Award-winning actor and playwright Gary McNair is back at HOME Manchester reading his teenage Letters To Morrissey in a show produced by Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre Company.
Directed by Gareth Nicholls, the Travere’s associate director, Letters To Morrissey follows up McNair’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe First hit A Gambler’s Guide to Dying, which featured in HOME’s Orbit Festival in 2016.
It’s 1997. You’re 11. You’re sad, lonely, and scared of doing anything that could get you singled out by the hopeless, angry people in your home town. One day you see a man on telly. He’s mumbling, yet electrifying. He sings: “I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does.” This guy gets it. You become obsessed with him. Later, when you need someone, you write to him. A lot.
McNair’s affectionate one-man show – which runs from on Tuesday 12th - Saturday 16th September - is the final part of a trilogy of often darkly comic works drawing on the joys and struggles of growing up in working class Scotland. McNair explores his teenage self through letters written to The Smiths’ front-man Morrissey at the turn of the millennium from an outsider living on the outskirts of Glasgow.
Fast-forward to today, 20 years on. You find those letters written by your younger naïve self and ask yourself: “Has the world changed, or have I changed?” Letters To Morrissey is about confronting the worst thing you’ve done - and hoping that you can still be good person.
Coming to HOME direct from this year’s Edinburgh Festival, where it world premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Letters To Morrissey considers our human desire to be understood, and about finding what is probably false kinship in an icon you don’t actually know or have never met.
Performances:
Tuesday 12th September - Friday 15th September 2017 at 19:45, Saturday 16th, 14:00 and 19:45
To book https://homemcr.org/ or 0161 200 1500
