When Billy Met Alasdair – Scottish Storytelling Centre

Enthralling.

Feel free to locate your battered copy of ‘Lanark’ but under no circumstances attempt to speed-re-read two days before the show. Breathe… turns out it’s not necessary. Author & playwright Alan Bissett is the proud owner of a photo showing the two Scots cultural icons at the launch of said tome at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre in 1981 and wondered how the conversation between the two might have gone. But there’s stuff before we get there…

It’s a simple set, just Bissett in front of us alternating between Connolly and (attaches glasses, cues the lighting) Gray, telling their own stories in lively monologues, insights into how and why they ended up doing what they do/did. There’s an armchair to Bissett’s left and a table on which sits a bottle of Glenfiddich (a rather special bottle, as it happens) and a couple of glasses. On the right, amusingly (to the locals, at least), a ‘captions’ screen runs Bissett’s words into subtitles. Just in case.

We kick off at Connolly’s celebrity-strewn 60^th birthday party in Hollywood. It’s speech time and he launches into a spoken memoir covering his fragmented home life in Anderston and Partick, the years as a welder in the Govan shipyards, stressing how the humour he found here informed his progress and transformation from musician to comedian/storyteller. Gray tells us about his early life, detached from his peers, finding refuge in drawing and writing. He didn’t like school but ironically later did a stint as an art teacher, cut short after a classroom-based hypersomnia-related episode. As Lanark is a complex novel, correctly read starting with Part Three (and ending with Part Two), the fear was that this would be an impenetrable, high-brow show; it was nothing of the sort, but an entertaining, informative celebration of two inspirational Scots who persevered and succeeded in the arts despite unpromising backgrounds. It’s heartfelt too, Bissett breaking open the fourth wall midway through to tell us a bit about himself and explain why he’d undertaken the enterprise.

Connolly achieved significant financial wealth, though not without hefty slices of fame-related refuelling issues (‘Never let a hangover catch up with you’). Gray did not but both possess unassailable reputations and without them it’s unlikely Scotland would have produced Warner, Kelman, Banks, Welsh, Howson et al… or Bissett!

Running at The Scottish Storytelling Centre, Aug 9th– 12th, 15th – 19th, 22nd – 23rd, 20.30 (8.30pm in old money)

Reviewer: Roger Jacobs

Reviewed: 7th August 2025

North West End UK Rating: