an old ruined church with a sinister history, intending to demolish it to make way for a huge out-of-town 'retail development'. But before that can happen, Tam first has to settle accounts with the mysterious young woman who almost killed him the night before....

Just a week or so ago, I performed my show THE PASSION OF TAM SHANTER here at Whiting Bay on the Isle of Arran. Like most of my live shows, this was not scripted - though it was rehearsed so intensively that I always had a clear idea of where I was going next with the words and narrative: in that sense it wasn't purely improvisational, unlike several of the folk tale performances I do here on the podcast, eg Wild Katy & The Living Dead or The Murderer's Hand etc. etc. The only catch with such an intricate, but also text-free, show is that if I decide months later that I want to do another live performance, I have a job in hand reminding myself of all the intricacies of a story every bit as complex as one of my scripted audio dramas for Audible or the BBC: there's no script to consult!
So I thought I'd perform the whole thing one more time for the microphone, to serve as a kind of aide memoire for rehearsals of the next theatrical performance, whenever that should happen. And then, of course, having done all this, I thought that recording a decent enough bit of storytelling to go here on the podcast for those who might never get the chance to see me performing live.
So here it is, in the five 'acts' that befit a tragic drama. The story, obviously, is my very modern version of the classic ballad of Tam O'Shanter by Robert Burns. But whereas the original is distinctly, tongue in cheek, Burns as a man of the 18th century enlightenment making fun of supersitions surrounding wirchcraft, even as he derives narrative excitement from them, my version is a much more serious contemporary psychological horror story, more in keeping with the folk tale versions of this material which preceded that of Burns.
Likewise, while Burns's protagonist is very much the cliche of Scotsman as drunken Jack-the-Lad, I - like many modern Scots - am a little weary of that stereotype, so my Tam is drunk on power and ambition rather than whisky. At the same time, his cavalier attitude to the women in his life may at times echo the behaviour of Burns himself. But I want the story to be taken on its own terms, as a powerful modern thriller. Here's the start of it....

Final part of this very Scottish version of a Slavic folktale. Our heroine Ellie has contended with Grampa Guzzler, wild wolves, midges, dead men's clothes, a counter-clockwise haggis and now, with the help of her friend Ian Skelly, the skull upon a pole, seems set for a happy ending. But hold on, there's a whole stretch of wild wood yet to get through... and all the dangers there present!