Wallace

An upside-down stag hangs over the stage as the haze rises. The ensemble emerge in black: gothic, shining, latex, dark. Wallace presents a hip-hop concert telling the story of a Scottish national hero, but its real subject is how and why that hero, and the nation around him, got made.

Ross Mann spends much of the first half making the case for Wallace, in a show pitched somewhere between Hamilton and Six. The hip-hop beats have an addictive pull throughout, even though the lyrics do not always punch to that weight. Manasa Tagica’s King Edward brings a brutish charisma to the early material, while Madeline Grieve’s Hesselrig carries real force, particularly when her tunic turns to blood. When the production makes attempts at violence, though, it often reaches for volume instead: the “kill them all” number flattens the North Berwick massacre rather than giving it tension and space. Voices disappearing in the bass-heavy mix only make that harder to find.

DJ Wallace himself, played by Dave Hook, is unassuming, unheroic, unrhetorical, purposefully no Mel Gibson. Once he steps out from behind his decks, the show gets to the questions that make it worth its salt: whether Wallace was a hero, a terrorist, or even existed at all. We are told that “the line between hero and villain isn’t actually a line, it’s a forest.” Tagica’s Edward starts to gain more character here, and the telling of these historical figures becomes less fixed. It is only a shame it takes the entire first act to get us here.

With the stag now fallen, the rap battle gives the second half a form for arguing over names, language and national stories. This is where the show teeters on something interesting, but the historiography can displace the music and the dramatic momentum. One seems to come at the price of the other: when the historiography gains weight, the musical recedes, and so on. Wallace wants a “Future reimagined, remixed, not rewritten”, but its ability to do that ultimately does not arrive.

Wallace by Raw Material. Credit Raw Material Arts.