The Scotsman 16 September 2024

When you think about musical-theatre writing partnerships, you imagine earnest young people hunched over a piano in the Brill Building, batting musical phrases and lyrical ideas across the keys. You picture them living and breathing every moment together until the score is complete.

That was not how things were for Andy McGregor and Isla Cowan. Their work on To Save The Sea, a musical touring Scotland from this month, began in lockdown. Cowan, the Edinburgh playwright, had seen a tweet by McGregor, composer and artistic director of Glasgow’s Sleeping Warrior theatre company, looking for a collaborator for a large-scale sung-through musical.

“I was researching environmental activism and came across the story of the Brent Spar in 1995 when Greenpeace activists scaled and occupied the oil store,” says Cowan. “The story of what happened at the Brent Spar is so spectacular and theatrical – there are people hanging off the oil store, giant water cannons, the police arrive and it turns into an international political saga. It didn’t feel like something I could capture in a play. It needed the heightened reality of a musical. We had a Zoom call and Andy loved the idea as much as I did.” [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).