Local Hero: how do you put such a sacred film on stage?
As Chichester Festival Theatre's musical version opens, director Daniel Evans and others talk about the little film that struck oil
By
Jasper Rees
17 October 2022
During the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, certain obsessives will have spotted that the coffin pulled on a gun carriage by naval ratings from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey was accompanied by a nostalgic tune, solemnly blown by massed pipers, from the soundtrack of Local Hero.
In Bill Forsyth’s modest masterpiece from 1983, about a Texan oil man sent to buy up an entire Highland fishing village, the lilting strains of The Mist Covered Mountains turn up in the Ceilidh section at the heart of the story. It’s here that “Mac” Macintyre (played by Peter Riegert) from Knox Oil and Gas realises that he doesn’t want to go home to Houston. Who would, hearing that music, and in that landscape?
The song, also heard at the funerals of John F Kennedy and Joe Strummer, was composed in 1856 by John Cameron. Its Scottish Gaelic lyrics evoke a yearning love for home “that I’d trade not for tons of gold”. In Local Hero, the villagers of Ferness turn out to be less sentimental: with black gold under the sea, they are only too eager to become homeless millionaires.
“It’s their place, Mac,” reasons Victor, the worldly Russian trawlerman who sails in every year for the Ceilidh. “They have a right to make what they can of it. You can’t eat scenery!”
That indelible line, and The Mist Covered Mountains, and the famous red phone box were given a new lease of life three years ago. A new stage musical version by David Greig and Bill Forsyth, with a clutch of new songs by the soundtrack’s original composer Mark Knopfler, was a popular hit at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh.
The musical was destined for The Old Vic in 2020 only to be thwarted by Covid. With the original director John Crowley no longer available, the producer Caro Newling sent the script to Daniel Evans at Chichester Festival Theatre. He confesses he had never seen the film.
“I asked them whether I should watch it and we collectively decided that I shouldn’t, that I should come at it via the musical first and I’m really glad I did because they’re very, very different beasts.” Evans, recognising a straitened small-town community not unlike the Rhondda where he grew up, was hooked. Knowing his way round the art form as both actor and director, he suggested structural improvements to Greig and Knopfler, who duly wrote three new songs.
“It was mostly about making sure the songs were always furthering plot. One of the booby traps with pop or rock musicals is you often have to stop the drama and park for a while.”
When the musical was first announced, purists like me would have all had the same nagging doubt: do Mac and Gordon, the village’s wily negotiator, really need to sing? Could there be a show tune for Felix Happer, the oil mogul so indelibly played by Burt Lancaster? Greig, a recent convert to opera, makes the exuberant claim that “no work of art, in my heart, has reached its most realised form until it’s become a piece of theatre on a stage with music.”
He was pushing at an open door with Forsyth. Thanks to the Ceilidh section, Knopfler was involved far earlier than a composer normally would be. “In a real way music made the film, if not saved it,” Forsyth explained to me when Local Hero marked its 25th anniversary, “because I’m so reluctant to give things to an audience. Maybe I err on the side of reserve. Mark saw what the film wanted to do and his music helped it by another 50 per cent. I felt wow, thank goodness.”
Much of that heavy lifting was done by Going Home, Knopfler’s wistful leitmotif and theme tune. “It’s one of those pieces of music,” says Greig, “that just speaks to every human all around the world in a way that is almost inexplicable.” At the insistence of the producer David Puttnam, an electric version of it surges in over the final credits to mitigate the ending’s Strindbergian bleakness as Mac is cast out of paradise.
While Evans had never seen the film, Paul Higgins – inheriting the role of Gordon from Denis Lawson – has never performed in a musical. He submitted an audition tape while isolating during Covid. “A couple of the songs I played on my guitar. I said, ‘If Mark Knopfler ever hears this, I apologise.’ And he did.”
In the outward-looking, entrepreneurial Gordon, Forsyth broke with Scottish stereotype. Denis Lawson once told me that “it was quite hard to find a contemporary Scottish character who wasn’t in wellies and a kilt or a Gorbals heavy. It was the most enjoyable experience I’ve ever had.”
Higgins, who comes from a small post-industrial community in Lanarkshire, has avoided rewatching the film. “But I remember Denis Lawson annoyingly because he’s so clearly right for the part. I’m not trying to copy him.” It helps to establish some distance from Lawson’s performance that in the musical, unlike in the film, Gordon and his wife Stella are not at it like rabbits. “Maybe the reverse is true. They don’t agree about how to deal with this potential windfall.”
Indeed the entire character of Stella, sweet and almost silent on screen, has been beefed up to form part of a semi-romantic triangle. The idea springs from an exchange in the film when Mac drunkenly proposes to swap places with Gordon: in return for his apartment and his Porsche, Mac gets Gordon’s life, and his wife. Stella is now an incomer from Glasgow, a lone voice in this unspoiled wilderness who wants to protect the idyll of village life from big oil. Between them they play out the drama’s central dilemma: to get rich on the back of violating change, or stay poor but protect heritage and environment.
It’s one of the magic tricks of Local Hero that, as the decades have passed, its ecological narrative has hustled its way to the fore, elbowing past the Cold War theme personified by Victor from Soviet Murmansk and NATO fighters jetting up the coastline. In a line that would have sounded like the purest science fiction in 1983, a scientist in Aberdeen talks about unfreezing the Arctic Circle.
“Can you imagine a world without oil?” asks Mac in the film. "We know what happens to oil, they don’t,” says Greig. “What Bill spotted back in the 1980s was the arrival of oil was not necessarily seen as this giant desecration.”
It helps no one if the perfection of the original – celebrated in a charming new 40th anniversary book (Local Hero: Making a Scottish Classic by Jonathan Melville) – casts too long a shadow. The theatre can’t do sea and sky, beach and cliff, or close-ups and cutaways. That’s where songs like Only Rock and Water and I Wonder If I Can Go Home Again come in.
“For some people the film is sacrosanct,” Evans concedes. “I just hope they will allow themselves to enjoy the story in a different genre.” Devotees should be aware that, with Forsyth’s approval, beloved characters have been culled. “You need to choose who your central characters are and focus on them,” argues Greig. “Bill can afford to be generous because he has made a classic film. It’s not going to be damaged by us.”
Their collaboration did not run entirely smooth. Forsyth had already demonstrated a willingness to revisit old stories when in 1998, nearly two decades on, he went back to Cumbernauld to shoot Gregory’s Two Girls. But he was his own boss there. During rehearsals for Local Hero in Edinburgh he felt sidelined and publicly distanced himself. Greig is uncertain if he ever saw it so is delighted to learn that Forsyth has requested tickets for Chichester.
I’m reminded of the story’s question mark of an ending, inserted to placate nervous Hollywood backers. Mac has been expelled into his lonely Houston high rise, with a pocketful of sea shells as mementoes. The dream is over. Cut to the ringing phone box. The local hero can always return.
Local Hero is at Chichester Festival Theatre until November 19. Tickets: cft.org.uk
