The Kelton Hill Fair review
Atmospheric ghost story set in Dumfriesshire with a cast of colourful characters
Developed in Dumfries and Galloway by skilled young Scottish company Wonder Fools, with support from Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival (D&G Arts Live), Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse’s play initially doubles as a primer for the area’s history. Directed by Nurse, it centres on teenager Flora (Ava Hickey), who has experience of the care system. She’s in trouble with her school and the police for assaulting a teacher (Martin Donaghy), whom she claims is lecherous.
At first the plot appears social realist, until Flora runs off into the woods and finds herself magically transported to an ethereal version of the legendary Dumfriesshire gathering of Travellers at the Kelton Hill Fair, and among a procession of figures from the region’s past.
Jenny Booth’s versatile set is a green hill with a cave, walkway and two staircases within. The characters suggest a rich regional background, and furnish nuanced and interesting confrontations. They include famed Victorian feminist and writer Lady Florence Dixie (Julie Wilson-Nimmo), exiled murderer William Hare of Burke and Hare infamy (Michael Dylan), and celebrated poet and carouser Robert Burns (also Donaghy).
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Meanwhile Billy Marshall (Sam Stopford), the locally renowned 17th-century Traveller leader and ‘Gypsy king’ of Dumfriesshire, moves through the play with a haunted and prickly demeanour that’s somewhat at odds with the carousing that surrounds him. (Stopford steps seamlessly into the role at short notice due to cast illness.) There’s also a contemporary young woman with a Rangers football shirt and a rough tongue, Lizzy (Laura Lovemore). She offers comic relief, and in the second half it’s revealed that all these characters remain in this purgatorial afterlife until the last person who remembers them dies.
At that point, Gordon and Nurse finally ramp up the gothic ghost-story elements. Donaghy’s Burns becomes deeply sinister; the excellent Wilson-Nimmo’s Lady Dixie appears in a cackling, domineering incarnation and Dylan’s savage Hare steals the show with a hilarious song in honour of his crimes, courtesy of composers Stuart Ramage and Roan Ballantine. And at the play’s heart, Hickey’s Flora is a rock, beset by challenges, but heroic and self-assured.
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