Greg Hemphill and Jimmy Chisholm: On The Fringe Podcast

From  The Scotsman:

Our latest podcast features Greg Hemphill from Still Game and Jimmy Chisholm from Take The High Road. They talk to Arts and Entertainment Editor Liam Rudden about their show An Appointmnent With The Wicker Man.

DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST (right click and ‘save as’) here
Or download it direct from iTunes by clicking here

Catch An Appointment with The Wicker Man at the Assembly Rooms

Source: Scotsman 

Greg hemphill: Appointment with The Wicker Man review

Edinburgh Fringe : Appointment with The Wicker Man – The Assembly Rooms

The Public Reviews Rating: ★★★★☆

West end smash comedy The 39 Steps has carved a path for comedic stage adaptations over the years including Ben Hur and Casablanca, now The National Theatre Scotland turn their gaze onto cult horror classic The Wicker Man.

It has to be said from the outset that this isn’t a straight adaptation, Appointment with the Wicker Man, take the premise of a play within the play, performed by The Loch Parry Players, have a read of their very funny programme before the show to get a taste of what is to come.

The company have lost their main actor and have employed TV star Rory Mulligan (played with sexy sophistication by Sean Biggerstaff) to save the day and take the role of Sergeant Howie, however all isn’t want it first seems, with director Callum Guthrie (Johnny McKnight) splicing up the show with musical numbers and broadway style choreography, throw in a mystery surrounding Artistic Director of the Loch Parry Players, Finlay Fothergill and things start to parallel the iconic movie…not the crap one starring Nicholas Cage.

Writers Greg Hemphill and Donald McLeary bring gag after gag with their fast paced, anarchic script which is tightly delivered in Vicky Featherstone’s deft direction, the set designed by Chloe Lamford hides many hilarious details including a poster of past Loch Parry production of Gary Glitter:Mad About The Boy.

Appointment with the Wicker Man is a massive crowd pleaser, with inventive staging, hilarious script and uniformly excellent cast, how can you not be won over by The Loch Parry Players?

Runs until 26th August

Source: The Public Reviews

National Theatre of Scotland says “Join us and meet the Wicker Man”

From the National Theatre of Scotland blog:

Calling all bloggers, vloggers, tweeters, instagrammers, film buffs and fans of Loch Parry’s premier amateur dramatics company.

Join us at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for an exclusive event for social media users with Appointment with the Wicker Man

This is a one-off opportunity to photograph and film a scene from the show and meet the cast before enjoying the afternoon’s performance for free.

Co-written by and starring one of Scotland’s most popular performers, Greg Hemphill (Chewin’ the Fat) with Sean Biggerstaff (Harry Potter) and featuring a top line-up of Scottish comic talent, Appointment with The Wicker Man, is a new musical adaptation and an affectionate spoof homage to Robin Hardy’s cult film classic.

The event takes place at the Assembly Rooms, George St, Edinburgh on Tuesday 7th August, at 12.45pm for a 1pm start. Participants will receive a complementary ticket to the performance at 3.10pm.

Find out more about the show and watch the trailer here. http://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/content/default.asp?page=s880

Join in the conversation by using the Twitter hashtag #WickerMan

Places are limited so if you would like to attend please register in advance by emailing eve.nicol@nationaltheatrescotland.com

Appointment with The Wicker Man is on at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, 1 – 26 Aug (not Mondays), 3.10pm.

Source: National Theatre of Scotland

National Theatre of Scotland at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2012

The National Theatre of Scotland will be presenting two productions at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Appointment with The Wicker Man returns after a successful Scottish tour earlier this year, with Greg Hemphill and all the original cast,  as does Molly Taylor’s, Love Letters to the Public Transport System, following Scottish tour dates and an acclaimed run as a work in progress in 2011. Both productions are being presented at the refurbished Assembly Rooms on George Street.

Since the National Theatre of Scotland’s launch in 2006, the Company has presented  six productions at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Black Watch (2006); Venus As A Boy (2007); Architecting (2008); Beautiful Burnout (2010) and The Wheel and The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart last year. All winners of  either a Herald Angel or a Scotsman Fringe First.

