Joint Winner of The Hector MacMillan Best New Scottish Play 2019
Photograph by Lara Cappelli
The Play
Salisbury Crags. Twilight. A woman takes a step forward into the air. A teenage boy pulls her back. Two lives are changed forever. Libby whiles away her days in New Town cafes and still calls herself a writer. Declan is a talented young artist struggling with a volatile home on the city’s outskirts. As they form an uneasy friendship, complicated by class and culture, Libby spots an opportunity to put herself back on track, and really make a difference. She needs his story. But does she have a right to it? Frank, unflinching and threaded with unexpected humour, Mouthpiece takes a look at two different sides of Edinburgh that exist in ignorance of one another, and asks whether it’s possible to tell someone else’s story without exploiting them along the way.
Mouthpiece is a Traverse Theatre Company production.
The Playwright
Kieran is a writer, performer, and theatre maker based in Glasgow. This basically means that sometimes he writes stuff that he’s in, sometimes he writes stuff that other people are in too; sometimes he does this on his own, sometimes he does it in a way that involves other people.
Past work includes Rantin, a ceilidh-play with music created for the National Theatre of Scotland and the Arches; Beats, a monologue performed with a DJ created with Arches Platform 18 Award; Hitch, an autobiographical story with a live band; Chalk Farm, co-written with AJ Taudevin originally for Òran Mór and subsequently touring internationally in a production by ThickSkin; and a number of short plays including Belcoo and Bruises (Royal Court); and Close, Amanda, and London 2012: Glasgow (Theatre Uncut). Beats won Best New Play at the Critics’ Awards For Theatre in Scotland, which Hitch had been nominated for previously.