There are those of us from a certain generation that grew up with Restless Natives.
I remember it being screened on Channel 4 while still at St Mark’s Primary School in Oxgangs. The next day my classmates were buzzing with tales of the Clown and the Wolfman riding on a Suzuki motorbike and holding up buses. They presented a new kind of Scottish hero from just down the road in Wester Hailes.
Part of it was seeing characters with accents like yours, they were modern day folk heroes robbing the rich to literally throw money around Edinburgh council schemes.
Forty years later the story returns with a new stage production which arrives in Edinburgh this month at Leith Theatre exactly four decades after the film premiered in Edinburgh’s ABC cinema in June 1985.
Original Restless Natives screenwriter and now lyricist Ninian Dunnett and director Michael Hoffman invited Sarah Galbraith to be part of an original workshop for the new musical version just after Covid-19. The role she was invited to play had a certain amount of heft thanks to the great character actor Ned Beatty who played American cop Bender. In the original film he gets involved in the police chase to capture Will and Ronnie. (This time around Bender remains American but he has changed gender.) “I didn’t know they were going to switch the role” said Sarah of Bender’s transition from male to female, “but like the character, I was an American in Scotland.”
Galbraith is now based in Falkirk with her husband and daughter. “Later I asked Michael Hoffman and he explained that he hadn’t really thought about it, but decided it would be great for this version. They’ve developed this brilliant story around her and the reason she really wants to catch these boys is because of issues with her dad. It’s a cool transition.”
While the original film is packed with Scottish banter and humour, it was also political with an undertone of Scottish nationalism. It’s fair to say anti-Thatcherite themes were more obvious. Ms Galbraith said: “The production does have a moral compass, there’s dialogue where the characters talk about tourists spending £20 on a pair of plastic bagpipes while they are underpaid. Will’s moral compass kicks in and he wants to give the money away to help people. The scene where money is fired out of these cannons to his community with people picking up the money is very powerful. Ronnie goes more off the deep end and is more into the badness (of robbing). It’s really all about how you ‘stick it to the man’ and make more of yourself than what was ever expected of you.”
The production has been successfully touring Scotland where certain audiences have cheered when the classic line is recited ‘I hold up buses’.
Edinburgh is central to the story with locations such as Wester Hailes, Princes Street, North Bridge and Salisbury Crags all included in the original film. The bus station scene was said to have been filmed in Glasgow but the yellow Bar-Ox (a teenage gang from Oxgangs) spray paint on the escalator suggests otherwise. Now north Edinburgh will become part of the story when Restless Natives arrives at the regenerated Leith Theatre.
Sarah said: “We are looking forward to arriving in the capital where the story is set. It’s a home-grown Scottish musical, there are lots of jukebox musicals now but as well as the original Big Country material there’s new music written by Tim Sutton. The sounds very much belong in the 80s in terms of the Big Country guitar riffs as well as the kinds of sounds you might recognise from an advert or something that could only be from that time.”
The much loved Big Country soundtrack amplified the Scottish underdog spirit of the film, and Will’s fascination with Rob Roy also added a further swashbuckling romance. The musical, much like the original film, suggests it’s time for Scotland to produce new stories and heroes. Sarah added: “The tourists are no longer interested in the original Scottish heroes. They want to know about these new ones. As the policeman says at the end ‘spending is up, tourism is up; you’re bigger than the Loch Ness Monster’. These boys become the Scottish heroes of the times”.
Ned Beatty was persuaded to take on the original role of Bender for £25,000, a kilt and a Scottish holiday.
Sarah agrees there are resonances with herself and the character. She arrived in Scotland after growing up in New Jersey and meeting her husband while singing on a cruise ship. She said: “I was about 15 minutes from New York and my thing growing up was Broadway shows. In those days you could get tickets for the last row for around $15. My idol was Lea Salonga who was the original voice of Jasmine in the Disney film Aladdin, I would go and see her in Miss Saigon and Les Misérables, really anything she was in”.
Sarah achieved something of an American dream when she met Lea and became her backing singer for UK tours and a subsequent Christmas tour of the states. She will carry on in that role later this year.
“I met my idol and now I sing backing for her”.
Sometimes dreams do come true.
Restless Natives is at Leith Theatre from June 7 to 21 2025
