“It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century

Then let us pray that come it may,

As come it will for a’ that,

That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth

Shall bear the gree, an’ a’ that.

For a’ that, and a’ that,

It’s coming yet for a’ that,

That Man to Man the warld o’er,

Shall brothers be for a’ that.—

—Robert Burns, “Song—For a’ that and a’ that—”

In most of the English-speaking world, Shakespeare is “The Bard.” However, in Scotland “The Bard” is their national poet, Robert Burns (1759-1796), and his popularity extends far beyond Scotland, having long ago reached global proportions. Since the early nineteenth century there have been annual gatherings called Burns Night Suppers—rife with whisky, tartan, haggis, bagpipes, poetry, singing, and dancing—to celebrate his birthday, now numbering in the thousands worldwide each year.(1) During the same period, well over one hundred plays and musicals about the Scottish Bard’s life and influence have been written and produced. However, in the last thirty years it is rare that a new stage work about Burns is performed in the United States.(2) In 2022, the announcement that transplanted Scot Alan Cumming would star in Burn, a dance theatre piece about the poet, was met with enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic, especially among Burns clubs and societies, Scottish organizations, scholars, Alan Cumming fans, and those in the dance and theatre communities.

For over two-hundred and twenty-five years, since Burns’s death at the age of thirty-seven, there have been ongoing debates about his poetry, patriotism, morals, faith, politics, health, alcohol consumption, sexual prowess, romantic ideals, and cultural impact. Most recently questions about Burns’s mental health, his treatment of women, and his response to slavery have come to the fore. In spite of a life filled with contradictions and complications, his potency as a symbol of Scotland and Scottish identity has only grown stronger. Yet, the challenge for theatre artists is to sift through the layers of oversimplifications that have been imposed on Burns and have often reduced him to one hollow stereotype or another. This is due in part to the tug-of-war to define and claim Burns by different factions and interests. Orcadian novelist and poet Edwin Muir (1857-1959) described the role Burns 's malleability has played in the Scottish psyche:

The myth is endlessly adaptable; so that to the respectable, Burns is a decent man;

to the Rabelaisian, bawdy; to the sentimentalist, sentimental; to the socialist, a

revolutionary; to the Nationalist, a patriot; to the religious, pious; to the self-made man,

self-made; to the drinker, a drinker. He has the power of making any Scotsman, whether generous or canny, sentimental or prosaic, religious or profane,

more whole-heartedly himself than he could have been without assistance; and in

that way perhaps more human(3)

Scottish poet and ethnomusicologist Hamish Henderson described the situation this way: “Like all great artists, Burns has needed a lot longer than his lifetime to come into his own. But the question is: are we ready for him? His own age emphatically was not. Already in his lifetime, attempts were being made to cut him down to size . . . What Scots succeeded in doing with Burns was a truly grisly spectacle. They wanted to turn him into a sort of literary equivalent of Lenin in his tomb. . . . how is it possible to rescue this poor painted, cosmeticized cadaver of a dead poet from the ghastly mess in which they’ve laid him? Can it be done?”(4)  This is the legacy that Cumming and his collaborators were faced with when deciding why and how to embody the Scottish Bard onstage, and the question becomes whether or not they were able to find new ways to frame and understand the complexities of Robert Burns.

Produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, The Edinburgh Festival, and the Joyce Theater, Burn opened August 9, 2022, at the King’s Theatre as part of the Edinburgh Festival. It subsequently toured Scotland, including performances in Glasgow, and concluded its run with six nights at the Joyce Theater, the distinguished dance venue in New York City, in September 2022.

Actor Alan Cumming (creator and performer) and choreographer Steven Hoggett (creator and co-choreographer) have concocted a musical, epistemological, and biographical mediation on Robert Burns. The structure of the event, which lasts about an hour, is a chronological accounting of Burns’s life—the timeline indicated by projections of dates that continue year by year from 1759 to 1788, and then jump to 1796. For the initial fifteen minutes, Cumming used Burns’s 1787 autobiographical letter to Dr. John Moore—edited and often paraphrased—as a first-person monologue delivered via direct address and interspersed with images and dates that flashed on an upstage scrim while he performed dance-like movements and gestures that mimicked parts of the text.(5)

As if employing an elementary form of sign language in this section, Cumming made gestures to emphasize at least one or more words in every sentence, sometimes an entire phrase or idea. Because the gestures were literal, they were often, though perhaps not always intentionally, funny; his dependable, knowing smirk indicated that they were at least clever. However, the larger implication was that the words themselves were insufficient to carry their own meanings. Had the gestures used been in opposition to the dialogue or conveyed action, one wonders if they might not have been cumbersome.

