Burnscripts E-Book

John Cairney

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 454

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

This publication is actor John Cairney's life with Robert Burns in theatrical terms. Since 1959, he has been involved with Burns as actor, director and writer. Over the years, Cairney has taken the opportunity to investigate different aspects of Burns as they relate to performance in the theatre. For the first time he has brought all these working playscripts, which have already been tested before a live audience, together in book form. Others interested in the prismatic attraction that is Scotland's Bard can now see how one Scottish actor-writer has dealt with a national icon theatrically. The scripts, written by Cairney, look at Burns' creative work, his everyday life, and his relationships, to build a full picture of the man so important to Scotland's cultural heritage. The plays are followed by an appendix which features a selection of plays written about Burns' life since his death at the age of 37.BACK COVER The overall impression gained in studying Burns' work as a whole is that, given the brevity of his life, it is extraordinary not that he wrote so much, but that so much of it was good. JOHN CAIRNEY Burnscripts is a collection of dramatic scripts by John Cairney interpreting the life and works of Robert Burns.Cairney, as actor, author and scriptwriter, has been connected professionally with Robert Burns for nearly half a century. He has performed as Burns all over the world and consequently knows him better than most. This personal exploration of Burns' life and work in performance helps to build a fuller picture of the poet and is an insightful celebration of one of Scotland's most important cultural icons.

Leseprobe

JOHN CAIRNEY is well known to audiences in Scotland and internationally through his one-man shows about Burns. Indeed, in many minds he is synonymous with the Bard and is considered as one of the leading interpreters of the works of Robert Burns.

In more than 50 years as an artist, he has worked as an actor, recitalist, lecturer, director and theatre consultant. He is also a published author and an exhibited painter. Trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, he was a notable Hamlet at the Citizens Theatre and a successful Macbeth at the Edinburgh Festival. He was also This Man Craig on television and has appeared in many films like Jason and the Argonauts and Cleopatra.

He gained a PhD from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and is much in demand as a lecturer, writer and consultant on Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Robert Burns. Dr Cairney has written books on each of these famous Scots, as well as other books on football, theatre and his native Glasgow, where he lives with his New Zealand wife, actress and scriptwriter, Alannah O’Sullivan.

First published 2011

ISBN: 978-1-909912-76-2

The publisher acknowledges subsidy from

towards the publication of this book

Typeset in 11pt and 10pt Sabon by 3btype.com

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

© John Cairney

For a copy of the musical score for Red, Red Rose, apply to www.johncairney.com

No amateur or professional performance may be given of this original work, or excerpts quoted in any retrieval system, permanent or temporary, or photocopied for other than for private use, unless permission is first received in writing from the copyright-holder or his accredited representatives. To license, apply to www.johncairney.com.

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Burns and the Stage

How Playing Robert Burns Began

The Robert Burns Story (Solo Play)

Red, Red Rose (Stage Musical)

Burnsang (Reading)

The Lingering Star (Reading)

The Clarinda Correspondence (Reading)

As Others Saw Him (Reading)

The Boyhood of Burns (Short plays for school children)

The Lesson

The Vision

Playtime

Halloween

Sabbath Day

The Songsmith

The Wordsmith

There Was A Man

Song (To the tune of ‘The Star o’ Robbie Burns’)

APPENDIX A

Dramatic Adaptations of Burns

Burns-related Writing by John Cairney

APPENDIX B

John Cairney – The Man Who Played Robert Burns

Preface

THIS IS A PLAYBOOK. It is a compilation of scripts performed in the theatre, laid out for reference and performance. By definition, dramaturgy is not literature. Plays for the theatre are guides to performance and intended entirely for the pleasure of an audience. All elements in these pages relate to the life and work of Robert Burns and have been presented as such before an audience. They are theatrically defined as ‘scripts’, hence the title Burnscripts.

Burns himself had always hoped he might write a play, but he never did. However, others have done so. This is my contribution to the Burns dramatic canon.

Introduction

BURNS AND THE STAGE

by

John Cairney

A lecture delivered at Glasgow University, 2009, on the occasion of the Burns Conference commemorating the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns’ birth.

Introduction

Burns and the Stage

IN 1789, Burns wrote to Lady Cunningham:

I have some thoughts of the Drama... a Scottish audience would be better pleased with the Affectation, Whim and Folly of their own native growth, than by the manners which, to by far the greatest of them, can only be second-hand… if, after a preparatory course of some year’s study… I should find myself unequal to the task, there is no great harm done…

Three months later, to Peter Hill, the bookseller, in Edinburgh,

I want... as you can pick them up, second-handed or any way, cheap copies of Otway’s Dramatic Works, Ben Jonson’s, ditto Dryden’s, Congreve’s, Wycherley’s, Vanbrugh’s, Cibber’s, or any dramatic works of the more Moderns – Macklin, Garrick, Foote, Colman or Sheridan. A good copy too, of Molière in French I much want – tho’ I should wish Racine, Corneille, & Voltaire too…

This is a formidable list by any standards but the art of the drama isn’t learned by reading about it. It is a ‘doing craft’, a practical business arrived at by trial and error for the most part, and even then, there is no guarantee that it will work until it is performed before an audience.

It must be borne in mind that the boy Burns had come to plays originally as literature, in pieces to be read, if not seen, as in Masson’s Collection of Prose and Verse from the Best English Authors. Here he read excerpts from plays, mainly Shakespeare, and was enthralled. The Stratford Bard was rich feeding for an isolated, book-minded country boy, and led to his life-long love of Shakespeare. Although, Burns’ first experience of a Shakespeare play was not happy.

