The Scotsman 13 November 2023

A first-time collaboration is a risky thing. What if the participants don’t hit it off? How do they negotiate if one is not happy with what the other is doing? Who gets to call the shots?

It was a step into the unknown when playwright Morna Young sent her adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen to composer Finn Anderson. What would he make of her first song? Would it be how she imagined it when she wrote the lyrics?

The answer, in short, is yes. It was exactly what she had in mind. “We would have a conversation about each song in an abstract way before Finn would work on the music,” says Young in a lunchtime rehearsal break. “But the first song he sent me – Can You Hear Me? – I emailed back saying, ‘It feels like you’ve been in my head.’ It was everything I had imagined but better.” [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).