The rest of the hour consisted of edited excerpts from letters by Burns, snatches of his poems and songs, dance sequences, and original music by Scottish composer Anna Meredith. An impressive creative team, including set designer Ana Inés Jabares-Pita, costume designer Katrina Lindsay, lighting designer Tim Lutkin, video designer Andrezej Goulding, sound designer Matt Padden, and illusion consultant Kevin Quantum, collaborated closely to create a whirlwind of light, sound, projection, and charming special effects including chairs that rested upon only one leg, a quill that wrote by itself, and a dress lit from within that emerged airborne from a dark pile of papers and rags. If there was a motif, it was that of extremes; the theatre was rarely silent, the energy on stage swinging from moments of excited sound, music, and dancing, to quieter recitations and lighter, easier movements. If that concept was intended as a metaphor for the concentrated, short life of Burns, it was successful.

Although Cumming remained intensely focused and committed during the entire piece, he often had to compete with the volume of the music or sound effects, and at other times his prerecorded voice was heard while he was in motion. There didn’t appear to be a pattern as to when the recordings of Cumming’s voice were played versus when he spoke live—sometimes after an athletic section of movement, he would breathlessly speak a nearly inaudible stanza by Burns. I counted at least a dozen excerpts from Burns’s poems and songs (from over 700), most unidentified. The choices tended to underline the tone or mood of a given moment and, in some cases, served as a metaphor for an aspect of the story. For example, after excerpts from letters about the grueling life of a farmer juxtaposed with the joys of poetry and love, Cumming recited stanzas from “O Were I On Parnassus Hill.”

Choreographer Hoggett is renowned for his work in physical theatre and his athletic style rooted in text. Co-choreographer Vicki Manderson and Hoggett’s contributions to Burn often began with the rudiments of utilitarian movements, usually related to farming or writing, then at times expanded into modern dance vocabulary, occasionally with what seemed to be touches of ballet and Highland dancing. Advance press for the production on both sides of the Atlantic set forth the allowance that the fifty-eight-year-old Cumming has had no formal training as a dancer.(6) The original score, rarely separated from physical action, recitations, or projections and sound effects, was most often bass line variations on low throbbing, a pulse, or an electronic thumping at high volumes. In and of itself, Meredith’s music was effective, but it seemed indiscriminately used so that it often masked other theatrical elements, creating a cacophonous effect. In addition to being a farmer, a poet, and later an exciseman, Burns was also a lyricist and song-collector, having written lyrics for upwards of three-hundred and fifty traditional Scottish tunes. Whether or not any of those melodies influenced, or were incorporated into, Meredith’s score, was not clear.

The narrative moved from one well-known and well-trod episode in Burns’s life to another: his poor childhood in Ayrshire, his father’s hardships with debt and his early death, Burns’s love of poetry, then of girls, his womanizing, his plan to emigrate to Jamaica, the publication of his poems, his hot-and-cold treatment by the Edinburgh literati, his work in the excise, his illness, and death. Burn is in the tradition of a long line of Burns plays that have promised in their publicity to offer the elusive “real Burns” or the “truth about Burns,” but were unable to deliver.(7) This is an ongoing issue with Burns that artists quite rightly attempt to address: accumulated generalizations and stereotypes about Burns over the last two centuries have frequently resulted in depictions of a rather flat character, instead of a person.(8) Burns’s likeness was used to advertise and sell products from whisky to tobacco, so Cumming was quite justified in declaring that his interpretation would “challenge the ‘Hollywoodised’ and ‘biscuit tin’ image of Burns.”(9)

In Burn, much time was spent recounting some of Burns’s love affairs and tribulations with women, several of whom were at one point effectively represented by shoes hanging on wires, which Cumming spoke to and about, flattered, relished sexually, and swung at contrasting speeds. He concluded this section with a rousing interpretation of the shocking “thundering scalade,” the description of sex with and beating of his wife Jean Armour contained in a 1788 letter to Robert Ainslie (edited in this case, perhaps for more impact).(10) Little context was given for the chain of women whom the audience was meant to understand had been used, abused, and abandoned by Burns, such that there was little or no distinction between the women he courted, corresponded with, wrote love songs about, or fathered children out of wedlock with—all of the latter’s children he acknowledged and supported financially. Cumming shared the women’s stories with an arched eyebrow of conspiratorial lasciviousness, rather than conveying the unguarded or unashamed sexuality attributed to Burns and evidenced in his correspondence and poetry, or much at all by way of the romantic strains central to his love poems and songs. Thus, Burns’s relationships with the women in his life—his mother, siblings, children, friends, girlfriends, and his wife—were mostly left unidentified and unexamined.

