REVIEW: A History of Paper (Pitlochry Festival Theatre/Dundee Rep)

A History of Paper – ★★★★★ – Phenomenal  

Pitlochry Festival Theatre & Dundee Rep
9-12 Sept (Pitlochry), 16-19 Sept (Dundee)
Review by Rebecca Mahar
 
A History of Paper at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, a co-production with Dundee Rep, leaves its stage littered with the insubstantial, all-important fragments of a life and its audience with tears.
 
A one-act musical from writer Oliver Emanuel and composer Gareth Williams, A History of Paper encounters He (Alan Cumming) and She (Shirley Henderson), looking through a box of papers —memories— of their life together, and their time cut short. This musical begins in Glasgow on the eve of the millennium, December 1999, after He’s had a bad breakup and She shoves a note through his door telling him to turn down his music. He sends back a note folded in the shape of a rose; She agrees to go to dinner with him, where He folds a Pizza Express menu into a paper crane; and the rest is history.

Alan Cumming as He and Shirley Henderson as She. Pic: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.

History, recorded in bits of incidental paper, that all end up in the box. In late 2000 they marry: confetti in a glass jar. In September of 2001, She is invited to a job interview in New York City, at a prestigious office in the World Trade Center. In the aftermath of 9/11, He looks up into the poisonous sky at all the bits of paper fluttering down like so much confetti, anathema to the fire and pain and loss.
 
Andrew Panton directs a production that is equal parts tender, devastating, and joyful in the mad randomness that is any human life, and the ways we remember it. Ana Inés Jabares-Pita’s clever set design creates a liminal world of memory, a broken grey plateau (interrupted in key moments by riots of colour) in which frozen instants of time play out, unfaded by the years through which He looks back at them. Hidden nooks and notches hold up various paper items, placed there by He and She, and highlighted by tiny points of light.
 
Bruno Poet’s outstanding lighting design is perfectly pitched to the production: understated until it swells into magic, in moments both ecstatic and gut-wrenching. Magic of love, magic of grief; magic of life, foul and fair, illuminated with aching clarity.

Alan Cumming as He and Shirley Henderson as She. Pic: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.

Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson embody He and She with a casual humanity that makes their joy infectious and their despair piercing. There’s nothing that feels contrived or overwrought in either of their performances, and Henderson in particular has a flair for the dry, dropped-in humour of Emanuel’s writing, which often takes half a second for the audience’s laughter to catch up. Extreme naturalism within an entirely unnatural setting —liminality, non-linearity, memory, ghosts— comes off with complete success here, drawing the show’s watchers effortlessly into the beating heart of its world.
 
Musically, A History of Paper is deceptively simple. Music director Gavin Whitworth joins Cumming and Henderson onstage, seated at a piano that transgresses diegesis, playing their world to life. Both actors are vocally well suited to their parts, with voices that are unique, interesting, beautifully imperfect, and so very human. In a contemporary musical theatre market trending towards sameness, with a preference for power and agility that sometimes favours acrobatics over specificity and character, the composition of A History of Paper and the casting of Cumming and Henderson prove that individuality and vocal diversity have a place in today’s industry— and that audiences respond to voices, as well as stories, that represent them.

Alan Cumming as He, Gavin Whitworth, and Shirley Henderson as She. Pic: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.

The image of scraps of paper falling like confetti over lower Manhattan recalls another one-act musical influenced by and set in years following 9/11, Adam Gwon’s 2008 Ordinary Days. Here too a character who has lost a loved one looks up into the poisonous sky and wonders at all the bits of paper falling, and how impossible they seem. Twenty-five years later, this image of papers falling, as well as the pieces of paper recovered from the wreckage and the pieces of paper left behind by those who never came home still permeate the lives of those who remain. Archives of lives: a history in paper, impermanent and precious.
 
A History of Paper is not always an easy play to watch, especially if you’re keeping track of the dates as they’re casually mentioned, knowing what is to come. But it is an excruciatingly awesome (that is, awe-inspiring) and phenomenal (that is, a phenomenon) piece of theatre, and worth surrendering your heart and tears to. 
 
 
Pitlochry:
Running time: One hour and ten minutes with no interval
Venue: Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Port-Na-Craig, Pitlochry PH16 5DR
9-12 September 2026 
Time: 7:30pm; 2:00pm 
Tickets: Run ended.
 
Dundee:
Running time: One hour and ten minutes with no interval
Venue: Dundee Rep, Tay Square, Dundee DD1 1PB
16-19 September 2026
Time: 7:30pm; 2:30pm Thurs/Sat
Tickets: https://dundeerep.co.uk/events/a-history-of-paper

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