AN extraordinary noise is coming from Mairi Campbell’s mouth. Beautifully lilting, the tones glisten like water, a startling re-enactment of how the musician’s aunties would sing psalms at the dining table when she was growing up. At Hogmanay the family home would host parties: teenagers up in the attic, sleeping infants in the bedrooms, grown-ups and dancing on the ground floor.
Music was everywhere, including, of course, Auld Lang Syne, Burns’s classic long enjoyed around the world from Japan – where it signals the end of a day’s trade in department stores, to the Netherlands where it’s a popular football chant, to the US where it’s brought in the new year for almost 90 years. It was in New York after the Wall Street crash that Italian-Canadian bandleader Guy Lombardo brought the song to a wider audience through radio and TV broadcasts – a tradition carried to this day, when the version by his band The Royal Canadians still plays as the first song of the new year in Times Square.
But as Campbell, pictured, recounts Billy Crystal relating in NYC-set romcom classic When Harry Met Sally, the world’s most weel-kent songs is also the least understood. Many – even many Scots – are unsure how to sing it properly and remain understandably flummoxed as to what on earth a “right gude-willie-waught” is.
All is revealed in this enriching, heart-warming show, the follow-up to Pulse, Campbell’s acclaimed theatrical debut from 2016.
Co-devised and directed by Kath Burlinson, the show uses the Burns song as the pivot around which Campbell weaves stories from her personal and professional life. Blending live music, animation and movement, the viola-player is an elegant storyteller with natural audience rapport, and there’s a delightful honesty which works well with Burns’s story of friendship and shared humanity.
Until Aug 27, Scottish Storytelling Centre, 4.30pm (1hr), £12, £10 concs. Tel: 0131 556 9579. Tickets: bit.ly/ALSMairi mairicampbell.scot @ScotStoryCentre
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