Thus far, the most successful and well-known dramatic interpretations of the poet were in the one-person plays There was a Man by Tom Wright and The Robert Burns Story by John Cairney in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. In each, the handsome and charismatic John Cairney (1933-2023) became the personification of Burns on stage and television for several generations of Scots, Canadians, and Americans.(11) Cairney’s dashing, alpha-male stage Burns was exactly what the public would have expected, and likely wanted—he took a “realistic” and sentimental embodiment of Burns as far as it could go. As poet Donny O’Rourke observed, John Cairney was “Rabbie’s representative on earth, eradicating the Nasmyth and other portraits with a single toss of his pony-tailed head."(12)

One way to look at plays about Burns is as “biographies come to life,” since the impulse to tell Burns’s story, or even part of it, usually requires enough biographical context to allow an audience to experience the character of an eighteenth-century Scottish farmer and poet without getting lost.(13) There is a long tradition of trying to cram Burns’s entire life into one theatrical evening instead of choosing a single incident, episode, or aspect to dramatize.(14) The attempt to cover such a vast amount of biographical information in Burn led to frequent oversimplification or misinformation, which has been the case for many of the previous plays and musicals about Burns. In Burn, it was not any errors in the facts offered about Burns that created confusion—Professors Kirsteen McCue and Moira Hansen from the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow were the Academic Consultants for the production—but rather the way in which the information selected was organized into a narrative often felt cursory or disjointed, and many times editorialized more than dramatized the story.

In addition to the pitfalls of a cradle-to-grave biographical play told in one hour, Burn suffered from too many genres, too many subjects, and not enough time.(15) The high-speed combination of stage effects frequently obscured whatever it was we may have been meant to understand or feel. Some of the focus was surprising: the woman whom this Burns talked about the most was Mrs. Frances Dunlop and Burns bore so much humiliation at accepting the job of an exciseman that he fell into a weird self-pity. Certain incidents were cherry-picked such that if one didn’t already know all the primary events of Burns’s life, which most people both inside and outside of Scotland do not, they might be perplexed. One seasoned theatregoer I spoke with mentioned that he hadn’t known about Burns’s love affair with Frances Dunlop and wanted to know more about her.  A middle-aged widow, Dunlop was in fact a friend and correspondent of Burns’s, twenty-nine years his senior, not one of his lovers. This audience member was also surprised to discover that Burns had lived in Jamaica. He had not. It was Burns’s desperation to escape financial ruin as a farmer and leave behind the contentious situation with Jean Armour and her family, that prompted him to self-publish, by subscription. The purpose of what became known as the Kilmarnock Edition of his poems was to raise enough money for passage to Jamaica. In part, because his slim volume of poems became such an immediate and resounding success—not just in Scotland but also when interest was fueled in London by Henry Mackenzie’s glowing review in The Lounger—Burns eventually abandoned his plans to emigrate.(16) That audience member’s misunderstanding was quite understandable considering the frenetic and fragmented ways in which information was conveyed in Burn.

One aspect of Burns’s personality addressed in Burn, not previously explored theatrically, involved contemporary research into the poet’s mental health. Burn introduced the topic primarily using sections of his correspondence that described times of emotional distress, and then, during a shower of strobe lights, images, and sound that accompanied rapid-fire movements from Cumming—likely meant to represent Burns’s mental state when he was overwhelmed—the word “Hypochondria” flashed on the scrim, which at the time was a term used to describe anxiety and depression. This was followed by the word “Hypomania,” its letters beginning to distort. A clinical designation for a condition characterized by dramatic swings of mood, interest, and energy, hypomania is thought to be much like what is now understood as manic-depression or bipolar disorder. It has long been known that Burns experienced extended bouts of profound melancholy; considering the volume and intensity of Burns’s creative output, song collecting, correspondence, friendships and fraternal socializing, love affairs, and his responsibilities with farming, excise, and family that kept him engaged for the duration of his short, thirty-seven-year life, it is quite believable that his manic highs and lows may in hindsight indicate that he suffered from bipolar disorder.(17) However, if any connection was made between the projection of the word “Hypomania” and Burns’s mental state, it was experienced on a visceral level only, lost in the swirl of sound, movement, and light. The words “apoplectic” or “stressed” might have been projected with the same effect.

The most innovative element of Burn was Cumming’s appearance: shoulder-length black hair untied, black fingernails, a ghostly pale whitened face and arms, almost blue in places, darkened lips, and the silhouette of a slender man who appeared to be quite a bit older than Burns was when he died. By creating an incarnation of Burns that bears no relationship to the well-known variations of the ubiquitous Alexander Nasmyth portrait (such as was John Cairney’s Burns), the audience was offered a rare opportunity to view Burns through a different lens.(18) Burns’s immediately recognizable image and established narrative—much like Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the readymade—is ripe for reframing or fracturing to create a new and contemporary understanding of Burns, and quite in keeping with Cumming’s desire to dispense with the Burns of  biscuit tins and bring him to life as a complex person.(19) Even for audience members who were not familiar with the standard Nasmyth image of Burns, they would have recognized immediately that Cumming’s Burns did not appear to be an eighteenth-century farmer.(20) This is where the creators succeeded, by offering a personification unlike any Burns character that has been previously embodied on stage: quite opposite to sometimes hyper-masculine depictions of Burns, and with a sexual ambiguity not previously attributed to the poet. Likewise, the choice to convey a biographical portrait via dance, contemporary music, and sophisticated audio-visual effects, had the potential to broaden our contemporary understanding of the poet.

