ROBERT BURNS: NOT IN MY NAME

ROBERT BURNS: NOT IN MY NAME - A performance by Kevin Williamson with films by Alastair Cook

This performance will showcase the radical subversive poetry of Robert Burns: the dangerous stuff he couldn’t put his name to during his lifetime. Linked by a sequence of 12 video narratives – written by Kevin Williamson and created for this show by award-winning filmmaker Alastair Cook - this is an incendiary interpretation of the life and work of Scotland’s national poet.

Without messing about with the texts Kevin Williamson (poet, iconoclast and founder of the legendary Rebel Inc publishing house, as well as co-founder of Bella Caledonia and Neu! Reekie!) will perform the radical and bawdy verse of Burns as never seen before. This Scotland’s Bard torn free of tea-cloths and shortbread tins: a scathing dissident, on the side of the people, risking his personal liberty, to tell truth to power.

The show is for 2 nights only at Leith Depot, Monday 11th Aug and Mon 18th Aug, starting at 7.30pm each evening.

"Williamson's. Burns is stirring, lyrical, explicit, frequently hilarious and above all feels contemporary" - Darran Anderson

“It’s something of a thrill to hear one of Scotland’s contemporary radical poets – Kevin Williamson, founder of the Rebel Inc imprint – giving us his own performance, from memory, of some of Burns’s most radical poetry, accompanied by beautiful short video films by Alistair Cook… the show is intensely moving; and well worth seeing, for any radical spirits who ever imagined that Burns was a poet of the establishment, with nothing to say to them” - Joyce McMillan

"Kevin Williamson’s earthy and expressive readings invigorate and stir, and even those less familiar with Robert Burns easily lose themselves in the rich, lilting rhythm and characteristic vernacular. An intensely beautiful, expertly assembled and thought-provoking experience in Scottish poetry" – Jessica Balance, TW Edinburgh