David Tennant at the 1989 Fringe: 'The Square Who Couldn't Rock 'n' Roll' and 'Passion'
...so you think David never played at the Fringe? Think again!
It was July 1st, 1989, and 17-yr old David Tennant had been a student at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) for less than a year. He’d enrolled at the RSAMD the previous September under his real name, David McDonald, but he’d already chosen Tennant as his stage name. This early on he was still getting used to how Tennant sounded, though, and its exclusive use wasn’t yet set in stone - every once in a while, he’d still find himself listed in various campus productions as McDonald.
But the 1989 Summer Term at the RSAMD had just ended and David had a long two and a half months of vacation ahead of him. He certainly didn’t intend to spend it laying about. He wanted to act - and luckily for him, the coming of summer meant the annual Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
If you’ve never heard of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe before (which in common parlance is often called the Fringe Festival or simply the Fringe), it has a rich history (and is going on in Edinburgh as I write this post). It comes in two parts - firstly, the Edinburgh Festival was
dreamt into existence in 1947 by Rudolf Bing and Harvey Wood to heal the wounds of a fragmented post-war Europe. Through theatre, music and art, the International Festival was to nourish the color and creativity of artists and audiences from all over the world.
The Fringe grew up beside the official Festival (as did its later cousins, the Edinburgh Film Festival and Book Festival). Unlike its parent, at the Fringe there’s no selection process for who can perform - with true creative freedom, anyone could schedule a performance and show up and do their own thing. Usually held in August, the Fringe is a three-week festival of arts and culture which still holds the Guinness World Record for the largest arts festival in the world.
Being as theatre-centric as it was and with easy access to the Fringe goings-on, the RSAMD had over a half-dozen student theatre companies of various sizes floating around for students to join.
One of the most well-known was Made In Glasgow, founded in 1987 by the RSAMD’s theatre manager Steven Thompson, along with Lorenzo Mele and Pene Herman-Smith. The company aimed to be a professional student theatre ensemble and had already hosted a one-night only, Friday the (January) 13th production of Scrooge on campus. It planned to put on three more productions at the 1989 Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Weddings and After by William McIlvanney, The Square That Couldn’t Rock ‘n’ Roll by Brian McCann, and Night, Mother by Marsha Norman.
Of the other companies, two were just finding their feet by July 1989. The first new company was called Commedia. It had been founded by recent RSAMD graduate Ian Sizeland and was made up of a number of fellow students. Sizeland had received a grant from the RSAMD Student Representative Council to stage Edward Bond’s play Passion at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
The second, called X-Academy, was founded by several of the seventeen recent Diploma of Dramatic Arts (DDA) graduates with the intent to stage a September revival of The Hired Man, a huge hit of a play the students had done as a school performance (without a dedicated company) at the beginning of the year. X-Academy was scouting students still on course to drum up enough cast for the supporting roles and chorus.
Now if you’ll recall, I said before that David wasn’t content to sit around for the summer months and twiddle his thumbs. So before he left the RSAMD campus on that last day of Summer Term, he’d made sure to get himself involved with all three companies.
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We won’t yet dwell on two of the plays from RSAMD student theatre companies which David got himself involved with in 1989 - Scrooge and The Hired Man. Those plays were performed on campus at the RSAMD and will be explored in more detail soon.
Today we’re looking at the two plays David did at the Fringe in 1989 - The Square Who Couldn’t Rock ‘n’ Roll and Passion.
The 1989 Edinburgh Fringe Festival was held from 13 August to 2 September, and David was in with a double-header in the very first week. He had two plays on - The Square Who Couldn't Rock 'n' Roll and Passion. Both premiered the day after the start of the Fringe (on 14 August 1989) and went for six performances each, ending on the 19th.
As you can see from the listing above, Made In Glasgow had scheduled six performances of the The Square Who Couldn't Rock 'n' Roll from 11 am to noon at the venue regularly used by RSAMD students: Venue 13 at the Harry Younger Hall in Lochend Close, Canongate (for a map of this location, click here).
Every morning, David had to get up and catch a train from Glasgow into Edinburgh to make it in time to go on stage at 11 am. After he finished his performances in The Square Who Couldn’t Rock ‘n’ Roll, he had about five hours to kill before he needed to return to the Harry Younger Hall to join his fellow actors in Commedia to perform in Passion. These six performances were shorter, clocking in from 6 pm to 6:35 pm. After that, it was back on the train to Glasgow for the evening. And rinse and repeat for those six days!
There’s not much in the way of written documentation from the time of the plays’ performances to help me confirm David’s role in either of these productions (with the exception of both of David’s early CVs) - but over the years, I’ve managed to gather some additional information in order to confirm his participation.
So let’s take a look at what I know about each.
THE SQUARE WHO COULDN’T ROCK ‘N’ ROLL
According to author Brian McCann’s website, The Square Who Couldn’t Rock ‘n’ Roll is a children's operetta with a simple message of equality and fitting in:
It tells the tale of the square who lives in the Land of Circles. He isn't liked much and the circles certainly don't like his corners. The Ruler decides the Square must leave the land of Circles and find his home elsewhere. It doesn't take long till the evil Triangle gets her hands on the poor Square and puts him in her Freak Show, along with a curious bunch of misfits, or mis-shapes! The Circles, under the rule of the Ruler, who has a heart, eventually saves the Square, and all the other shapes.
McCann wrote the play when he was a student at the Wirral Metropolitan College in Birkenhead, England, when he was sixteen. It was the first piece of theatre he ever wrote. The play had its debut performance sometime between May and October of 1984 at the first International Garden Festival in Liverpool.
The following year, McCann stepped into the role of the Square and took the play on the road, performing it all around local Wirral-area schools. The play then lay dormant for a few years while McCann began support tutoring for the Inter-Arts Programme/Creative Arts at his alma mater, Wirral Metropolitan College.