John Murdoch, the young schoolmaster hired by William Burnes to teach his two sons in the rudiments of grammar and punctuation, brought a copy of Titus Andronicus to read aloud to the Burns boys. The plot so incensed the seven-year-old Robert that he snatched the book from Murdoch’s hand and threw it in the fire. Mr Burnes quickly plucked it out of the flames and restored it to Murdoch who just as quickly brought out The School for Lovers by the deservedly forgotten William Whitehead, and no doubt our young critic was appeased.

When Murdoch became a master at Ayr Academy, the 14-year old Burns walked into Ayr for a term’s lessons in French and English Language. It was not for long but it gave Burns his first glimpse of boys of his own age who were not from his peasant class – and this small playground collision gave him his first chip on the shoulder. He wrote:

I formed many connections with many youngkers who possessed superior advantages… youngling actors busy with rehearsal of parts in which they were shortly to appear on the stage (of life), where, alas, I was destined to drudge behind the scenes.

His use of stage metaphor here could not be more pertinent. If he hadn’t yet been drawn to write a play, he certainly was to acting a part. Even on the limited stage offered him in Ayrshire, he showed from the beginning all the signs that he was a ‘natural’, as we say in the theatre. As the late David Daiches once told me, ‘The man was a role-player, there was no doubt of that,’ and I tended to believe what Professor Daiches told me.

The budding performer was already evident in the youthful Burns. Indeed, considering his father’s constant struggles with money, Robert, at 16, with his tied hair, buckled shoes and saffron plaid, was already something of a dandy. He even attended dancing classes at Dalrymple in defiance of his father. It was as if the farmer’s son was preparing himself for another kind of future other than the agricultural.

He was constantly on the look-out for a platform. He acted as gobetween on behalf of friends in their pubertal amours, playing their part, like a Mauchline Cyrano de Bergerac, with great style and effect. He founded the Bachelors’ Club at Tarbolton so that he could practice his speaking skills in debate with his peers. He clearly had an inner agenda that had little to do with remaining a ploughboy. Girls were particularly impressed, although he warned them,

Beware a tongue that’s smoothly hung,

A heart that warmly seems to feel.

That feeling heart but acts a part

’Tis rakish art in Rab Mossgiel.

He knew from the beginning he was different from his fellows but was uncertain as to who he was supposed to be, which is why he tried to write his way into an appropriate identity. If the writer was in the boy, the actor was in the man, but he had yet to find the right part to suit his emerging talents. It can now be seen that his early manhood was a studied, self-imposed rehearsal for a living dialogue that was to come, whatever that was to be. All he knew was that it would not be on the land. He always felt he had been miscast there. Forever at odds with his own background, the beginnings of the radical were already showing. Yet he never gave way to any impropriety or overt nonconformity until after his father died in 1784. Significantly, the very next year, 1785, was his annus mirabilis.

Coinciding with the family’s move to Mossgiel Farm, the poet in him sprang into life at almost the same time as the birth of his first illegitimate child, and not long after, he met the real love of his life and future wife Jean Armour at a penny-fee dance. Burns played all three parts – poet, parent and suitor – with aplomb even adding an encore as a justified sinner taking his rebuke for his bastard wean on the cutty stool. Complication piled upon complication thereabouts but, ironically, even as his private affairs disintegrated around him, his Poetic Muse soared. He ought to have flown with it but was forced to attend more prosaic concerns at ground level. He willingly turned the farm over to his brother, Gilbert, but was forced to give up Jean, for a time, to a weaver in Paisley.

Depressed and rejected, Burns decided to get out of Mauchline, out of Ayrshire, out of Scotland, out of his whole unhappy personal dilemma, caught as he was, between barren fields and fertile women. At the time, an outlandish plan was put to him to emigrate to the West Indies to become, as he said, ‘a poor negro-driver’ in Jamaica. This was improbable casting by any standards. It wasn’t Burns at all. The scheme wasn’t his idea, but that of a Mauchline friend whose Douglas family had an estate there. Burns didn’t really care where he went or what he did, he just wanted out of the place and out of himself. Then,

Farewell Scotland, I shall never see you more.

To raise money for the sea passage, he arranged to publish some of his poems by subscription and thanks to Masonic friends, this was done at Kilmarnock, his Poems in the Scottish Dialect being published there by John Wilson on 31 July 1786. 612 copies sold out in weeks and put ‘near on twenty pounds’ in his pocket. A second edition was called for immediately but Wilson was busy on a hymn book and couldn’t do it, so Burns packed his trunk for the Atlantic voyage. He must have been just a little bit excited. For any young man, this was a whole new script.

Then, quite unexpectedly, a letter arrived at Mossgiel from a Dr Blacklock in Edinburgh, who suggested Burns should try for a second edition there. Edinburgh? As foreign to him as Jamaica. Why not? He had little to lose, so Burns cancelled his passage and, with the character now of poet in ‘guid black print’, he headed for the capital.

In his Kilmarnock Edition, Burns had cast himself somewhat over-modestly as an unlettered ploughboy. Everything about him palpably contradicted such an image. Edinburgh had expected him to speak in the dialect of his poetry but he upstaged them completely by speaking better English than they. He looked like the actor he was, and his vocabulary was that of a don rather than an obscure rural rhymer. This peasant was seemingly at home in any kind of social situation and what was more telling, his conversation was brilliant at all times. In short, he was a sensation.

I am in a fair way to becoming as eminent as Thomas a Kempis and John Bunyan and having my name in all the almanacs along with Black Monday and the Battle of Bothwell Brig.

What society didn’t realise was that he was acting his head off while getting used to walking across a carpet for the first time. Thanks to my Lord Glencairn, he got his second edition and this was put in hand by Creech, the publisher. Once his proofs were checked Burns had nothing to do but enjoy being famous. Something he had always wanted. Between appearances at the supper tables, he worked with James Johnston on Scotch songs but there seemed to be no place for plays in all this ‘performance’ so he gave himself over to charming the ladies at their afternoon teas and entertaining their men folk in the evenings with another side of himself. His love of the congenial hour earned him the label ‘drunkard’ despite the fact that his capacity was less than half of the five-bottle a night men he consorted with. He hadn’t the stomach for strong drink. His boyhood saw to that. The drunk was not one of his favourite roles and violent mood-swings were often the result.

