Live in the Library, Moira’s monologues fae Falkirk awe audience

“Ah want your dug to come and apologise tae mah dug.”
“Apologise? Tae your dug? How exactly am ah gonnae manage that?”
“No mah problem. You trained it. And no very well, ah might add…”

The opening of The Moira Monologues takes us into deepest, darkest Falkirk, where Moira, the lippy chain-smoking cleaner, is berating her neighbour for the bad attitude his Rottweiller has been displaying towards her beloved Pepe, and demanding a canine apology in person. And, this being Moira, she of course gets that apology…

Alan Bissett is better known as an author [ Boyracers (2001), The Incredible Adam Spark (2005), Death of a Ladies' Man (July 2009). alanbissett.com ], but with this performance, he must also be acknowledged as a very fine character actor. Playing the lead female character entirely straight, Bissett also seamlessly inhabits other unforgettable characters – a huge male bouncer, Diesel the Rottweiler, Pepe the Yorkshire terrier, and Charlie the smooth-talking teacher all appear crisply and physically in front of the audience. It’s an unforgettable performance of jaw-dropping quality that rightfully gained huge applause, foot stomping, and massive whoops and cheers from a full house on its first night.

Understanding Scots dialect (Falkirk homo vulgaris Hallglenis) is probably an advantage when coming to this performance, especially with the visceral volley of foul expletives that first launches us into Moira’s world, but on enquiry, a native Russian audience member who spends most of her time in Russia, happily reported that the language gap did not inhibit her enjoyment. The xenophobic and bigoted elements of Moira’s psyche were most definitely not lost in translation, as the hilarious riff on exceptions to enjoying membership of Jock Tamson’s Bairns’ Club showed, with such groups as The Catholics, The Huns, Muslims, Paedophiles, Big Brother contestants, and of course The Edinbourgousie all being summarily excluded. The irony of a broadly middle-class Edinburgh audience getting its rocks off as it is itself being so roundly derided and abused by the characters before it on stage is part of the delicious class-conscious cubism that Bissett paints in this piece, and in his novels.

The episodic settings are wonderfully paced in this hour, and although laced with huge humour and devastating one-liners, more serious themes emerge, in particular with Moira incisively questioning the middle-class obsession with being or becoming someone or something. The couch setting for the drunken football-inspired monologues is just perfect, the body language surrounding the seduction (more like an entrapment) of Charlie, the physical reality of a Rottweiller growling and slavering in front of you, the flick of imaginary cigarette ash as Moira leans on her mop, and the whining hand-wringing of a put-upon neighbour illuminate and underline already memorable, authentically paced, witty and plain bloody hilarious dialogue.

The Moira Monologues also benefit from being presented in an intimate and humane venue, in a small room inside the National Library of Scotland – somewhere you feel refreshingly unlike being just another member of a herd of cattle rounded up and packed into a soulless and stuffy darkened room.

See this. It’s astounding, insightful, very Scottish, a wee bit sad and elegiac, but mainly very, very funny, and reveals Bissett as a quite extraordinary stage presence.

David Petherick ||| @clarocada