One of the most resonant voices of youth today, Douglas Maxwell has been distracted by the good old days for his new play. Variety is about just that, the jamboree that was the music hall tradition of Scotland.

But Variety presents a fresh and touching take on the era of verbose vaudeville comperes and desperate hopefuls performing in front of audiences armed with rotten fruit. Maxwell has set his play in the roaring twenties, when post-war partying and "talkies" began to drown out the antiquarian art of music hall until it was no more.
		Variety feels like the missing chapter in the saga of Scottish resistance

Maxwell is still in the cradle of his career, and yet has already scored a Fringe First for last year's Decky Does A Bronco. Earlier this year the Traverse produced his PlayStation play Helmet, an ingenious experiment which also boasted that curiously Scottish trait of using cocky humour as the vehicle for expressing the most straight-faced of sentiments. Incredibly 71% of the audience that went to see it had never been in a theatre before.

Maxwell is the latest talent to get "people who don't usually go and see plays" into the theatre. His fellow countryman Irvine Welsh, or England's Mark Ravenhill, are fully paid-up members of this club too, although it is more for his quirkiness and lack of pretension than for provocative subject matter that Maxwell is winning admirers in the most unlikely of places. It is certainly not because he has got Madonna or Nicole Kidman making a guest appearance.

So hopefully his credibility and ability to drum up audiences will mean that a new generation will be aware of the all but forgotten world of Scottish variety theatre. In its heyday, variety theatre was the nation's major form of entertainment, taking in satire, music and comedy as well as heightening regional awareness. In Scotland the Tommy Lornes and Hector Nichols related an acute, gently teasing observation of their community that lives on really only in Billy Connolly's "have you ever noticed how..." monologues.

The direct descendants of the music hall greats north of the border, namely Duncan Macrae, Stanley Baxter, Jimmy Logan and Rikki Fulton, are worryingly not producing any obvious successors. So whether one sees Maxwell's work as an elegy to Scottish Archie Rices, or a thinly disguised celebration of national identity in hard times gradually dying away, there's no doubt that Variety feels like the missing chapter in the saga of Scottish resistance.

Simon Farquhar