This Is Memorial Device by Graham Eatough & David Keenan – Wee Red Bar, Edinburgh

David Keenan’s novel has become a cult in its own lifetime. His completely convincimg and entirely fictional etymology of the early 1980s Airdrie alternative music scene is beautifully written and can only have come from someone who was there. As a stage version it has a ready-made audience consisting of people of a certain age who were also there. Yet it’s not obvious how such a literary work could be successfully staged. Fortunately, as a one-man show fronted by the excellent Paul Higgins, it works a treat. Adaptor and director Graham Eatough casts him as the central narrator Ross Raymond, and we believe him entirely as he explains how legendary band Memorial Device played a gig “in this very room”. Higgins gives a masterclass, constructing the characters from shop dummies as he describes them, and even playing their instruments for them. Other characters give their testimony on filmed clips, including Mary Gapinski, Julie Wilson Nimmo and Sanjeev Kohli – all very funny. Keenan’s achievement is to create something that seems more real than the reality, a shared myth that we can all claim a part of because none of us were there. Of course it ends in disappointment and failure as all mythologised times must do. At the end of the evening, the man sitting behind me, big, bearded and in his 50s, was in tears, which says it better than any review.