The most prolific theatre company in Europe? It’s on Byres Road

A woman is caressing a wood-burning stove. Her fingers play lovingly over its curves: she strokes its long, strong exhaust pipe and coos sweet nothings into its firebox. It’s an oddly intimate scene; the spell is broken only when she turns to ask if she’s taken things a bit too far. The log burner is hot, but is it that hot?

It’s a Wednesday morning in a bland rehearsal room on Bath Street, and actors MJ Deans and Chelsea Grace are slowly working their way through the opening scene of Eilidh, Eilidh, Eilidh, a new play by Lana Pheutan. They’ve been rehearsing for 10 days, but yesterday they had their first — and only — walk-through on the stage where they’ll perform the piece next week. The experience left them with some questions. “The ceiling above the stage is all in different levels, so you have to work a wee bit harder in some areas, and the sight lines are difficult at points,” says Pheutan, who’s also directing. 

Now they are adjusting their blocking — changing the way they move across the stage, deciding if a coat should be thrown or carefully placed on the back of a chair, calibrating the moment when MJ’s character kicks off her boots — to be sure that everything will work in that unfamiliar space.

If two weeks of rehearsals and just a few hours in the performance venue seems like an intense timetable, it absolutely is, but that’s how they do things at A Play, a Pie, and a Pint. “Everything about theatre is concentrated here into one shot glass of excitement,” Brian Logan, the company’s artistic director, tells me.

A Play, a Pie, and a Pint was dreamed into being in 2004, when David MacLennan’s radical theatre company lost its funding, and publican Colin Beattie was looking for a way to bring cultural programming to Òran Mór, the new venue he was launching in the West End.