Dungeons, Dragons, and the Quest for D***
It’s a wet day in Glasgow today. It was wet when we travelled up yesterday and stopped at Gretna Green on the way. Unfortunately, it was a stop for a pub lunch and my husband hid behind his menu.
But here we are in a flat a few minutes walk away from George Square. Our play starts at 1pm, but I hope to see the Alasdair Gray murals in the upstairs room first.
The play is written and directed by Laila Noble and enacted by Bea Webster and Ciaran Stewart [see the first photograph]. Here is how the play is introduced:
A deaf queer comedy about finding love in a hopeless place…with dragons!
Finn is here, queer, but not very used to it. At some point, between flying the pride flag and learning all the words to ‘Born This Way’ he forgot to fall in love, have his first kiss or…well, anything.
When best friend, and resident dungeon master, Wiley discovers Finn’s woefully unexplored waters they hatch a plan – a quest to find love, or failing that, maybe just a quick fumble around the back of the dragon’s lair.
It sounds fun, I think as I sit in our holiday flat, and I will continue as things happen. Awa’ to Òran Mór, once Kelvinside Parish Church.
We arrived at Byres Road, somewhat frazzled by the diversions created by the closure of the Western Road approach from the M8, found a parking place with much stress, and took Daisy to the Botanic Gardens.
Daisy chased a squirrel and then went into a mild terror, so we sat with her in Waterstones for a coffee. A biscuit cheered her
Then to buy more parking time, [£1 per 15 minutes], and to Òran Mór, just pausing to see the wonderful cosmic symbol on the spire, framed by a very wet grey sky:
Daisy ensconced in the car, we were early enough inside Òran Mór to ask for an escort to see the painted roof by Alasdair Gray. You go up 2 floors to the church space, used for communal events like concerts and weddings. The spiral staircase is atmospheric.
The hall space itself spectacularooking up to the roof painting:
The young man (a charming Glaswegian in his 20s, proud of his place of employment and repectful.of its history and his colleagues also working there) then took me further up to the choir space for a closer look at the murals in the original apse:
I spoke earlier of the young Glaswgian guy’s respect for his colleagues. He ended his tour by showing us Gray’s mirror art bearing the face of the makers and workers at Òran Mór. Gray valued people in an explicitly non-hierarchixal manner. all of these were collegiate makers of the art of Òran Mór. The young guy, though he said he would be 4 at the time of the painting, still felt part of this group, some of which still worked at Òran Mór.
Gray appears himself only in half face below, on the left.
But the pride of place, to the left of the access to this upper hall, are the pride of the whole: The Labourers.
Back downstairs, we viewed the bar:
Then we go downstairs again, via another spiral stairway to the crypt theatre. Where you pick up your pie [vegan sausage roll for us] and pint [bottle of no-alcohol lager].
And then we waited for the show to begin, after which no photographs were allowed.
The play itself was just shy of an hour long and set in their upstairs bedsit room, in their mother’s flat of Wiley played by Bea Webster. The play opens in a British Sign Language (BSL) recreation of a game of Dungeons and Dragons (DnD), for this us how Wiley fills their time, creating scenarios filmed for display on social media.
Wiley’s best friend, Finn, played by the adorable Ciaran Stewart, arrives to tell of a date he has in the offing that he feels afraid to attend, even though he thinks the guy, named Richard, might be a possible contender for the lover rather than just a lover. The issue, however, is that Finn has never had sex with anyone before, though he has claimed / lied to Wiley that he has. The answer Wiley thinks is for Finn and Wiley to enact how fear of sex might be defeated using a set of imagined DnD scenarios. The highlight of the play is the fine BSL enactment of the taming of sexual Fearfright, the second and only other one to be done with voiced language as well, which stuns snd somehow makes the fear of erectile dysfunction or laughable sexual.performsnce capacity not only fun to see enacted but really meaningful. It is a theme contributed to in mime, clever use of properties, including the ‘erection’ of a bed tent using a pole to represent a mountain overshadowing a town compounded of the fear of sex, as well as some fine dual-language dialogue.
Wiley, however, is no saint in doing this for Finn because their aim is to film the saucy scenario without Finn’s consent, and indeed against his expressed wish, and improve their number of hits on TikTok. Moreover, Wiley’s own life is shown to be sadder than others. It is a sadness that is not relieved by the end of the play, but neither is it made a sentimental thing. Lonely lives filled up with fantasy are accepted as one of the means of living out our the differences we have with each other by the end of the play. Wiley over-romances their own and Finn’s life: Richard has to become Richardo. There is a simple kind of moral to the play that rather cuts a tangent across romance’s circumference. Finn realises that, in the event, obsession with either Richardo or Richard is not his true goal, at least not his first goal. He must first learn to love dick and himself in relation to dick, and not that just provided by Richard, before he substitutes life for fantasy, even tje ordinary element we all need.
I won’t give other and more fundamental story spoilers and tell you what happens. See it yourself. You will enjoy it. It is a story full of fun and a with a more visceral grasp of the duration of the coming out process than usual. You end up loving the characters, and that is probably because the cast itself is lovable, like part of a chosen family you have just accessed.
If you are in Glasgow this week, see it.
With love
Steven xxxxxxxx
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