However, Burns, the sober salon entertainer was well-received. Obviously, all those hours of youthful rehearsal had paid off. The highborn ladies, and those who pretended to be, loved his company because he was a novelty. He also looked well, spoke well and had wit. Their men-folk distrusted him for the same reasons. All through his Edinburgh time, at least as far as the ladies were concerned, he was subtly kept at a white arm’s distance. There was no such inhibition about the serving girls, however, and his earthier appetites were amply catered for at a lower level. For this natural recourse on only two or three occasions in his two years in Edinburgh, he was branded a rake, even in his lifetime. It was a role he played instinctively, or off the cuff, as actors say. He was held to be ‘good in the part’.

Burns saw through all this temporary dazzle, for he knew it would soon pass. But he knew, too, that to get his book sold he had, literally, to pay lip service to the gentry’s every whim. But he loved the show and the talk. Good talk was second-nature to him. He networked at every level, even as he told himself he was no more than the performing pig in the Grassmarket. Once his second edition was out, and he had his money from Creech, he could get back to being his own man.

In a sense, he was only ‘acting out’ what he had already written. The rhymer was already the actor. His willingness to read his poems to anyone who would listen was proof of this. From the almost-asleep Gilbert in the Mossgiel attic ten years before, to 14-year-old Nelly Kilpatrick in the harvest field for whom he wrote his first song, to the labourers clustered in the barn to hear him on a wet day, his local audience was as found. As his name grew, so, too, did his appearances before his fellow-craft at surrounding Masonic lodges, county folk at the inns, and the aristocracy in their castle withdrawing rooms. All were part of the Burnsian journey to national fame.

He had all the panache of the performer and, after Edinburgh, he toured the country like a stage idol. He was accepted at every level because his work lent itself easily to performance. The best lines almost demanded to be spoken aloud. The actor in him made look easy what the poet worked hard to perfect. It is clear that he was well aware of his histrionic instincts. These would have been an indispensable element in his potential metamorphosis to dramatist but he didn’t know that in the early years of his celebrity. He had no model to work on.

As his father’s principle labourer until he was 25, Burns had little chance of seeing live theatre. The nearest centre for the main touring companies was Glasgow and that was beyond his means. Like everything else, any knowledge he had of theatre came to him from his reading. He never saw a play until he went to Edinburgh and even if he had been able to get to Glasgow he would only have seen the stilted, fustian dramas in the grand style of the day like ‘Douglas’ or ‘Cato’.

As it was, exactly the right man was waiting for him in Edinburgh. William Woods was an English actor dubbed ‘The Scottish Roscius’ by local playgoers. He had previously befriended Robert Fergusson, the young poet whose verses in the vernacular had so influenced Burns. Woods had given Fergusson a free pass to the Theatre Royal. He now did the same for Burns, hoping a play might come out of it, but all that resulted was a wrenched knee for Burns when he fell out of a coach after an after-theatre spree with Woods and some of the actors. Burns had to rest his leg for weeks and he spent the time in his room in Smith Square with his damaged leg on a stool reading the Bible from cover to cover and writing a series of ‘stagey’ love letters to a Mrs Agnes McLehose.

Not all the theatre influences on him were theatrical. There were others, just as keen to see his work ‘on the boards’. During 1787, Henry Mackenzie in Edinburgh and John Ramsay of Ochtertyre tried to persuade him to think about the drama, and Ramsay even gave him the plot – about a Highlander who sheltered the Earl of Mar during the Jacobite Rising and was rewarded with exile, but Burns wasn’t interested. Ramsay was disappointed, since he had only wanted to see ‘the flashes of intellectual brilliance… sparks of celestial fire,’ that Burns had shown at the dinner table, made available to a bigger audience than dinner guests. Although he did say that Burns sometimes ‘didn’t know when to play off and when to play on.’ Who does round a dinner table? Ramsay believed such obvious talent should be employed in something ‘of the pastoral kind’ for the theatre. Burns still didn’t respond. He had other notions of the pastoral life.

Yet something must have got home to him. Even in the middle of all his later Ellisland and Excise preoccupations, the play idea was still niggling at him, as can be seen in his letter to his Excise mentor, Graham of Fintry in 1788. It was the first hint that the stage seed still held.

I am thinking of something, in the rural way, of the Drama-kind – Originality of character is, I think, the most striking beauty in that Species of Composition, and my wanderings in the way of my business would be vastly favourable to my picking up original traits of Human nature.

In his first Commonplace Book of 1783 he had told us he was going to write poems and songs, and he did, after a rigorous self-training based on his omnivorous boyhood reading. Now he was telling the world that he wanted to write a play and seemed just as determined to do so. He wanted to write about what he knew best – ordinary people in ordinary situations. There were no Gods here, no supernatural images, no classical allusions, just plain folk going about their business in its day-to-day-complication with all its hidden conflict. In terms of the classically-based, artificially-styled theatre of his day, it was very forward thinking indeed. It would certainly have broken new ground.

There is no doubt in my mind he could have done it. The impulse that inspires the poet is also that which provokes the playwright. The flowering may differ but it’s the same stem, the final result is from a common root. To read Burns in his best work is to imagine that you can hear his ‘voice’ in every syllable. ‘The Holy Fair’ is a pantomime of character effect, managed skillfully over 27 stanzas. He was writing about what he knew and catching it on the wing,

Here, some are thinkin’ on their sins,

An’ some upo’ their claes;

Ane curses feet that fyl’d his shins,

Anither sighs an’ prays:

On this hand sits a Chosen swatch,

Wi’ screw’d-up, grace-proud, faces;

On that, a set o’ chaps, at watch,

Thrang winkan on the lassies

To chairs that day.

