Mr Government was a new play by Stuart Paterson about life in a rural community in Ayrshire.
I played Donal, a boy with learning difficulties, and I remember that this was the first time that I actually understood acting. I don't know how to describe it. Something clicked, or loosened up, or I let go in some way. Whatever, one day on stage, I just sort of had a breakthrough and realized that I could inhabit this person and it wasn't really like the acting I had been doing or had thought I had to do up to that point. I just felt that something opened inside me and I was more connected to the character. So I have a special fondness for this play and the experience I had. I got to work with great Scottish actresses like Caroline Paterson and Juliet Cadzow, and again with Martin Black who had been in Macbeth.
Funnily enough, many years later this play would be reworked and produced again at the Traverse Theatre as King of the Fields, directed by John Tiffany who directed me in The Bacchae and Macbeth over twenty years later.