A Writer at the Theatre (Cecilia Peartree)

 An old friend and I have had season tickets for the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh for as long as I can remember - somewhere between twenty and thirty years, with an inevitable break at the height of Covid lockdowns. Even then the Lyceum was one of the theatres that produced online content,  including a Christmas show filmed on their own stage but without a live audience during one of the early lockdowns, which must have been very hard for the actors but was a treat for the viewers at a time when they were trapped at home and starved of entertainment.

We've also experienced a break from going to the theatre together during this past eight months or so, thanks to my hip injury and some further illnesses for both of us. Neither of us is as steady on our feet as we were before, and actually getting to the theatre is quite an adventure at the moment, so I thought going out to the Christmas show at the Lyceum might get us back into the mood so that we could begin to make use of the season tickets purchased before the above-mentioned illnesses. I invited the friend to stay for a few days, partly to facilitate our theatre outing and partly because the son who lives with me was off to London for a while between Christmas and New Year and I was slightly nervous about being in the house on my own, particularly as I suspect some local squirrels of having breached our defences and moved back into the attic. But that's another story!

The Lyceum Christmas show isn't usually a traditional pantomime, although often based on a fairy tale, and The Snow Queen was no exception. It drew on elements of Scottish and other mythology to do with the seasons, and the cast included a pirate, Highland warriors and a unicorn character, and a backdrop with a silhouette of Edinburgh Castle in some of the scenes. There was music and movement, and some glittering costumes, and it was an excellent piece of entertainment.

At the interval, as we ate our ice-cream, I found myself commenting to my friend that I thought the Snow Queen herself could do with a bit more of a back story, because I didn't think her motivation was very clear! It was almost as if the playwright had been reading my mind, because that was all explained in Act 2. I suppose it's inevitable that, now that some years have elapsed since I helped backstage at amateur productions, I have stopped critiquing the sets and have now apparently turned my attention to the writing. I was quite taken aback by the fact that I'd done it without consciously thinking about it. Just another of the many hazards of spending most of my time working out why people might commit murder (in fiction, that is).

I'm now trying not to think about the first regular production of the New Year, which is a version of Jekyll and Hyde, as I don't want to start coming up with variations on the plot before I've even seen it.