The great set pieces, like ‘The Twa Dogs’ and ‘Death’ and ‘Dr Hornbook’ are incisive duologues, lifting the exchanges into social and philosophical comment. ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ on the other hand, is searing satire set in a monologue that reveals the character fully but pins hypocrisy to the page.

Lord, hear my earnest cry and prayer

Against yon presbytery of Ayr,

Thy strong right hand, Lord, make it bear

Upon their heids!

Lord, visit them, and dinna spare

For their misdeeds!...

But Lord, remember me and mine

Wi’ mercies temporal and divine!

That I for grace and gear may shine,

Excell’d by nane!

And a’ the glory shall be thine!

Amen! Amen!

‘The Jolly Beggars’ or ‘Love and Liberty – a Cantata’ as he called it, is one of Burns’ largest efforts, and a product of his Mauchline years. It is almost a play. Characters spill over each other in happy abandon and only a little more work on structure and continuity would have made it a Scottish cousin to John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera of more than 50 years before. Unfortunately, Burns’ work was ‘mislaid’, shall we say, through most of his life as being thought highly improper, so he never had the opportunity. He almost forgot all about it, but ‘The Jolly Beggars’ was further evidence that even as early as 1785 the nascent playwright was at work in the poet. The dramatist was only waiting for his cue. It was the inevitable next step.

What might have been his ‘drama years’, from 1790 to 1796, were almost entirely given over to songs, with the exception of that glorious sunburst of creativity called ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ in the late autumn of 1790. This epic narrative which Burns himself thought ‘the best of my productions’ is virtually a modern screen play. It has all the elements of drama: a vigorous eponymous hero, an antagonist as the personification of evil, the Devil himself, a chorus of colourful corpses and the mandatory chase featuring a pretty young girl in a short dress. From its fireside start to its almost comic end, the piece drives the reader along with it so that the action ends in what can only be described as exhilaration. This work is a triumph of dynamic verse and deserves the widest of screens and the most extraordinary technical effects to do it justice.

‘But here my Muse her wing maun cour;

Sic flights are far beyond her pow’r...

Suffice to say, it was a smash, in every sense. It is interesting to note that almost a hundred years later it was performed at Drury Lane as a two-hander with Mr Farren and Mr Bartley with music by Mr Cooke.

In just 13 years of writing, a torrent, a veritable Niagara of words had poured from Burns – in poems, odes, epistles, song lyrics and letters, so many letters. There was hardly a day when he didn’t write something. When he didn’t it was only because he couldn’t. But in all of this extraordinary output, not one line of stage dialogue.

Burns was gradually dwindling down, becoming more and more removed from his vibrant, creative self. His volatile temperament was at its nadir, his body paying dearly for his boyhood, when he ‘fell in at the door, too tired to eat, too hungry to be refreshed by slumber.’ Now, in 1790, at the age of only 31, he was Ill the whole winter. An incessant headache, depression of spirits, and all the truly miserable consequences of a deranged nervous system.

Ellisland Farm was by now to him ‘nothing but the riddlings of creation’ and riding 200 miles a week around ten parishes on Excise matters ate up what little time he had left, but ‘I have not by any means given up on my Muses,’ he insisted. Yet everything in his life up to this time had pointed to some kind of dramatic fruition. Everything he had done to date could now be seen as a veritable pageant of innate theatricality. Unfortunately, the timing was wrong, and in the theatre, timing is everything.

Stage possibilities had given way to a combination of half-hearted farming and part-time wages as a gauger with the Excise. When, two years later, he turned his back on farming at last and moved to Dumfries, trailing a milk cow behind him, there was still a chance he might write for the stage, despite his many preoccupations like the continual making of songs, not to mention the making of children.

George Sutherland, the manager of a touring company then playing in Dumfries asked him to write a prologue for his wife’s benefit night. He was happy to oblige.

What needs the din about the town o’ Lon’on,

How this new play and that new sang is common’?

Why is outlandish stuff sae meikle courted?

Does nonsense mend like brandy when imported?

Is there nae poet, burning keen for fame

Would boldly try to gie us plays at hame?

There was. Burns himself. This Dumfries connection ought to have been his entry proper into the greasepaint trade but he was pulled too many ways on all sides and this, coupled with failing health, left him hardly strong enough to hold the goosefeather. Besides, he had to watch his step. He was suspected of being a revolutionist and, as a family man, this was perilous. He had to be discreet. Once again the theatre chance was lost. What a shame. The drama of the age screamed for a play. The tumbrels in Paris, rebellion in the Americas, Scotland’s second place to London, bread riots in Dumfries. All this was happening all around the muted Burns and he could do nothing.

In his heyday he had made many friends but now he was at the mercy of many more highly-placed, influential enemies. His biggest foe had always been his own ever-ready tongue, but he could never resist the quip, however incendiary, and this had led to many well-worded apologies on his part. His voice had always been his most telling instrument yet now he had it turned against him. Powerful men saw that the poet Burns had made his mark with the people. This could be a threat to public order. He might be a rallying point for subversive forces. He had to be watched. It was known that Burns admired Thomas Muir, who had recently been dragged through the streets in chains. His closest friends, like Dr Maxwell, sympathised with the French revolutionists. He had proposed a toast in honour of George Washington – ‘May our success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause.’ He just avoided a duel afterwards. It was also known he had a copy of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man in his possession. No wonder he was suspected of political disaffection. These were difficult times for a thinking man.