Read more (with video) at National Theatre of Scotland 

Also reported (with listings) by All Media Scotland 

Sean Biggerstaff: interview and music vid

Interview: Sean Biggerstaff, actor 

The Wicker Man musical is a strange concept, but for Sean Biggerstaff, it’s no more weird than the hysteria that met his best-known role, writes Susan Mansfield. Sean Biggerstaff laughs as he describes the process by which he joined the cast of An Appointment With The Wicker Man. “Read the script. Laughed a lot. Said yes. It was an absolute no-brainer. Turned up at work on the first day and it’s been a hoot and a holler ever since.” 

Biggerstaff, cast in the role of PC Rory Mulligan, a TV cop drafted in to help the Loch Parry Players stage The Wicker Man, has the straightest part in the show. 

“Much like Edward Woodward (in the original cult movie), who was quite a normal person finding himself in amongst all this madness and reacting to it, that’s the main part of my job as well. I joyously get to react to the great comic performances going on around me.” 

It’s now ten years since Biggerstaff, 28, made his last appearance as Oliver Wood, captain of the Gryffindor quidditch team in the Harry Potter movies, yet it is still the job for which he is best known. When his part was cut from the third film, an online petition gathered more than 50,000 signatures to the slogan “It’s the Wood that makes it good.” 

Now, eating a cheese toastie in the costume fitting room at the National Theatre of Scotland’s rehearsal space, he shakes his head as if he’s glad those days are over. 

“When you turn up in Leicester Square and there are 5,000 people screaming your name and holding placards, that’s just weird. It’s hard to find a place for it in your brain that makes any sense. I’m not really comfortable in that sort of situation.” 

Biggerstaff grew up in Maryhill, the son of a fireman and a community worker. When he was 14, he was spotted in Scottish Youth Theatre by Alan Rickman, who was looking for two Scottish boys to cast in his film of Sharman Macdonald’s The Winter Guest. Rickman was so impressed that he asked his own agent to represent Biggerstaff, leading swiftly to his casting in Harry Potter. The films did bring some opportunities, he says, some of which he turned down. 

“I’ve always been fussier than I can afford to be. I don’t just want to do whatever it takes to be successful, I want to do what I consider to be good stuff. If I’m not engaged in something, it doesn’t matter what it is and who’s doing it.” 

He comes across as very grounded, choosing to base himself in Glasgow, playing guitar in Glasgow-band Wrongnote: “It’s good to have a foothold in reality, a base somewhere that’s always been a base. Sharman Macdonald once said she needs life to write, she can’t write if she’s just in theatre all the time. I’m the same way, I think. I’ve always felt that if my life was all about the job, I wouldn’t be so good at the job.” He pauses. “That might be unutterable w*** – but I have just uttered it!” 

Biggerstaff has been acclaimed in independent films, such as Cashback, directed by Sean Ellis, and spent part of last year in Switzerland making a film about Mary Queen of Scots. Does it irk him that he’s still known for Harry Potter? “You’ll never hear me whingeing about it because it was the biggest thing since The Beatles, and to be part of that was a really rare and unique privilege. But for me, it was two tiny five-minute parts I did when I was 17, 18 – and I’ve done tour de forces that no-one’s ever seen or remembers.” 

The “proudest moment” on his CV is Consenting Adults, a BBC4 movie about the Wolfenden Committee whose report, in the 1950s, led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain. Biggerstaff played Jeremy Wolfenden, the gay son of the committee chairman (played by Charles Dance). “He was a dream to play, and I had the feeling that we were documenting something that was genuinely important.” 

He doesn’t mention that he won a Scottish Bafta for the part. When I do, he looks sheepish. “Yeah. Uhuh. To be brutally honest, I like that people like it, but having a bit of metal on a mantelpiece doesn’t really make that any better. Awards are weird. I think giving actors awards is quite a silly business.” He stops, looking uncomfortable. “No offence to the people at Bafta Scotland, who I know and like.” 

 An Appointment with the Wicker Man marks his return to the stage for the first time since 2005 when he appeared in Sharman Macdonald’s The Girl with the Red Hair, at the Lyceum, and his first musical since his days in Scottish Youth Theatre. “That’s the interesting thing about being an actor. I would never think, ‘I want to do a musical,’ but I’m having a perfectly nice time. It’s a bit of a cheat – you can step in and get the thrill without actually having to put the years of slog in to be successful at it!” 