However, in addition to the Burns character who bears no resemblance to any known image of Burns, we are introduced also to the impish character of Alan Cumming himself, whose public persona is so well known that he also has the effect of a readymade. Further layers are added by the physical, verbal, musical, and visual techniques, so rather than merely a different lens, this Burns is seen through a prism in which not only is the readymade-Burns refracted, it is distorted by the readymade-Alan Cumming character; thus the biographical details, such as they are, take on meanings that may or may not have to do with Burns. How is an audience to know the difference: when are they seeing an embodied Burns from a different angle, and when are they actually witnessing a running commentary on Burns? The evening is therefore as much about Cumming, and often more so, than it is about Burns. Since Cumming has played many characters on stage and screen that bear no immediate resemblance to his public persona as a celebrity, one can reasonably understand that this characterization was a choice; Cumming never got lost in the role of Burns. To the contrary, he seemed to revel in the role of Alan Cumming, as when he ignited some flash paper then cheekily quipped to the audience, “Well, the show is called Burn.”

The choice to portray the character of Cumming in turn portraying the character of Burns may have squandered an opportunity to reveal the humanity of Burns. It meant that the cursory narratives offered about various well-known incidents in Burns’s life, as well as facets of his personality, were reduced to clichés. It was all left for the audience to untangle, or not. Engaging a director or a dramaturge, or some other outside eye, might well have helped to sharpen the narrative and guide the audience’s focus.

The description of Burn by the creators and producers as a “dance theatre” piece is accurate to a large extent—even more so, it is a hybrid that hasn’t prioritized any of its genres. Though much of Burn consists of monologues delivered via direct address—the audience being consistently assigned the role of Cumming’s scene partner—it’s not entirely a play. And while the projections and contemporary trappings are reminiscent of Scottish performance artist and drag king Diane Torr’s (1948-2017) successfully didactic, cross-dressing, and campy Ready Aye Ready (a standing cock has nae conscious) (1992)—about Burns and his collection of bawdy songs and poems, The Merry Muses of Caledonia—Burn is not quite performance art.(21) As it happens, the evening’s reliance on the recognizable persona of Alan Cumming is what gives it much in common with performance art. The combination of the vivid, often beautiful, projections, powerful lighting, intense music, and high energy Cumming sometimes resembled an art installation, except that members of the audience were, of course, unable to come and go as they pleased or share immediate physical space with the performer. The evening didn’t adhere to any traditional definition of a dance concert, and it wasn’t really a spectacle, yet there were times it came close.

Within their construct, Cumming and Hoggett offered arresting theatricality that resonated with Burns’s status as a Scottish icon, such as when Cumming held the ends of what appeared to be a five-foot-long Saltire (the Saint Andrews cross flag) which, as he marched toward the audience rapping the lyrics of Burns’s “Scots Wha Hae” to a contemporary beat, became the long blue cape of a superhero.

In a striking recreation, Cumming appeared in a black long coat and boots facing an upstage projection of mist and snow-covered mountains, replicating the famous painting “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” (1818) by German Romanticist Caspar David Friedrich. Without any context, connective tissue, or narrative link to Burns’s recently accepted status as either an immediate forerunner to Romanticism or an early Romantic, the imposing image remained unexploited.

Another arresting episode resulted from the simplicity with which Cumming stepped in front of the curtain during the final moments of the performance and sat on the lip of the stage with a glass in hand to quietly—without editorializing or indicating from the Cumming/Burns character—speak a stanza from Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne” and raise his glass to the audience. This was possibly the first time since the evening started that there were no sound effects, projections, dramatic lighting, movement, special effects, or music accompanying an encounter between the performer and the audience. Compared to the relentless sound and fury of the previous hour, the result was deeply charged and dramatic.

However, the most powerful moment of the evening occurred during the curtain call. It was a revelation of truth and intense connection with the audience: a breathless and sweaty Cumming bowed before the applauding theatregoers, then stood and accepted their approval in stillness, a grave and vulnerable look of gratitude on his face. I wondered where that guy had been for the last hour.

Alan Cumming in Burn, posing as a recreation of “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” (1818) by

German Romanticist Caspar Friedrich, photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan. (Used by permission of The National Theatre of Scotland.)

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