Victor MacIlvaney and Barry McLeish , founder members of the Kelvinside Young People’s Amateur Dramatic Art Society finally, actually, truly said goodbye. They died as the would have wished, on stage at the London Palladium when they performed as part of a Lyric, Hammersmith theatre fundraiser.
Victor slumped onto the keys of the piano, while Barry fell into a theatrical hamper.
In 1992, the director/designer David Ultz asked me to collaborate with him on a new adaptation of the Russian play Dragon by Yvgeny Schwartz, which was to be produced by the Royal National Theatre later that year.
The play concerns a village that lives under the thrall of a dragon, but as the play progresses it turns out there is no dragon at all, and really the dragon represents a fear that they need to have as they have been so conditioned to it for so long. The play was also a thinly veiled attack on the communist regime Schwartz was living under.
This was a really difficult play to adapt. There were so many things in it that didn’t translate well, and we wanted the show to have a very urban, modern feel to it that kids could relate to. I think there was a big mistake in using Spitting Image for the animatronics and then putting a big dragon on the poster. Because of course, there was no dragon, and so a lot of kids were really disappointed when the play ended and they hadn’t seen one.
But I still have a Dragon ruler which the National shop sold.