Source: Scotsman

 

Nice & Sleazy Open Mic: Sean Biggerstaff  
Sean Biggerstaff from Wrongnote performing in the basement bar at Nice N Sleazy's in Glasgow. The Acoustic Open Mic Night there every Monday is skilfully hosted by Gerry Lyons to create a friendly welcoming vibe - highly recommended as a night out. Of this performance, Sean says "the song is Serve You by the late Chris Whitley who is, subjectively, the greatest artist who ever lived. You should listen to him doing it!" 

 

Source: YouTube

Social Media Call for "An Appointment with The Wicker Man"

Social media users are invited to take pictures and film footage of the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of An Appointment With The Wicker Man on Friday 17th February at 11.45am for a 12pm start at the Macrobert Arts Centre, Stirling.

This is an exclusive opportunity to photograph and film two scenes from the production and to meet the famous Loch Parry Players. The cast and creative team will also be available for interviews.

Based on the cult film, An Appointment With The Wicker Man is co-written by Greg Hemphill and Donald McLeary and directed by Vicky Featherstone.

The cast includes Greg Hemphill and Paul Riley who worked together on Chewin’ The Fat and the spin off Still Game. They are joined on stage by Sean Biggerstaff who played Oliver Wood in the Harry Potter films.

The full cast is Sean Biggerstaff, Jimmy Chisholm, Greg Hemphill, Johnny McKnight, Sally Reid, Paul Riley and Rosalind Sydney.

Places are limited so if you would like to attend please register in advance by emailing andrew.neilson@nationaltheatrescotland.com

The first twenty people to register will be given a free ticket to see the whole show on Friday 17th February at 7.30pm.

In the meantime why not tweet about production using the hashtag #wickerman or find out what happens at a social media call.

The National Theatre of Scotland’s production of An Appointment With The Wicker Man is supported by Bank of Scotland and tours to His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen from 21-25 Feb, Theatre Royal, Glasgow 28 Feb-3 March, Eden Court, Inverness 6-10 March and The Alhambra, Dunfermline 21-24 March. More information at www.nationaltheatrescotland.com

Source National Theatre of Scotland

Preview review of An Appointment With The Wicker Man

'Animal masks" reads the cardboard box in the corner of the rehearsal room.

A mandolin lies abandoned by the kettle. Off to one side a dancer is running through her moves, tying imaginary ribbons round an unseen maypole. Meanwhile, torrential rain is battering against the room's perspex skylights, so violently it almost drowns out the haunting Gaelic harmonies of the seven singers sat in a semi-circle. They switch to something more robust, a 13th-century hymn in Middle English. It's entitled, jarringly in the circumstances, Summer Is A-Coming In. The rain continues to batter. It's all as good an introduction as any to the strange, skewed world of The Wicker Man, one of agricultural necromancy and free-range deviants.

Now celebrating its 40th anniversary, The Wicker Man has become that rarest and most circular of things: a film about cultism that in itself became a cult. Within the past decade particularly, The Wicker Man has ascended into a select band of cinematic immortals, as the so-called Citizen Kane of horror movies. Shot around Dumfries and Galloway, and studded with weird, yielding ditties in praise of bosky naughtiness, it has been restored and remastered, referenced and reverenced. There are shelves of academic Wicker Man analysis and, at the last count, four Wicker Man television documentaries. It has even survived the most calamitous of Hollywood remakes starring a bewildered Nicolas Cage. The Wicker Tree, a sequel of sorts by the director of the original, is imminent. An Appointment With The Wicker Man, a theatrical interpretation of the film, written by Greg Hemphill and Donald McLeary for the National Theatre Of Scotland (NTS), goes on tour later this month.

The Wicker Man is now part of the language. Just as we know a Walter Mitty character is a fantasist or that a Mrs Robinson is a predatory older woman, we know what's meant on hearing that something is a bit Wicker Man. It's a phrase that evokes every urban prejudice against life in remote rural communities; the lurking sense that something sinister is going on in every woodshed; that humanity gets up to no good when its nearest neighbour is three miles distant.