He wasn’t helped by a further lapse in his health. As he confessed to Maria Riddell, an Englishwoman and a real friend,

Here I sit altogether Novemberish, a damned mélange of fretfulness and melancholy; not enough of one to rouse me to passion; nor of the other to rouse me to torpor my soul flouncing and fluttering around her tenement like a wild finch caught amid the horrors of winter and newly thrust into a cage...

It was no more than appropriate that the last public act of his life should take place in a theatre. One December night in 1793, he sat in the pit of the Theatre Royal, after the play, when a disturbance broke out at the singing of the National Anthem. ‘Ça Ira’ rang out and riot raged all about him. All stood except Burns. He sat impassively in the centre of the mêlée with his hat on and his arms folded, as Loyalist jostled with Reformer around him and both sides called for him.

‘Take off your hat, Burns, for the King!’

‘Poet Burns. Speak for us, for the people!’

Burns was silent. ‘I have set, henceforth, a seal on my lips, as to these unlucky politics,’ he said later. As it was he almost lost his job but a well-worded apology in the right ear, saved the day. Nevertheless, he was on a knife edge. And he was failing fast.

In 1795, a frail Burns sat at the Brow Well, and, very weak, made his way home in a cart. He took to his bed, his copy of Shakespeare opened at his bedside table, and fretted his way to dying, misunderstood by many, underrated by most, underused and underpaid. Left to wither away his giant talent by an apathetic Dumfries and a Scotland that couldn’t wait for him to die so that she might properly honour him. Alive, he was dangerous, you see.

When nature, her great masterpiece designed

And framed her last, best work, the human mind,

Her eye, intent on all the wondrous plan,

She framed, of various parts, the various man.

That was Robert Burns. For nearly seven years he had nursed in one part of his mind the idea of writing a play for Scotland. That he never did was not only theatre’s loss, it was ours too.

How Playing Robert Burns Began

IT ALL BEGAN properly for me with Tom Wright’s There Was A Man, a one-man show on the poet, directed by Gerard Slevin and presented at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, on Monday 25 January 1965. This opening was not only a pivotal moment in my professional life, but it effectively changed the whole course of my theatrical career and, consequently, the rest of my life.

In a sense, I have been playing Burns, talking Burns, remembering Burns, opinionating on Burns, quoting Burns and writing about Burns ever since. In short I have been severely ‘burnsed’ and show little sign, at the time of writing, of ever completely recovering. Not that I have any real complaints. My continuing identity with Scotland’s poet is simply a fact of my professional life and I have to accept it. If he has totally altered my conventional career, he has given me a life full of interest, travel and excitement and I am grateful for this.

I have learned much from living with a genius for so long and recognise that he is still relevant and apposite even in our present, hurried age. I feel honoured to have served him wholeheartedly as an actor and writer with a zeal and enthusiasm which has not diminished at all since that fateful Monday night in Edinburgh.

I then went on to write my own two-hour one-man show entitled The Robert Burns Story. This was the costumed vehicle that carried me around the world until its final performance in Norfolk, Virginia, USA, in 1981. I then developed an hour-long version A Burns Experience for the international touring circuit. For this, I exchanged the cravat for a bowtie, the 18th-century coat for a dinner jacket and ‘He’ took over from ‘I’. This format has been performed in every kind of situation which can accommodate an audience, and it is this show which plays to this day.

The

ROBERT BURNS STORY

by

John Cairney

A Two-Hour Solo Play based on the Life and Work

of

Scotland’s National Bard

Performing Text

taken from the manuscript

and prompt-books from tours

given by John Cairney

throughout the world

during the period 1968–1996

as revised

1979, 1986 and 1998

First performed at the Theatre Royal, Dumfries, 1968

John Cairney as Robert Burns

The Robert Burns Story

PART ONE

I have taken a whim to give you a history of myself.

ROBERT BURNS, MAUCHLINE, 1787

The setting is as found. If it’s a platform, it should contain a lectern to one side and a chair and small table at the other. If it’s full stage, a centre rostrum leads to rear with entrance between tabs. A desk or table is set SCL with chair and small drinks table to SL. A small stool sits before a table and a large stool is set USR before a pedestal hat stand on which hangs a hat and coat. If possible, steps should lead from front SC to audience. The set should be dressed with papers, books, bottles, glasses, pewter jugs, candle in holder, simulated wine in carafe and any other props or artefacts appropriate to the period, circa 1796. The candle on corner of table is lit.

As houselights fade to black, cue music in blackout.

MUSIC 1

‘Rantin’ Rovin’ Robin’ (Fiddle)

Cue light build on cyclorama at rear to reveal silhouette of actor as he stand on rear rostrum.

Build lights as follow-on as he comes forward to halt at centre. He is carrying a large book.

ACTOR:

There was a lad was born in Kyle, An’ whitna day, an’ whitna style...

He places book on table then goes to hat stand to remove cape.

I have taken a whim to give you a history of myself. My name has made a little noise in my own country, and there have been many interested themselves on my behalf. I think it time, however, I spoke for myself. I will give you an honest narrative, although it might give me some pain in the telling. For I confess, I commence on this undertaking with some twitching qualms of conscience, arising from a suspicion that I am doing what I ought not to be doing. A predicament I have been in more than once before.

He returns to book at table.

Observations, Hints, Songs, Scraps of Poetry etc, by Robert Burns. A man who has little art in making money, still less in keeping it; a man, however, of some sense, a great deal of honesty, and unbounded good-will to every creature.

MUSIC 2

‘My Hearts In The Highlands’ (Fiddle/Guitar)

The actor speaks over:

My father was a farmer upon the Carrick border

And carefully he bred me in decency and order...

My ancient, but ignoble, blood

Has crept through scoundrels since the flood.

He moves forward of table as music fades.

As a very poor man’s son, I should have been marched off to become one of the little underlings about a neighbouring farm, but it was ever my father’s dearest wish to keep us under his own eye until we could learn the difference between good and evil.

