On the evening when the sons of two pugilists from the 1990s were pulling back the curtain to try and bring nostalgia to an 18-foot ring in a football stadium, up in Perth, a 1980s film was finding new life as a musical. Nostalgia—might just be what it ought to be…
Restless Natives, as a film, was a slow burn. Happening at a time of renaissance in Scottish film, it had a wistfulness, a whimsy and a joy at its centre. But it also had complexity that over time burnt brightly. People then began to understand its zeitgeist. It was the bleak 1980s when Thatcher was in power and Scotland was dancing to try and convince people that their jig should have been their freedom. So, the story of Ronnie and Will, two hapless Highland highwaymen from a tough Edinburgh Housing Estate, captured the hearts of the nation. They also did rob a few tourists along the way on, of all things, tour buses, but it captured a moment in time of despair and delivered a mythology of the moment of hope. It contributed to helping us through the bleak years of the '80s into the '90s where by the end of that decade, hope had sprung eternal and Scotland had got its parliament back.
The danger here is to see Restless Natives as a political statement. It was not that. It was an emotionally mature social statement. It was saying that if we looked into the hills, we might see the wisp of a hero who was able to come to our emotional aid. After all, this was about how we take tourists around to tell them tall tales filled with unbelievable stories of derring do and heroism. It was the pride of a downtrodden people who wanted to do right, when all they could see to achieve that was to do wrong.
And so, Margot, Ronnie and Will became heroes. Not just ordinary heroes, but wur heroes.
The narrative follows how Ronnie and Will become Dick Turpin-like robbers before Will falls for tour guide Margot, little knowing she is the daughter of the detective inspector who's been sent out to arrest these scallywags. Things become complex when Bender the Texas Ranger, one of the victims early in the capers, joins in the hunt, whilst the escapades of Ronnie (The Clown) and Will (Wolfman) spark demented pride for everyone, personified by Will's dad who wishes that his son was the Wolfman only to find out later that his son was… the Wolfman. All is not well with Ronnie and Will, who then fall out as Margot becomes increasingly important to Will and Ronnie becomes less of a presence in his thoughts. Their fractured relationship ends with Ronnie taking somebody else onto the capers—Nigel. Nigel was bad news, but through elements of jiggery pokery, things all fall into the right place and all ends well.
The film had a motorbike and a bus, and anyone expecting that this is going to have some Miss Saigon-like opportunity to bring both on stage are going to be unfortunately disappointed. This ain't the film, and that's the challenge. If you take one medium and attempt to translate it into another, you will instantly come up against opportunities that were in one media being lost and having to be replaced in the other. The skill of this is that Restless Natives has not lost its naïveté and fun, but adapted and developed it onto a new plain. If you pardon the pun. PS planes don't appear either.
The musical has taken the essence and the core of the original film, the quirkiness, set pieces, the laugh-out-loud moments, and delivered them with great skill because they were about people. In the heart of this, it's about people. It's about a father who has a daughter who's trying to work out just exactly what it is that his daughter wants. That's a perennial issue that is as relevant in 2025 as it was in 1985.
Of course, updating this was impossible because the type of technology that we have now wasn't available to people then. It’s a time of no mobile phones, no cameras, less CCTV, nae Google… Imagine that? It does not make it a simpler or more naïve time, because it’s about a bleak overview. The 1980s were when people felt the oppression of economic circumstances that led them to look outside the box. Will and Ronnie felt outside the box, looking in.
It is, however, predicated on the Big Country music, and there is some additional music added to expand the musicality. The new songs struggle to match Big Country's anthem but do motor everything along as it should do in a musical. Yes of course, there are times when songs appear out of nowhere and people sing in ways that seem to be incongruous with the narrative. But that's what a musical does. It has all the things you expect: the fading light and notes when the lovers kiss and songs that manage to turn somebody's entire thought processes on a pin in a second and make them the opposite of what they've always said they were, but this isn't about a narrative that's driven by character development; this is a musical driven by events that entertain. Having Hilary Brooks as MD loops the hooks and opportunities of a Big Country soundscape but adds arrangements which flow from the pit onto the stage and back out into the auditorium with such grace and ease. If the book, lyrics and music hang thegither, then it is directed with great skill.
Kirstie McLaren as Margot, Kyle Gardiner as Ronnie and Finlay McKillop as Will had huge shoes to fill. The fact is that instead of filling them, what they've done is they flipped them over, changed the colour and adopted a new type of shiny brogue. It has meant that they can skip along with freedom to reinvent and reinterpret characters. At times, you forget who it was who played who in the film; you got to celebrate three bright, fresh-faced young actors simply delivering a damn fine story with some fine tunes. Sarah Galbraith as Bender manages to bring that air of American arrogance, whilst Alan McHugh, Harry Ward, Caroline Deyga, Robin Campbell, Ailsa Davidson, Stuart Edgar, Ava McKinnon and Ross Baxter manage to do a fantastic job in ensuring that every set piece is delivered with pitch-perfect timing. And what set pieces there are—Margot v Bender in a dance-off, that bus announcer, the polis in the shop, Glen Miller etc. etc.
That’s not to say that it is wholly successful, and at the beginning it struggles to find its feet. But once it found its mojo, there was no doubt that this was a success. A distinctly Scottish one, because of the themes of the 1980s, a time when we were looking for heroes and didn't find them. We didn't find them in McGahey, we didn't find them in Scargill or Foot, or Benn. Nobody was to give the chance to be who we are rather than better than what we thought we were. Ultimately, at the end of the day, Restless Natives asked the question and answered it. The question? Wha’s Like Us?