FringeReview Scotland 2025
The Gray Plays
Outwith It Theatre Company
Genre: Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Oran Mor, Glasgow
Festival: FringeReview Scotland
Low Down
The four short plays, some extracts, were of a quality underneath the celestial sky painted and designed by the playwright himself – when does that ever happen? Directed with skill, this was an evening of great quality, with the appreciative audience witnessing from the assembled cast why it is Gray’s work should be more celebrated. Playing to a full auditorium they were highly appreciative of the creative quality on display.
Review
Outwith it Theatre Company is new, based in Glasgow and looking to start their creative offer by developing a relationship with The Gray Estate, as well as explore our cannon of Scottish plays.
These plays covered decades in Gray’s life starting way back in the 70s up until 2006 with the final play of the evening Goodbye Jimmy. Billed as a concert reading, this was rehearsed and produced with theatrical flair.
The other four – Quiet People about a couple retired who take in some lodgers who are reluctant to leave; The Loss of Golden Silence about a complex affair; The Man Who Knew About Electricity which was an incredible and beautifully crafted understanding of poverty as a theme without making it so over the top that you grew tired of the message; and finally, Goodbye Jimmy a meeting between God and his son both with recognisable accents.
One of the delights of watching this was to sit back and listen to the words, close your eyes, and just listen to the beauty and the rhythm of scenes unfolding in your ears. Our guides, as performers were incredibly adept at filling our characters and circumstances with a comprehensive understanding of authorial intention.
Quiet People and The Loss of Golden Silence developed from an initial premise into giving you layers of comedy, built upon dialogue with such skill that the laughter flowed through skilful interpretation.
It was all directed with silences and cadences carefully finding the rhythmic beauty allowing each tongueful to flow across the footlights.
In The Man Who Knew About Electricity, we were treated, if I can even use that word, to the underlying menace of poverty sitting astride the restless hope that people have that at some point it might get better.
Following someone who is enlisted to help one person in a tenement building, he finds himself wanting to provide help and support to others. In 2025, that’s a message more pre-prevalent now than ever.
In Goodbye Jimmy, it was all about saying see that green stuff, treasure it. It was an opportunity to just hear a warning from 19 years ago that feels as fresh now as it probably did at the time.
With an impressive cast of James McKenzie, Jane McGarry, Sam Stopford and Naomi Stirrat, they provided us with a skilled reading. At times some of performances played to the galleries rather than found the nuances, but not simply standing at a podium reading out words but inhabiting what they had been given, was the beginning of finding those nooks and characterful crannies.
Their skill and interplay between them as a cast created a concert in the true sense. There was also a small set that felt like the front parlour evening of literature but this was much more.
This wasn’t just about celebrating community but celebrating one person within that community who has given us such richness.
Ably directed by Fraser Scott, it was introduced and hosted by Cora Bissett. Music and soundscape by Sonia Kilman were vital as it was beautifully integrated. Lovely to see it framing it with an equal part of a creative process rather than a tacked on afterthought that music sometimes can become.
Audience seating was a little bit of an issue for some in terms of trying to avoid the various pillars but had he not been so popular, had he not been so great, had he not been performed underneath his very own ceiling perhaps fewer would have been there but who would have denied anybody the opportunity to simply be there at all.
Gray and his legacy of work should be grabbed with every hand available. I walked into the night really feeling that I was part of an artistic movement just by turning up. When words like that and the environment like this makes you feel like that, it is theatre’s all-encompassing opportunity to deliver messages that are not to be taken lightly, but also to spark debate.
I look forward to what Outwith It does next, because I won’t be out with it, I want to be very much inside.