A couple of years later, Made In Glasgow made the decision to put on a production of the play at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, with RSAMD student Joan McVicar doing the directing.
A few years ago I had the pleasure of speaking with Brian McCann and asked him if he knew how this Liverpool-based children’s operetta had suddenly come out of semi-retirement, and how Made In Glasgow might have heard about it. He told me one of the actresses who’d played a role in the show’s original 1984 performance made the suggestion to Made in Glasgow to put on a production of it…a young then-unknown by the name of Louise Delamere. Ah ha! Suddenly everything made sense. Years after her performance in the play, Louise was accepted at the RSAMD and studied on the same BA course as David. And of course, she not only became a good friend of David’s, she’d also become his flatmate.
Given this connection I was surprised to find out from McCann that he hadn’t realized David Tennant had played the lead role of The Square in that production! The news delighted him. McCann told me he remembered traveling up to Edinburgh to see it at the Fringe (as it had been the first thing he’d written and held a special place in his heart) and recalled the performance was absolutely lovely. He also said he didn’t take any photos at the show, though he couldn’t really remember or explain why he hadn’t. What he remembered most was the drink he shared with the cast after the performances, and that they were a nice group of students who were all curious about what future projects he had going on.
McCann went on to become a successful musical playwright and an Artistic Director for Active Drama, a theatre company he founded in 1997. He still writes dramas which bring together educational and social agencies, and - like he did with The Square Who Couldn’t Rock ‘n’ Roll - he still uses musical theatre and comedy to tackle tough subjects like bullying, inequality, and fitting in.
As I mentioned, David’s CV said he’d played the lead role of The Square. But even after talking with Brian McCann, I was no closer to being certain David had been in its Made in Glasgow Fringe 1989 production, since McCann hadn’t been aware David was his lead.
Until November of 2021, that is - when these photos (seen here in their original form) of David in his role as The Square were posted to Twitter. The original poster mentioned he’d found them when he was looking through some photos his grandmother had of his uncle, who was ‘The Circle’ in the production. The photographer just so happened to catch David in them, too!
These photos could have been taken at one of the show’s afternoon runs at the Festival Fringe, or during its one performance in mid-September 1989 at the Chandler Studio Theatre on campus at the RSAMD. I’m not sure which one of the performances it is, but what I do know is that they definitely confirm David’s role!
Speaking of that mid-September production…Made In Glasgow performed this play once more: on the 25th of September 1989 at 7:30 pm at the RSAMD’s Chandler Studio Theatre. It was part of Fresh 1989, heralding the start of the Spring Term.
That performance was announced in various newspapers as well as in the RSAMD’s own Events Programme:
Another thing - you might’ve noticed in the above photos that there’s a fellow playing a Casio synthesizer. That’s because the show was an operetta.
Which means, of course, that David sang!
And while we don’t have any audio recordings of the Made in Glasgow shows (or of David singing and acting in them), we do have Brian McCann’s website, with plenty to look at and hear. He’s got a hand-drawn flyer for the original 1984 show, and some recordings of the songs which he wrote for the show. I happen to think they’re pretty great, so I’ll put one here…and if you like this one, I encourage you to head over to McCann’s website and listen to the others!
This is called “Be One In Yourself”…
"You may as well be somebody else, so /
You're a person, you're one in yourself, so /
Find a way and that's the way you should go /
if you want to be one in yourself, so /
be one in yourself..."
THE PASSION
Sadly, I know a lot less about Passion than I do about The Square Who Couldn’t Rock ‘n’ Roll.
As I said before, Passion was scheduled for six performances from 6 pm to 6:35 pm at the Harry Younger Hall in Lochend Close, Canongate. The play premiered on 14 August 1989 and ended on the 19 August 1989.
Passion was written by British playwright Edward Bond, who wrote it in the 1970s to aid CND, England's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The original staging of Passion was at 5:30 pm on Easter Sunday 1971 by the Royal Court Theatre at an open-aired CND Festival for Life in London, with Norman Beaton as Christ. It wasn’t professionally staged again until 1985.
Unlike The Square Who Couldn’t Rock ‘n’ Roll, I don’t have any information about how or why Commedia decided to perform Passion. However the decision happened, it had been planned since early June, when the above article was printed in the Glasgow Evening Times.
Bond’s Passion delivers a twist on the traditional Easter message of resurrection. It is a short anti-war parable which begins when an old woman’s son is killed in action. His mother asks the Queen to give him back to her, just as she gave him to the Queen at the outbreak of war. But the Queen is reluctant to perform a resurrection and instead consults a magician, who suggests to the Queen that the old woman's request can be avoided if the Queen erects a statue of the old woman’s son instead.
But when the Queen unveils the statue, she presses the wrong button and sets off a nuclear bomb. Afterwards the country is left a wilderness in which we meet Christ and Buddha. Christ is on the way to Calvary and Buddha is looking for peace. And at the end of the play, we return to the thoughts of the dead soldier and his message to the madmen who run the world is only too obvious.
David played the role of Buddha, a relatively minor role in comparison to his lead role as The Square in The Square Who Couldn’t Rock ‘n’ Roll. And even though (perhaps not surprisingly given the rarity of its staging) Commedia’s performance of Passion was reviewed in The Stage, David wasn’t mentioned in the review.
If Passion has piqued your interest, you can read the entire script for the play here.
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And that ends the story of David’s involvement in plays performed at the 1989 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. I hope it’s delighted you to learn that he participated in the Fringe during his drama school years.
I know it delighted me!
I'm always thinking in the different trips that David did between Glasgow and Edimburgh or Dundee.
So love this. Even though I heard of the other plays. I had not heard of The Square before. Thank you.