KELI at The Royal Lyceum: a bittersweet mix of sadness and euphoria

The Herald Scotland

16-05-2025

When the massed ranks of Scottish brass champions the Whitburn Band join forces at the end of Lau accordionist and guitarist Martin Green's new play, alternating with the Fife based Kingdom Brass, the sound they make together is one of unity laced with a bittersweet mix of sadness and euphoria. As the culmination of a show about working class experience in a former mining town decimated by the 1984/85 Miners' Strike, it is a finale that speaks volumes about everything that went before.
This is embodied by the seventeen-year-old firebrand who gives Green's play its title. Keli's everyday life may be in chaos as she tends to her mum inbetween shifts at the supermarket and a failing college course, but when she plays her tenor horn with the local brass band she comes alive. Keli's musical skills are recognised by bandleader Brian, who promotes her to soloist for a competition at the Royal Albert Hall.
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While Keli makes it to London, trying to make the Megabus home takes her on a different path, and she ends up playing her horn at a techno fuelled fetish club. All this is framed by a back and forth between Keli and the ghost of miner and trade unionist Willie Knox after Keli ends up falling down an old pit. Willie's own tenure in the band is spoken of with awe, and his presence is a wake up call for Keli to channel her own talents.
Developed from an audio drama and a one off live rendition at the Celtic Connections festival, Green's play taps into the power of music to reclaim and reinvigorate a local culture. Artist Jeremy Deller did something similar in the late 1990s with the soon to be revived Acid Brass, in which a brass band played arrangements of Acid House classics from the post-industrial north. Keli's own clubbing experience here confirms Deller's belief that both brass bands and techno are cross-generational forms of folk art rooted at the heart of specific communities. Forty year after the Miners' Strike, they remain vital forms of expression in a play where music becomes salvation and totem of hope.
Green's brass-led underscore played live by a small ensemble led by tenor player Andrew McMillan runs throughout Bryony Shanahan's co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland and Green's Lepus company. Liberty Black gives a mercurial performance as Keli, with Phil McKee making a touching Brian, who understands the need to believe in something in order to survive. Billy Mack as Willie Knox believes this too. It's only life that gets in the way, be it in the form of Keli's mum Jayne, played by Karen Fishwick, or Olivia Hemmati's Amy, who works with Keli. If the band steal the show as they preserve a sense of belonging rooted in the past, Keli's getting of wisdom points to a brave new world beyond.