Those villages where you can still buy golliwogs, mousetraps and tea-towels with clowns on – they're a bit Wicker Man; Orkney pubs where you won't get served – they're Wickerish too. As Sherlock Holmes tells Watson in The Adventure Of The Copper Beeches: "Look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser."

Given the prevalence in Scotland of such isolation it's scarcely surprising that the film – and the NTS production and The Wicker Tree – mine some faultline in the national psyche. The Wicker Man is the anxiety dream of the city-dweller put on to celluloid.

One image recurs in the film and has entered our visual lexicon of the unspeakably creepy: Summerisle's villagers rising with sudden vigilance from behind low walls, their faces obscured by animal masks like those piled up in the rehearsal room box.

"We've watched the film a couple of times together as a company," says Hemphill, "and sometimes there's a bit of tittering going on. The very camp pub landlord always gets a laugh, or some of the lines haven't aged well. I sit there thinking: 'How dare they laugh – this is a classic, can't they see?' But then I realised the more they laugh the more powerful the ending becomes, when the horror of Howie's situation kicks in. And they were silent for the last 20 minutes – you couldn't hear a pin drop. Because The Wicker Man is not a traditional horror movie. It doesn't set out to scare you; it sets out to trick you."

Conceived by playwright and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer, The Wicker Man's story is as well known now as that of Whisky Galore! The devout Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) regulates the sleepy Highland port of Ullwater with unsmiling probity. He receives a letter from Summerisle, a seldom-visited private fiefdom, alleging that teenager Rowan Morrison is missing. Howie leaves by seaplane immediately.

What he finds is Sodom twinned with the Arran Folk Festival. The mysterious Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee, forsaking his cape for a tweed jacket) has allowed the islanders to abandon Christianity and revert to the Old Religion. Superstition and folklore hold sway, as does a cult of fertility; teenage boys are deflowered ceremonially by Willow MacGregor (Britt Ekland). Maypoles and phallic topiary dot the landscape. Churches lie in ruin. Couples fornicate openly after carousing in pubs free from licensing restrictions. Through Howie's eyes we see a wild, unfettered pagan community that disgusts him.

It's all a ruse, of course. Rowan Morrison is not missing. The island's apple crop failed calamitously last year and the Old Religion demands that the goddess be appeased. What ensues is perhaps one of the most unforgettable climaxes in all cinema. The "Christian copper" is dragged to a 30ft-high wicker effigy and placed high inside it while torchbearers set it aflame. As the community of Summerisle dance and sing below, Howie goes to meet his maker, his blood-curdling screams for mercy borne away on the wind.

Yet it isn't simply the movie's plot for which posterity treasures The Wicker Man. The making of the film is one of the most infamous black comedies in cinema history. Everything that could go wrong did – twice. The film was something of a whim, a one-off, from the outset, cooked up to aid Christopher Lee escape his typecasting as the tall, dark and gruesome focus of the Hammer horror canon. "Christopher had come to me," Anthony Shaffer told me in 1999, "and said, 'I'm very unhappy. I want to do a film without women who look like Barbara Windsor running up and down papier-mache corridors screaming, without the contact lenses and the fangs.' He wanted to do something more manly, with more originality."

Despite this caveat, the film was rushed into production with a cast described best as motley. Bit players were hired from the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. Local Gallovidians got their chance. There was also a practising Australian white witch and former wife of Sean Connery (Diane Cilento); a fixture of the Scottish pantomime scene (Walter Carr); the man who taught David Bowie mime (Lindsay Kemp, playing the aforementioned camp landlord); a Pole (Ingrid Pitt) portraying, in her words, a "nymphomaniac librarian"; and a Swede, Britt Ekland, whose accent was so thick it required redubbing by Annie Ross.

The panicked production schedule meant a story set at the height of spring needed to be shot in late October, on the blustery cliff tops of coastal Scotland. The rush meant Shepperton studios had not been booked for interiors. Plastic apple blossom was hung on wind-blasted trees. Temperatures on set dropped so low the cast sucked on ice cubes to prevent their breath condensing on camera. They changed their costumes in the public toilets of a nearby caravan park. Tempers flared constantly. After work, in the bar of the Ellangowan Hotel in Creetown, the hard-drinking cast sought to deepen their acquaintance with Glenmorangie, or the Big GM as it was known. Ekland caused a press storm when she claimed in an interview that Newton Stewart was "the most dismal place in creation".

