Preview of McLellan Festival programme

An Arran play for the Festival

Cicely Gill, who lives in Whiting Bay, wrote her first play when she was about 17, inspired by going to the Edinburgh Festival and visiting the Traverse theatre when it was in the High Street to see Ubu Roi. She has been writing ‘on and off’ every since, and this year her one-act play called No Danger from the Cutlery will form part of a double bill in the McLellan Festival.

Cicely wrote the play last autumn. It centres round the question of how people cope (or don’t) when a disabled person is introduced into the family, and features a mother called Antoinette whose reaction to her son’s love for a girl with a deformed foot may bring a wince of recognition to many in the audience. Antoinette, Cicely says, ‘seemed to grow of her own accord.’

The young players who starred so notably in the school production of The Importance of Being Earnest will appear in No Danger from the Cutlery, so the play is in safe hands and promises a further treat to the audience. Robert McLellan’s beautiful and mysterious one-act play, The Carlin Moth, which many people may remember from a production in Corrie Hall some years ago, completes a richly satisfying double bill. Performances will be at the Community Theatre on Friday and Saturday 23rd and 24th August, at the start of the McLellan Festival. Full details in next month’s Voice.

Open Studios – and a bus that serves them all

Following the great success of last year’s Open Studios weekend, when visitors – and interested residents, too – were invited to see Arran artists working in their own studios, the event is being repeated from Friday 16th – Monday 19th August. And, immensely usefully, an Art Bus will run from Brodick pier, leaving at 10:45am and returning at 4:15pm, and calling at a range of different s each day. No map-reading, no tricky parking, you are simply taken on a circular tour of every studio. School age children and full time students travel free, and everyone else pays a mere £5, which is less that it would cost you for the petrol.

More information about the route on each day will be available at www.arranopenstudios.com