Address to a Haggis

Review by David Cox

Having been a DarkChat reviewer since 2007, and an Edinburgh festival attendee since 1986 I sometimes find putting our itinerary together a little repetitive and time- consuming (though I love the end result).

This year we only had 5 full days so I thought I would fit in 2 "themed" days to enable us to visit shows and venues we wouldn't normally frequent. Today we were only seeing free shows, previously, if I had put a free show in our spreadsheet that would be the show I would drop due to tiredness as I hadn't made a ticket commitment.

Our "free day" started with a trip to the Eric Liddell exhibition at the Scottish Parliament (both building and the exhibition are worth a visit) followed by a trip to the Scottish Storytelling Centre for "Address To A Haggis".

The Scottish Storytelling Centre is fast becoming one of my favourite venues. Earlier this week we were entranced by Mairi Campbell's "Living Stone", both the musical show and the exhibition in the foyer.

It seemed quite fitting that we should begin this day with a rendition of Robert Burns's classic poem in the Haggis Box cafe. Being lunchtime it was packed but I only saw five people there for the performance, the rest of the people were there for food.

For me there were three joys of this production. One was hearing the Scottish writer's stunning words and the second was watching Martin Macintyre's extraordinary rendition. Reading the words in front of him he delivers a tour de force of conjuring a world long gone by (rather like Miss Campbell). 

The third joy of this short piece was watching the faces of the customers (mainly tourists) who clearly didn't have a clue what was going on. A couple of children stopped eating their lunch and sat open-mouthed through the entire reading.

To be honest I couldn't make out a lot of the words ( the piece was spoken in strong dialect, which of course is the whole point) but that takes nothing away from the power of the piece. Finally, the ultimate compliment I can pay is that I had to order a delicious Haggis lunch. (Martin should have been on commission).

Sadly, the DarkChat itinerary was already full so we were unable to fit in Martin's other show " Traditional Tales from Scotland" at the same venue.

As well as leaving with a full and happy stomach I was confident that my "Free show" day would be a success.

Spoiler, it was.