‘EVERYBODY’S got a story,” explains the faceless immigration officer on stage. “The Home Office prefers facts.”
But with Glasgow Girls, the musical based on the true story of seven schoolgirls from the city’s Drumchapel who came together to fight dawn raids and the detention of asylum seeking families, you get both.
Theatre maker and director Cora Bissett had the unlikely light bulb moment that the girls’ experiences needed a musical treatment after watching Lindsay Hill’s documentary Tales From The Edge.
Infected with the teenage energy fizzing on screen, she believed it was a story screaming out to be told through song.
She hoped it would be a way of getting more people to listen. More than eight years later, after a whirlwind of tours – the last one was in 2016 – and a clutch of awards, Glasgow’s King’s Theatre is packed out for this latest production. It looks like she was right.
Roza Salih: How our lives inspired Glasgow Girls tale of solidarity
With the talents of veteran playwright David Greig and a diverse array of music from the Kielty Brothers, Patricia Panther and MC Soom T as well as Bissett herself, how could it fail to deliver?
But I remember waiting for the curtain to go up at the Citizens Theatre in 2012 and, despite excitement, wondering just how songs and dances about child detention were going to play out.
Of course, it was a total blast; heart stopping, uplifting, poignant and funny all in equal measure.
Now Raw Material, in association with Regular Music, are bringing it back, this time to mainstream musical venues – including the King’s Theatres in both Glasgow (until last night) and Edinburgh (until January 26).
So a change of venue, yes. The excitement is still there, and also the niggles of worry – will its urgent vim and vitality still be there?
Tonight I’m also joined by my daughter, now just a few years younger than these girls when their 15-year-old friend Agnesa Murselaj – A Roma asylum seeker from Kosovo – was taken to Dungavel detention centre in 2005. How will she relate to this story, written about events happening in her city before she was even born?
As soon as the cast explode on to the stage – birling around the stark but effective stage set combining the balconies of the Kingsway flats in the city’s Scotstoun with the rusted swings of the playpark below – the questions vanish.
Roza, Ewelina, Amal, Agnesa, Jennifer and Emma, working in tight formation with the help of sharp, smart choreography by Barrowland Ballet’s Natasha Gilmore, are just as fierce; inspire just as much belief.
There is heartbreak – clever use of lighting and sound design during the dawn raids hit home hard. “No-one tells you it happened like that,” says my daughter who thinks those are the scenes that give it real power.
But there’s humour too – often from Noreen, another real-life heroine who organised early morning patrols to keep watch for the Home Office vans, played knowingly by Terry Neason.
“Can I take your shopping for you, Noreen?” asks Roza in the opening number. “Oh no, dear, you just get on with your montage,” she quips back.
She never wanted to be in a musical, she tells us in the second half, but “the creative team” talked her into it.
Her character is part narrator, makes light of the heavy lifting on the issues, and is a friendly guide though this new world she and her neighbours all found themselves flung together in.
Because this is a celebration of community, a tribute to the ordinary people of Glasgow who stepped in to help their neighbours, regardless of their immigration status.
“People see a working-class community and they think: ‘bigots’,” Noreen says. But not in Glasgow, she argues, where solidarity came in with the bricks. Defending the powerless is a badge to be worn with pride, from the days of Mary Barbour’s rent strikes and Red Clydeside, to the recent protests over asylum housing provider Serco’s proposed evictions.
There’s plenty of politics. First Minister Jack McConnell, played for laughs by Callum Cuthbertson, stars in a gold lame suit – a politician-come-Elvis character who sees an opportunity to make his name by backing the girls’ campaign.
For young people today, he’s clearly no longer a household name. But my daughter assures me she gets it regardless – he’s a politician who promises something that he doesn’t know if he can deliver on.
The power that the Glasgow Girls have is to remind him of his duty to them, not just as a politician, but as a fellow human.
Their power too is in the way they were able to articulate this story, first to their teachers, fellow pupils and neighbours, who signed a petition to release Agnesa, then to the media, to the politicians, to documentary makers, and writers like Bissett.
In the poignant song From The 16th Floor, when the girls retreat back to the Kingsway flats that have become their home, they sing that Glasgow “tells stories better than any of them”.
The Glasgow Girls is a story about a group of teenagers, but this musical is also about a movement.
It reminds us that this story has a legacy. And it’s being woven in to the city’s history, right in front of our eyes.
Glasgow Girls will be performed at Edinburgh King’s Theatre (January 23-26), Perth Theatre (January 30 - February 3) and Inverness Eden Court (February 7-9)
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