Yet worse was coming. At a time when Hammer horror was being supplanted by the suburban sex comedy, the board of producers British Lion decided no audience existed for a horror-musical set in the Highlands. The sole release the film could expect was as a supporting feature to the Julie Christie shocker Don't Look Now. Becoming such, though, meant much footage had to hit the cutting-room floor. The abbreviated orphan film was pushed out on a despondent tour of Britain's provinces in December, 1973. "I mean, this was an Anthony Shaffer picture," Edward Woodward told me. "In contemporary terms that would be like a Steven Spielberg film going straight to DVD – it was virtually unthinkable." By 1974 The Wicker Man was all-but forgotten, if it had ever been noticed.

Then something curious began to happen. In 1976, the film was reissued by a new distribution company in the US and began to break box-office records in San Francisco and New York, aided by a review claiming it was a "philosophical soft-core Scottish thriller musical". Its discarded footage was incorporated into a new version released on home video. In Britain, the Wicker Man Appreciation Society, a sodality of furiously photocopying devotees, made an appearance. Gradually, it became become a fixture in British television's repertory of late-night horror cheapies.

Hemphill saw the film first, in 1986, in a London hotel, as his family were relocating from Montreal to Glasgow. "I was 16 and I knew nothing about it, which is the way you should come to a film with a climax like that," he says. "I assumed it was just a weird and wonderful midnight horror film. So, when the ending came I thought, 'Oh well, he's The Equaliser – he'll get out of this. He'll climb out the back of the wicker man. Or it'll rain.'

"And it didn't. I sat there thinking, 'What the hell is this? What? No!' I remember being quite upset and disturbed. Because the islanders didn't think they were giving Howie a horrible death. They were smiling as he burned, they were killing him with kindness. That's the really creepy thing that ends up haunting you."

Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of the NTS and director of the play, saw the film in the same period while studying film and theatre at Manchester University. "It appealed to the anarchic drama students in us," she reflects. "At the time there was a lot of interest in shamanism and expressive dance, I suppose, and The Wicker Man seemed to fit in with all that." Featherstone went on to co-create the cuddly-country ITV drama Where The Heart Is and head the Paines Plough company. Since 2007 her tenure as artistic director of the NTS has been widely considered a huge success, vindicating the board's decision to appoint from outwith the narrow confines of the McTheatre community. Unafraid to think big or cross-fertilise with other forms, the 44-year-old from Surrey has overseen a growing slate of surefooted productions, including Black Watch, The Missing – from the novel by Andrew O'Hagan – and Alan Cumming in The Bacchus.

"I was having a conversation with my husband [television screenwriter Danny Brown] about whether there was a gap in the way the NTS made theatre, particularly in terms of addressing audiences who were culturally hungry but who didn't necessarily consider themselves theatre-goers," she says. "That took us on to the comedian Simon Pegg, whose work is full of film references, and that took us on to The Wicker Man."

Featherstone brought the notion to Hemphill, co-creator of the BBC comedy fixtures Chewin' The Fat and Still Game, and collaborator Donald McLeary, a writer and performer whose intimacy with rural skulduggery and police procedure were honed during his stint as PC Plum on the children's TV show Balamory. The connection was only strengthened when he noticed a coffin in one scene of the film had "McLeary" written along its interior. The pair convene Sunday evening social gatherings at which two horror films are watched, nights at which The Wicker Man is staple viewing. "We were such fans of the film that even if Vicky had asked for us for a line-by-line recreation we would have written that," says Hemphill, "but it would have been rubbish. A stage show, we thought, would need to have the same mesmerising soft-porn sexual madness of the film. That was our jumping-off point – we can't do a theatrical version of the film: so what do we do?"

An Appointment With The Wicker Man is the answer, a Scottish comedy hybrid of Hamlet and Abigail's Party, in which rural claustrophobia weaves like bindweed through the delusions of an amateur theatre troupe. In the village of Loch Parry, a ramshackle crew of egotists and ingenues have gathered to mount the stage version of the film. They profess to be obsessed with it, though they do seem rather sketchy on the details. "I've seen it," says Callum, the show's director. "Well, I've seen most of it bar the last 10 minutes. Lenny Henry was on the other side."

