Latest news with #LibertyBlack
The Courier
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Courier
Star of brassy new play 'knocks it out the park' as Keli heads for Dundee and Perth theatres
Both the play and the star bite off slightly more than they can chew, and that's part of the fun of Keli. The National Theatre of Scotland's brand new touring play, which began in Edinburgh last week and will next be seen in Dundee and Perth. Set in a fictional Scottish ex-mining town halfway along the M8, a lot of people from similar towns and villages in Fife and across the Central Belt will recognise the setting. The place's glories are behind it, and teenage Keli's (Liberty Black) days are filled with working in the local supermarket and struggling to look after her mentally unwell mum (Karen Fishwick) alone. Yet Keli lives for playing tenor horn in the local brass band, a remnant of the town's colliery days, and she's really good at it. When a chance comes for the band to play the Royal Albert Hall in London, it's make or break – but with the pressure she's under, Keli seems likely to break. Seeing what Martin Green, one-third of celebrated folk trio Lau, does with this self-penned play which stems from a fascination with the brass bands around his local area in Midlothian. The results are a mixed bag, with the inclusion of a dragged-up rave sequence in the heart of London and a ghostly visitation by long-dead local brass band legend Willie Knox (Billy Mack) amid designer Alisa Kalyanova's stark coalmine set suggesting the play's trying to do too many things at once. Yet there are real moments of beauty, especially in the way four players (including MD Louis Abbott, of indie group Admiral Fallow) provide a haunting soundtrack throughout, with director Bryony Shanahan cleverly placing tenor horn player Andrew McMillan alongside Keli when she 'plays'. Incredibly, this is young actor Liberty Black's professional stage debut, and she knocks it out of the park, bristling with tension, dark humour and anxious energy. Similarly, young Olivia Hemmati also steals her scenes as blunt, vaping shopworker Amy and posh London raver Saskia. The finale, a hymn to the uplifting social power of music soundtracked by a real brass band (Whitburn or Kingdom, depending on when the play's seen), is also incredibly uplifting. It's almost worth the admission alone. You're looking for a heartwarming, Brassed Off-style tale of working class grit and determination. Keli is uplifting in its own way, but its darker, more dreamlike style and the sweary Scots dialogue give it an edge all of its own. 3/5
Times
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Keli review — music is the star in a gritty brass band drama
Tales of British mining communities threatened by pit closures are familiar from hit films such as Brassed Off and Billy Elliot. Martin Green's Keli is in some ways the next chapter in that story. Written and with music by Green (the accordionist from the folk band Lau), the show, which had its premiere at the Royal Lyceum, is set in the recent past in a depressed former mining town halfway between Edinburgh and Glasgow. The pit may be long gone, but the local brass band, once a vital part of the mining life, plays on. The star of the Snaresbrook Mineral and Coal Company Band is Keli (Liberty Black), a gifted tenor horn player, who, at 18, is weighted down by a challenging home
The Guardian
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Keli review – a brass band player's search for solidarity
Towards the end of Martin Green's brass-infused play for the National Theatre of Scotland, there is a resonant metaphor. It makes the connection between directing the breath to play a wind instrument and dealing with life's stresses. 'The skill is in controlling that pressure,' says Keli, a 17-year-old tenor horn player who knows all about pressure. On her plate is a thankless job in a supermarket, a mentally ill mother and a solo spot in a national brass band competition. Making an impressive professional debut, Liberty Black is vigorous and tough in the lead role, a young woman so used to having her defences up, she cannot see when she is being helped – not least by band leader Brian (an avuncular Phil McKee). All she knows is that music gives her order. Keli is a young woman rooted in the landscape. Hers is a village shaped by its industrial heritage, traumatised by the miners' strike and muddling on by in a resolutely modern world. Although Alisa Kalyanova's set cannot decide whether to be literal or impressionistic, its cavernous black walls never let us forget this is a community built on coal. Community is behind another of Green's metaphors, one that resonates less than it should. Falling into a collapsed coalmine, Keli meets the long-dead Willie Knox (a sonorous Billy Mack), famed not only for his prize-winning tenor horn playing, but also for heroically surviving a mining accident. An old-school socialist, he is thinking of both music and industry when he eulogises the 'combined efforts of determined souls'. It is a powerful sentiment, but in focusing so tightly on one woman's story, the play is less about the communal than the individual. Only when, magnificently, the Whitburn Band (alternating with Kingdom Brass) takes to the stage at the end of Bryony Shanahan's production do we get a sense of collective endeavour. At the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 17 May. Then touring until 14 June
Scotsman
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Lau's Martin Green on Keli, his new National Theatre of Scotland show: 'I fell in love with brass bands'