He continues move round to stand at table with book.

The cheerfu’ supper done,

Wi’ serious face, they round the ingle form a circle wide,

The sire turns o’er, wi’ patriarchal grace, the big Ha’-Bible,

Aince his father’s pride.

Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,

He wales a portion with judicious care

And – ‘Let us worship God!’

He says with solemn air.

I have met with few who understood men and their ways as did my father. He had in him, and he gave to me in some measure, that certain something, that stalk of carl-hemp in man that was to see each of us through those first, early, hard and bitter winters.

He moves forward.

Waefu’ want an’ hunger fley me, glow’rin’ at the hallen en’,

Sair I fecht them at the door, but ay I’m eerie they’ll cam ben.

As soon as I could toddle I followed at my father’s plough-tail. I could handle a flail before I could sup with a spoon. Almost before I had begun to grow, I was studying the line of a rig in a field, doing a man’s work with a wee boy’s body. As long as there was light we would labour, and when darkness fell we would fall in at the door, too tired to eat, too hungry to be refreshed by slumber. Meat became a stranger to our table and such diet had our little family that it would hardly have sustained a sparrow. This then, was the life imprisoned me as a boy.

He goes to table and picks up one of the volumes.

Small wonder I escaped as often as I could into books. Any kind of book. I ate up print from the age of seven or so with a kind of appetite only my good father could understand. We were all encouraged by him to read at every opportunity. At the table, by the fire, walking behind the cart. I went about my task with a book in my pocket and whenever the chance, it would be out and I would be reading – The Life of Hannibal, The History of Sir William Wallace – till my father’s voice brought me back to earth again. And it was poor earth at that. Would it had been as fertile as my young mind, we would have been rich indeed. That has been the curse of my life, I fear – barren soil and fertile women.

John Murdoch, a young school master, was hired by my father to teach us and some neighbour children to paraphrase, supply ellipses and substitute synonyms; as well as to school us in English speech, which my father held to be the only tongue for discourse – and dispute. I now absorbed Fisher’s English Grammar and Mr Masson’s English Collection of Poetry and Prose and whatever novel by Mr Fielding or Mr Smollett that came to hand. I lived in the world of my imagination. And through an old maid friend of my mother’s that came about the house I was introduced to that other world – the world of devils and ghosts, witches and warlocks, spunkies, elf-candles, deadlights, wraiths and apparitions. This kind of life, the cheerless gloom of a hermit, the unceasing moil of a galley slave, brought me somehow to my 15th year. Wherein I first committed the sin of – RHYME!

O, once I lov’d a bonie lass,

Ay, and I love her still,

And while that virtue warms my heart,

I’ll love my Handsome Nell!

You might know our country custom in Scotland of coupling the labourers in the harvest field – man with woman, lad with lass. It lightens the works and makes for a useful distraction in the course of a long, hot day. It was in my 15th summer, and my companion was but one summer less; bewitching in her kirtled skirts. Her name was Nelly Kilpatrick, and she had had a song made on her by a Laird’s son, which was thought to be the great thing. I knew I could write as well as any Laird’s son, if not better, and so, for that wee girl in the harvest field, I wrote my first song:

She dresses ay sae clean and neat,

Baith decent and genteel;

And yet there’s something in her gait

Gars ony dress look weel!

The words were silly, but they were mine – and I was just 15. Feeling everything a 15-year-old boy feels, all the tenderness in him, that he would hate anybody to see, all the frustrated passion in the blood, all the hopelessness of trying to put a miserable joy into words. You never feel anything in your life again as keenly, as sincerely, as totally as you feel it at 15. Feelings I have even now as I remember Nelly Kilpatrick. I didn’t know why my heart thudded so whenever I held her hand to pull out a nettle sting, or why I liked to linger with her on the way home. I know now. Thus it was, and quite unwittingly, I was initiated into that certain delicious passion I hold to be our dear treasure here below.

Her face is fair, her heart is true,

As spotless as she’s bonie-O!

The opening gowan wat wi’ dew

Nae purer is than Nanie-O!

MUSIC 3

‘Mary Morrison’ (Guitar Intro)

Actor speaks over.

I never thought to turn poet till I got heartily in love, then rhyme and song were, in a manner, the spontaneous language of my heart.

He sings as he moves forward.

O, Mary, at thy window be

It is the wish’d, the trysted hour,

Those smiles and glances let me see,

That makes the miser’s treasure poor–

He breaks off suddenly.

What’s the matter? Burns couldn’t sing either! But who cared? His words sang for him.

He speaks over verse in time with music.

O, Mary! Canst thou wreck his peace

Wha for thy sake wad gladly dee?

Or wad ye brak that heart o’ his,

Whase only faut is lovin’ thee?

If love for love thou wiltna gie,

At least, be pity to me shown;

A thocht ungentle canna be

The thocht o’ Mary Morrison.

Music fades.

Actually, her name was Begbie. You try making a rhyme out of a name like Begbie. To me, she was ‘Mary Morrison’ and lives on as such. And, as such, turned me down as a suitor, despite my letters to her in most English style – ‘Marriage is only friendship in a more exalted degree’. I laid a most persistent siege upon her battlements but I learned, under a flag of truce, that her fortress had been already taken; and by another farmer’s son half-an-inch higher than I was in the social league than I was. Although, for any young lady, give her half-an-inch...

MUSIC 4

‘Green Grow The Rashes-O’ (Fiddle Intro)

He speaks over.

But I was young yet. My heart complete tinder, forever lighted up by some Goddess or other. I was green myself, but ripe for harvesting.

He sings or speaks gaily.

There’s naught but care on ev’ry han’,

In ev’ry hour that passes-O,

Whit signifies the life o’ Man,

An ‘twere na for the lassies-O? Green grow the rashes-O!