The faltering production is dealt a further blow – or is it? – when its Howie, played by one Roger Morgan, disappears in circumstances the remaining cast members seem reluctant to discuss. He's replaced by Rory Mulligan, star of the Taggartesque TV drama Blood Beat, another actor, the observant will note, who shares initials with Rowan Morrison, the teenage bait of the movie version. Mulligan starts his assignment believing the Loch Parry Players to be enthusiastic incompetents. Gradually, though, as the hopeless production is rehearsed, a weirder picture emerges of the Loch Parry Players. In the wilderness, lives can twist into strange gnarled shapes and drastic measures are often the only remedy. "It's important to point out we're not making fun of the film itself," says McLeary. "The jokes lie in how the film's situations reoccur in the lives of this indifferent theatre company. The Wicker Man is so deeply embedded in the culture now you can play with what audiences know about it. You say graveyard scene and people know what that involves."

In all, An Appointment With The Wicker Man is a hugely affectionate anagram of the film, playing upon one of its most crucial themes, the unbridgeable gulf between the urban and the rural. In its clever, broadly comic way it reminds us there is a range of reasons why this cheap, jinxed B-feature has come to enjoy such a singular afterlife. There's the wry, icy wit of Anthony Shaffer's unmatchable screenplay, of course, quoted throughout, and the spectacular brutality of the film's climax. It would be unfair to disclose how this finale is handled on stage but perhaps give thanks to the appropriate deity that Featherstone's initial idea wasn't pursued; toward the play's end a fire alarm was to sound, the audience escorted out – then not escorted back in again. "The idea was to leave the audience unsatisfied and uneasy, as the film does," she says. "Then the problems with the idea occurred to us."

Over and above its ending are the film's thematic concerns. The film seems to possess a quality that borders on clairvoyance. When The Wicker Man was made, faith and religiosity were hardly crucial issues of the day, in Britain at least. Forty years on, though, and we live each day with the threat of the extremes to which some will go to externalise their beliefs. The barrier between civility and barbarism is increasingly permeable. The Wicker Man argues that all faith – whether the dogmatic Christianity of Howie or the free-range deviancy of Summerisle and his neo-pagans – is man-made and socially constructed. Its message is one of a deep and abiding liberal humanism.

And just as The Wicker Man is a film about cultism that became a cult it is also a phenomenon about the life force that refuses to die. Howie believes God is the universal animating force; Summerisle believes it is nature. Whatever it is, on whichever side of the date you fall, The Wicker Man and its reputation can't stop flourishing, as An Appointment With The Wicker Man is just the latest entity to demonstrate.

"The film survives because it invites you to think for yourself; it insists in it," Anthony Shaffer told me in 1999. "There is something in the very frames of that picture which is saying, 'I am living and I will go on living.' I think Sgt Howie and Lord Summerisle would have approved of that -"

An Appointment With The Wicker Man opens at the Macrobert Arts Centre, Stirling on February 17-18 then travels to Aberdeen, Glasgow, Inverness and Dunfermline. Visit www.nationaltheatrescotland.com. 


Source: Herald Scotland

Greg Hemphill on how The Wicker Man inspired his new play

Still Game star Greg Hemphill has got the fear.

The Still Game and Chewin’ The Fat star is in rehearsals with the National Theatre of Scotland for An Appointment With The Wicker Man, a play he wrote with Donald McLeary.

Their take on the 1973 creepy classic – once dubbed “the Citizen Kane of horror movies” with one of the most memorable and nightmarish endings in film – has singing, dancing and jokes.

Someone is going up in flames and Greg just hopes it isn’t him.

He said: “Somebody asked, ‘Do you think people will be picketing outside because you have put jokes in it?’ I said, ‘Yes, I would probably picket it myself because I love it.’

“There will be humour in it but we are not making fun of the film.

“I would call it a celebration of the movie. It is to The Wicker Man what Mamma Mia is to Abba, bearing in mind The Wicker Man is a horror.

“We want to give the audience frights, laughs and a good time and celebrate the music, score, story and fantastic ending.

