Raising the Wickerman

For Greg Hemphill, the final Fringe performance of Appointment With The Wicker Man—a comedy play based on an iconic Scotland-set 70s British horror movie climaxing creepily with a scene of fiery pagan ceremony—will permit the resumption of a different, more mundane ritual. One pertaining to the substantial furry accumulation above his top lip.

“Very much so,” the Glaswegian comedy actor and writer famed for Scottish TV hits Chewin’ The Fat and Still Game nods insistently with a smile, when I ask him if his impressive chevron ‘tache—matched by meaty mutton-chop sideburns—was grown purely for his role as the sinisterly pompous Finlay Fothergill, and whether he’ll be going clean shaven again after the show’s run ends.

“Oh my god yeah,” chips in National Theatre of Scotland Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone, sat next to Hemphill at a table in the George Street Spiegeltent outside The Assembly Rooms, the venue where the show they’ve created together will have its official Fringe opening in a few hours. “Julie, Greg’s wife who I’m very good friends with, hates me that he’s got a moustache.”

“I had to grow it over the holidays,” he adds. “She was like ‘please.’”

It’s a tale of sacrifice both on and off stage, as the Fringe welcomes this affectionate and funny sideways musical theatre take on Robin Hardy’s cult 1973 film starring Christopher Lee, Edward Woodward and Britt Ekland (whose naked dancing became the grubby fascination of many a teenage boy of a certain generation).

With the film’s plot (Woodwards’ devout Christian policeman travels to far-flung Hebridean island in search of a missing girl, uncovers dodgy pagan goings-on to a groovy soundtrack) not to mention its chilling denouement (fire, death) being widely known, they wanted to avoid a straight adaptation. So Featherstone, Hemphill and co-writer Donald McLeary struck upon a nifty play-within-a-play conceit.

On a present-day remote Scottish island, amdram society the Loch Parry Players—directed by the shifty Forthergill—are preparing to stage a musical version of The Wicker Man. But after their leading man goes missing suspiciously, they’re forced at the last minute to hire in a TV cop actor from Glasgow (played by Sean Biggerstaff, of Harry Potter repute), setting off a sequence of events that metatextually mirror the film with increasing eeriness.

Featherstone had been trying to coax Hemphill into working with NTS for years. Asking him to write and star in this play proved an offer too irresistible to turn down; The Wicker Man, by chance, is his favourite film. “I seen it when I was 16,” he says. “I became obsessed with it, and watched it about once a year after that.”

It might come as a surprise to find two entities relatively removed in the cultural ladder meeting like this, Hemphill being a household name in Scottish popular entertainment and the NTS being a high-brow arts institution (“Vicky’s stepped down and I’ve stepped up and we’ve met in the middle,” jokes Hemphill). But it shouldn’t: Featherstone’s remit with NTS is to reach new audiences, and one key target group are just the kind of people who wouldn’t normally consider that the theatre is for them. People who might be interested in a play starring someone such as, say, the guy off Still Game.

As the NTS’s flagship performance at this year’s festival, Appointment With… could be considered the biggest Scottish production at this year's Fringe, and as such how Scotland has chosen to represent itself to an international audience. Lovers of “serious” theatre may baulk at the idea, but Featherstone wears the fact that the now six year-old NTS is “grown-up” enough to bring something this daft and accessible to the Fringe as a badge of honour. “I think for me, it’s a sign of our confidence,” she says. “I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but I think this a sign that we no longer think that we’re defined by any one thing at any one time. We’ve just done Macbeth with Alan Cumming, that was in Glasgow and went to New York and was a huge success. It was a really serious, cerebral piece of drama. We feel absolutely right that we can follow that with this.”

For Hemphill’s part, Appointment With… has been a “cathartic” return to the stage for the first time since a pantomime in 1999. The BAFTA winning Still Game ended in 2008 (Hemphill recently gave a sweary response on Twitter to constant calls for another series – he and former comedy partner Ford Kiernan have been at odds for years), but has since stayed in the “velvet cage” of television doing presenting, voiceover and writing work, in part he says because he’s “lacked the bravery” to return to live performance.

He’s glad too to be back on the Fringe, after having had a breakthrough here as a young comic in 1990 when he won a So You Think Your Funny award as part of comedy troupe the Trio Brothers. “Afterwards I remember sleeping in Exchange Square waiting for the train back to Glasgow the next morning,” he recalls, almost fondly.

Featherstone and self-confessed “Wicker Man geek” Hemphill have been encouraged to see their show well-received by people involved or connected with the film. Director Hardy has been to a performance, as has the late Woodward’s son. Locally, the play has brought out all kinds of surprising and funny stories from individuals who were involved with the movie during its shooting around Dumfries and Galloway and Ayrshire in 1972. Be it actress Juliet Cadzow—who appears as Edie McCredie in the children's TV show Balamory—who had an minor role as a villager, or a casting director who claimed his mum was Ekland’s bum-double.

There are no plans as yet for more dates after the Fringe, but if the play drums up sufficient interest over the next few weeks then it and Fothergill’s whiskers—sorry, Mrs Hemphill—may return to tour down south. Now that Featherstone has coaxed Hemphill into finally working with NTS, will she try and do so again? “Yes, 100%,” she replies, without hesitation. “Why wouldn’t I? He is masterful on stage – charismatic and brilliant. His character is horrible, and it’s great that somebody as affable as Greg doesn’t mind being hated by the audience. A lot of people wouldn’t like that. He is vile.”

Hemphill beams exaggeratedly. “You have to be vile when you have a moustache like this.”