Green grow the rashes-O!

The sweetest hours that e’er I spend

Are spent amang the lassies-O!

Music segue to:

MUSIC 4A

‘Corn Rigs’ (Fiddle)

He speaks over while he mimics rough minuet.

It was upon the Lammas night

When corn rigs are bonie.

Beneath the moon’s unclouded light,

I hied awa’ tae Annie!

The time flew by wi’ tentless heed,

Till ‘tween the late and early,

Wi’ sma’ persuasion, she agreed

Tae see me thro’ the barley!

Corn rigs an’ barley rigs

An’ corn rigs are bonie.

I’ll ne’er forget that happy night

Amang the rigs wi’ Annie!

Music pause.

And Maggie – and Betty – and Lizzie – and Jenny! But all so innocently.

We were so young.

Music resumes as he goes to table and picks up papers.

MUSIC 4B:

‘My Love She’s But A Lassie Yet!’ (Fiddle/Guitar Intro)

He sings or speaks over lightly as he goes down centre steps to audience.

O, my love she’s but a lassie yet

My love she’s but a lassie yet,

We’ll let her staun a year or twa

She’ll no’ be hauf sae saucy yet!

For we’re a’ dry wi’ drinkin’ o’it,

We’re a’ dry wi’ drinkin’ o’it.

The minister kiss’d the fiddler’s wife–

He breaks off to kiss ‘wife’ in audience.

An’ couldna preach for thinkin’ o’ it!

He moves among audience.

I lived for love and verse-making and was easily roused to both.

I began to set my rhymes down and circulate them among my friends.

And, as a consequence, became known in the neighbourhood as a maker of rhymes!

He gives paper to ‘wife’.

Kiss’d yestreen, kiss’d yestreen,

O, as I was kiss’d yestreen,

I’ll never forget while the hollin grows green,

The bonie, sweet lassie, I kiss’d yestreen!

He distributes papers among audience as he reads them out from the others in his hand.

As I cam roon by Mauchline toon,

No’ dreadin’ onybody,

My heart was caught before I thought

And by a Mauchline lady!

He moves to another.

Beware a tongue that’s smoothly hung

A heart that warmly seems to feel.

That feeling heart but acts a part,

‘Tis rakish art in Rab Mossgiel!

He invites a gentleman to read.

Lament him, Mauchline husbands a’,

He often did assist ye.

For had ye stayed whole weeks awa’,

Your wives had never miss’d ye!

He returns onstage to sit at front of table with books.

I had always an instinct to better myself. For what purpose, I was never sure, but I had walked into Ayr once a week to study French with John Murdoch and a little Latin when I was not in love. My Latin studies did not go forward. My good father had sent me to Hugh Rodger’s school at Kirkoswald to learn something of trigonometry but a charming fillette who lived next door to the schoolhouse set all my studies at a tangent and I was returned home. I won a prize for ‘Lintseed Saved in Sewing’ and got three pounds for it. I might have proved one of the new farmers had I applied myself. I might have proved anything had I applied myself.

I used the Linseed prize to go to the port of Irvine and learn something about flax-dressing but it was drab, dusty work and, lucky for me, a drunken Hogmanay fire put paid to the heckling shop and to my investment. I was left like a true poet – not worth a sixpence! It was in Irvine, however, during a walk in the Leglen Wood, that a sailor by the name of Richard Brown gave me the idea of one day putting my rhymes and verses into print. It was he too, who showed me woman as she was. That she was not the deity I had made her heretofore. But my education, in that regard at least, was only beginning. Captain Brown didn’t know the mischief he’d done me.

FX: Bell

The tolling of a funeral bell interrupts him. Stage lights dim to centre area. The actor moves to stand under centre light. He stands with head down up until the bell ceases. He then speaks quietly.

I returned home to find that my father was dying, worn out from work and tyrant factors. We waited about the house for the end to come. One white, February afternoon, with only my sister, Bel, and I in the room, he spoke for the last time. His last words were for me. Only once, had he spoken of me before, and it was to my mother when I was younger. ‘Who lives,’ he had said, ‘will know great things from that boy.’

Now, dying, he feebly raised a finger, and beckoned me to him. I bent over the face on the pillow as he whispered – ‘It’s only you I fret for’.

Then he died.

Centre light dims. He continues in the shadow.

And was carried off to where ‘the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest’.

He moves quickly to chair and right and throws himself down on it.

I ran out of the room so that my sister shouldn’t see me cry. I ran into the barn where some of the serving people were waiting, and threw myself down among the straw. After a time, one of the serving women, a sonsie, brosie lass who had not long come to us, came to me when the others had gone and comforted me in the only way she knew. She showed me in her woman’s way, the passion that was in compassion. She dried my tears with kisses and I buried my misery in her.

He rises up and returns centre.

So that, in due time, Bess Paton, for that was her name, was delivered of a daughter, the image of herself. A misbegotten child – a bastard wean – they said, but to me she was a beautiful thing. And it was this instance, gave me first entitlement to the venerable name of – Father! I was glad my own was dead. Of course my mother was determined I should marry with Bess, and I was equally determined I should not.

I did not love her, and I could not marry where there was no love. So much did I honour marriage. Bess understood. She had a soft feeling for me, my sisters said, but it wasn’t love. Not as I knew it – or thought I knew it. My mother turned from me from that time. She sent Bess off to her own family and took her – my – daughter into our own house. Stonyfaced, my mother brought me in to look on the object of my shame, the proof of my sin, but all I saw was a helpless, bonie wee thing, in all its innocence.

MUSIC 5

‘Bonie Wee Thing’ (Guitar)

He goes to stool and stands looking down at it, then recites over music:

Welcome, my bonie, sweet, wee dochter

Tho’ ye cam here a wee, unsocht-for,

And tho’ your comin’ I hae focht for,

Baith kirk and queir,

Yet, by my faith, you’re no’ unsochtfor,

That I shall sweir.

