King of Scotland' and 'The Tobacco Merchant's Lawyer'
By (Author) Iain Heggie
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Methuen Drama
1st August 2011
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
822.914
Paperback
96
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 8mm
136g
King of Scotland is an award-winning, dark comedy and a free adaptation of Gogol's A Diary of a Madman.
Long term unemployed Tommy McMillan joins a government funded retraining scheme Up The Ladder'. Cited as a shining example of the government's employment policies and chosen for a media profile, Tommy is taken on by The Department of Upward Mobility. The department gets more than they bargained for when they discover just how far up the ladder Tommy is expecting to go.
The piece features trouserless bankers, talking dogs, flying taxis and a razor-sharp parody of the workings of politics, King of Scotland is an outrageous Fringe First winning monologue.
This volume also contains the biting satire The Tobacco Merchant's Lawyer. Set in 1780, when Glasgow is booming, but the American war is looming, and the city's wealth is dependent on the import and export of American tobacco. Cantankerous and impoverished, Enoch Dalmellington is more harried by problems: how to marry off his dreich pious humourless daughter Euphemia, being able to afford his pew at the Tron Kirk, and what to do about Mistress Zapata's scurrilous predictions about Glasgow in the twenty-first century.
Award-winning playwright Iain Heggie is one of Scotland's leading playwrights. His Mobil prize-winning play, A Wholly Healthy Glasgow (1988), and his John Whiting award-winning play, American Bagpipes (1989). His other plays include An Experienced Woman Gives Advice, Don Juan, Love Freaks and Wiping My Mother's Arse.