Telling the story of a tenor horn player from a fictional Central Belt mining village who heads to London for a brass band competition, Keli has been a complicated balancing act for its creator Martin Green, who both wrote the script and composed the score. Interview by Mark Fisher Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... What happens when a composer becomes a playwright? Take the case of Martin Green. He is the accordionist best known for his work with Lau, the nu-folk band he plays in with Kris Drever and Aidan O'Rourke. He is also something of a multi-hyphenate. In the 2016 Edinburgh International Festival, he brought together musicians and stop-motion animators to share stories of migration in Flit. During lockdown, he released The Portal, a richly crafted podcast for which he wrote and narrated a time-spanning detective story. Later, for BBC Radio 4, he made Dancers At Dawn, which made unexpected connections between Morris dancing and rave culture. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Now, for the National Theatre of Scotland and his own Lepus Productions, he is writer and composer of Keli, a play about a tenor horn player from a fictional Central Belt mining village who heads to London for a brass band competition. According to Liberty Black, who plays the title role, one thing you get with a musician for a playwright is extraordinarily precise feedback. Liberty Black in rehearsals for Keli | Julie Howden 'He said to me, 'I've rewritten some of these lines because you're funny with consonants,'' says the Clydebank actor, who is in her final year at the Royal Conservatoire Of Scotland. 'I asked him what he meant and he said, 'Well, some people are vowel funny and you're funny with consonants.' I would not have known that about myself!' Bryony Shanahan, the director, observes something else. She has no trouble describing Keli, but when she tries to define its genre, she is stumped. 'This is not a play that has sections of brass music in between the scenes,' she says, sitting in the Glasgow headquarters of the National Theatre of Scotland, her poodle lying obediently on her lap. 'It is an underscore. It's sort of like a musical without songs. Or is it like an opera? I don't know! The music is a personality on its own. It is a twin to telling the story.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Martin Green and Bryony Shanahan in rehearsals for Keli | Julie Howden What Shanahan does know is the emotive power of the music in a show that features a live brass band, either West Lothian's Whitburn Band or Fife's Kingdom Brass. 'There's something about 25 people playing,' she says. 'Last week, I was really trying to keep it together. It made me suddenly want to cry and I wasn't sure exactly why. It's a certain chord that gets struck or a peak they hit musically and it is this massive emotional thing.' Green himself is uncertain where one job ends and the other begins. In the first week of rehearsals, he felt like a playwright because the focus was on the text; by the second week, he felt more like a music maker. 'It certainly doesn't feel like we've got a blueprint,' he says. 'Even if we wanted to phone it in by numbers, it would be hard.' The play started to take shape at the same time as Green's three-part BBC Radio 4 documentary series, Banding: Love, Spit and Valve Oil. Living in Newtongrange, Green became intrigued by a Midlothian landscape shaped by coal fields and a popular culture that found expression in brass bands. Seduced by the mournful sound, and impressed by the musicians' dedication to be the best, he determined to compose his own brass scores. 'I fell in love with the music but also just brass bands as a community-music phenomenon,' says Green, who programmed the Whitburn Band alongside Lau and Joan As Police Woman at Leith Theatre in 2018. 'Radio 4 were the first people to bite, but the drama had started well before the completion of the documentary.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Writing an original score – released last year as Split The Air – meant not only learning the characteristics of each instrument, but also going beyond pastiche and resisting the pull of Hovis-advert cosiness. 'It's so powerful,' he says. 'As soon as you hear one tenor horn, you start floating off. I spent a long time trying to make the pieces of music not too nostalgic. The dialogue helps because it can put a bit of lemon juice in the sugar. Liberty said something really interesting, which is that the horn is a smooth and legato instrument, but Keli's speech patterns are staccato and percussive.' The story he tells is about a 17-year-old musician juggling with her final year at college, a job in Scotmid, a competition at the Royal Albert Hall and caring for her housebound mother. It is determinedly modern, even if the past hangs heavy over a post-industrial landscape that, 40 years on, is still haunted by the miners' strike. Liberty Black in rehearsals for Keli | Julie Howden Making her professional debut, Black is drawing on the local knowledge of tenor horn player Andrew McMillan, a fellow final-year student who plays with the Whitburn Band. Despite being born decades after the strike, she understands a legacy that affects her generation even now. 'In Scotland, there is a hatred of Thatcher and everything that she represents that is almost genetic,' she says. 'Before I had a concept of who she was, I had heard the phrase 'Margaret Thatcher, the milk snatcher'. I don't have any familial relations to the mines, but I have a lot of familial relations to industry and the seeds of individualism that were planted at that point are still affecting communities today. The play explores what is the modern young person's relationship to that.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Shanahan warms to the play's vision of communal endeavour, one that recalls the camaraderie of Same Team: A Street Soccer Story, the Traverse Theatre hit for which she received a best-director nomination in the CATS awards. 'I love the analogy that being a brass bander is like being involved in a sport,' she says. 'It doesn't matter if it's football or music, it's wonderful when people can come and be together. It can be tough as well. The play does not romanticise: the level that these bands are playing at is really serious and people can feel the pressure. But at its heart, it declares that music and coming together is good for us and should be protected – and it's quite easy for me to get behind that.'