“It will play like a horror comedy. The Wicker Man is all about the ending. You want people to come and enjoy the ride.”

An Appointment With The Wicker Man is set on a remote Scottish island, where the Loch Parry Theatre Players’ production of The Wicker Man is disrupted when their lead actor goes missing and they ask a TV detective from the mainland to step in and save their production.

The play parodies the plot of the original –starring Edward Woodward, Britt Ekland and Christopher Lee – which followed a policeman travelling to a remote island to search for a missing girl who the strange islanders claim never existed.

Greg’s show was originally intended to be a straightforward stage adaptation of the film – remade in 2006 starring Nicolas Cage. But NTS artistic director Vicky Featherstone suggested doing a play within a play. Greg said: “The story of the movie parallels the Loch Parry players, finding out what happens to their missing actor Roger Morgan. They are sort of intertwined and the line gets blurred between the two.

“The humour comes from this rag-tag group of amateur drama players trying to put on a horror movie.

“I think audiences don’t have to know the film back to front to understand what’s going on with our story.”

Greg, 42, who is married to actress Julie Wilson Nimmo, with whom he has two sons, has come to know The Wicker Man intimately. In preparation for writing the play, he watched the film 10 times, bringing his total number of viewings to around 30. But it’s been no hardship. He said: “A lot of films, when you watch them a lot, get less scary. But The Wicker Man never fails to unnerve you.

“I first saw it in 1986. I remember being horrified by the end. I didn’t think movies ended that way.

“As writers, we have nothing but respect for the film. It is a perfect story with an amazing ending.

“If you flip it comedically, it’s a joke – you have a great story followed by a punchline. In my opinion, it has the greatest ending in cinema history.

“But because it relies so heavily on this punch-to-the-stomach finale, there is not necessarily a value in adapting it slavishly. A surprise ending is only good at the time. It is going to lose its impact so we had to come up with something else which salutes it. That was our challenge.”

An Appointment With The Wicker Man, which stars Jimmy Chisholm and Harry Potter actor Sean Biggerstaff, will also see Greg teaming up with his Chewin’ The Fat and Still Game co-star Paul Riley.

Despite the reunion, a return to Still Game is unlikely.

Greg said: “You would be an arrogant fool to say it’s never happening again but it’s unlikely because I am not a fan of programmes that go away and come back.

“Comedy is lightning in a bottle. It speaks to a generation, to a certain time. I think when you bring shows back, you almost upset the apple cart with the audience.

“Sometimes the journey is better than the arrival. But who knows.”

Greg’s partnership with McLeary, who also writes Radio 4 comedy Fags, Mags And Bags and stars as Mickey John on CBeebies show Me Too!, has seen them write two films, now in development.

They are also due to film a pilot for their new sitcom, Blue Haven.

But first there is the burning ambition of An Audience With The Wicker Man to deal with. Greg said, laughing: “It says on the poster, ‘Someone’s going to burn for this’ – and it could well be us writers.”

● An Appointment With The Wicker Man is on at His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, from February 21 to 25; at Theatre Royal Glasgow, February 28 to March 3; Eden Court, Inverness, March 6 to 10; and the Alhambra, Dunfermline, March 21 to 24.

Source: Daily Record

Sean Biggerstaff on stage in National Theatre of Scotland’s production of An Appointment with The Wicker Man

BBC Still Game and Chewin’ the Fat actors Greg Hemphill and Paul Riley are to re-unite for the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of An Appointment with The Wicker Man in 2012. The production is co-written by Donald McLeary and Greg Hemphill, who is also appearing as Lord Summerisle, and opens at His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen on 21st February before touring Scotland.

Greg Hemphill and Paul Riley worked together on Chewin’ The Fat and the spin off Still Game in which Greg played Victor and Paul the part of Winston. They will be joined on stage by Sean Biggerstaff who is known for playing Oliver Wood in the Harry Potter films and has won a Scottish BAFTA for the BBC4 film Consenting Adult.

Regularly popping up at the top of “Best Horror Film of all Time” lists, The Wicker Man is regarded as a cult film classic. An Appointment with The Wicker Man, directed by Vicky Featherstone, is an all-singing-and-dancing love letter to a unique and timeless cult masterpiece.

Read more at Northings