He kneels.

Tho’ they ca’ me fornicator,

An’ tease my name wi’ kintra claitter,

The mair they talk, I ‘m kenn’d the better,

E’en let them clash.

An auld wife’s tongue’s a feckless maitter

Tae gie ane fash,

He picks up stool.

But if thou be whit I wad hae thee,

An’ tak the coonsel I wad gie thee,

I’ll ne’er rue my trouble wi’ ye,

The cost nor shame o’ it,

But be a loving father tae ye

An’ BRAG the name o’ it!

Music fades as he replaces stool upstage and returns centre.

And so it was that Bess Paton gave up to me her love-child. I gave her her mother’s name and handed her over to my own mother and sisters to bring up as one of our own. The which they did, so that I was able to take care of my dear-bought Bess until her own wedding day. Thus the sad affair became, in the end, a joyful matter. I never saw Bess Paton again, but I saw that she got twenty pounds out of the Kilmarnock Edition. I believe she married a Glasgow man.

Gin a body meet a body comin’ thro’ the rye

Gin a body kiss a body, need a body cry?

He faces audience and recites:

O, ye, wha are sae guid yersel’

Sae pious an’ sae holy,

Ye’ve nocht to do but mark an’ tell

Your neebors’ fauts and folly.

Hear me, ye venerable core,

As counsel for poor mortals

That frequent pass douce Wisdom’s doors

For glaikit Folly’s portals.

Ye high, exalted virtuous dames,

Tied up in Godly laces,

Before ye gie poor Frailty names,

Suppose a change o’ places?

He ‘selects’ woman in audience.

A weel-lov’d lad, convenience snug,

A treacherous inclination,

Well, let me whisper in your lug,

You’re aiblins nae temptation!

He turns away.

Then gently scan your brother Man,

Still gentler sister, Woman,

Though they gang a-kennin’ wrang,

To step aside is human.

One point must still be greatly dark,

The moving – why they do it?

And just as lamely can ye mark

How far perhaps they rue it!

Who made the heart, ‘tis He alone,

Decidedly can try us,

He knows each chord its various tone,

Each string, its various bias.

Then, at the balance, let’s be mute,

We never can adjust it.

What’s done, we partly may compute,

We know not what’s resisted...

MUSIC 6

‘Comin’ Thro’ The Rye’ (Fiddle/Guitar Intro)

He speaks over.

For in Mauchline there dwells six proper young belles,

The pride o’ the place an’ its neighbourhood a’

For carriage an’ dress a stranger wad guess

In London or Paris they’d gotten it a’.

Miss Miller is fine, Miss Murkland’s divine,

Miss Smith she has wit, an’ Miss Betty is braw,

There’s beauty and fortune to get with Miss Morton,

But Armour’s the jewel for me o’ them a’...

Music segue to:

MUSIC 6A

‘Of A’ The Airts’

Actor continues:

Of a’ the airts the wind can blaw,

I dearly like the west,

For there, the bonie lassie lives,

The lassie I lo’e best.

There, wild woods grow, and rivers row

And mony a hill between,

Yet day and night, my fancy’s flight,

Is ever wi’ my Jean...

Music segues to:

MUSIC 6B

‘My Love is like a Red, Red Rose’ (Guitar Intro)

Actor continues.

I first met Jean Armour at a penny fee wedding when my dog Luath jumped between us at the set. She was much put out and said nothing. I could only say – ‘I wish I could find a lassie would love me as much as my dog did!’ She still said nothing, but blushed, and from that moment, from being in love with all women, I was now – and for the first time – in love with one. And she with me. I knew it. And she knew I knew it.

O, my love is like a red, red rose,

That’s newly sprung in June,

Fiddle joins with melody.

My love is a like a melody

That’s sweetly play’d in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonie lass,

Sae deep n love am I,

And I will love thee still, my dear,

Till a’ the seas gang dry.

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

And rocks melt wi’ the sun,

O, I will love thee still, my dear,

While the sands of life shall run.

So fare thee weel, my only love,

And fare thee weel awhile,

And I will come again, my love,

Tho’ it were ten thousand mile...

A love song. Telling simply of love. And written with all the ease of absolute sincerity. I was in love, and being in love, I had a wish to be married, but being still in trouble with the Kirk Session on account of Bess Paton’s bairn, I was in no position to become anybody’s husband, but being in love, we couldn’t wait. Jean was already showing signs of that condition that women who have husbands inevitably show – so I declared us married by the very oldest laws and in the eyes of God. But old Armour, her father, and master-mason of Mauchline, said he knew his own daughter better than God did, and packed her off to Paisley to marry with a weaver! Jean! Jean! My darling, Jean! Married to a weaver? In Paisley?

He sits at table.

There is a pretty large portion of Bedlam in a poet at any time, but thereupon, I was nine parts stark, staring mad. Jean was with child – our child – but, since I had a part in the process, her father would rather would see it bastard than own me as son-in-law. When he first heard of his favourite daughter’s condition, he fainted. When he was told I was the father, he fainted clean away again! But truth was, I was desolate. And angry too. That for fear of an unruly parent, she did deny her love for me. But she did!

He moves forward to front

I tried all sorts of excesses to forget her – drinking, rioting, raking – I even joined the Masons. To no avail. She was in every part of me that girl.

There’s not a bonie flow’r that springs

By fountain, shaw or green,

There’s not a bonie bird that sings,

But minds me o’ my Jean!

MUSIC 7

‘For the Sake of Somebody’ (Guitar Instrumental)

Actor continues:

Jean! Jean! Dearer to me than my own heart’s blood!

He sits at stool.