Nancy Sleekit and Howard's Revenge by Donald Campbell
Cast: 1 - both monologues
"People are forever claiming to be presenting undiscovered wee gems on the Fringe, but this really is an undiscovered wee gem. James Smith was a highly popular playwright in 19th-century Edinburgh, since sunk into unforgiving oblivion; but this completely delightful short comic monologue, exhumed and adapted by Donald Campbell, fully deserves the daylight."
Catherine Lockerbie, The Scotsman
"Come what may, the 1985 Edinburgh Festival will stand for me as a thing of joy and gold. I have seen Finlay Welsh's performance as the Irish actor who dominated Edinburgh theatre a century ago, in the one-man play by Donald Campbell, directed by Sandy Neilson. That is to say, I have seen one of the greatest theatrical experiences of my life."
Owen Dudley Edwards, The Scotsman
ISBN: 9781906220051
Price: £6.99
The Widows of Clyth by Donald Campbell
Cast: 8, 3 male and 5 female
"Donald Campbell's powerful two-act play is based, he tells us, on history. In 1876 six fishers from Clyth, in Caithness, were lost, leaving five widows and twenty-six children in a state of acute poverty. Out of that plain and terrible history Mr Campbell has made a play that may be expected to grip the attention of an audience, not only through pity and terror (for it is not a tragedy so much as the story of how strong-minded people, and especially women, reacted to calamity), but through a simple story enacted in a straightforward way, a matter of fact heightened by skilful fiction ... Placed within a context of their everyday life, the widows' story is likely to be almost unbearably moving. But it is true: those widows had to bear it."
Robert Garioch, Lines Review
"First seen in 1979, when it deservedly won a Fringe First Award, the play creates a series of specific moments in the lives of five Caithness women who shoulder widowhood bravely.
It is a play full of honest dignity, pain and resolve, the kind of resolve that comes from knowing the hazards of a given way of life and from accepting them, resolutely. In many ways this Dundee production is thinkingly alive to the tensions and the grief, the courage and the humour that are essential to the central characters."
Mary Brennan, The Herald
ISBN: 9781906220037
Price: £6.99
Till All The Seas Run Dry by Donald Campbell
Cast: 8, 3 male and 5 female
"This is a splendid play - a rich tapestry of pointed dialogue blended with beautiful soliloquies from Jean Armour and embellished with Burns' own poetry and song. The subtlety of Campbell's style is also most impressive. At no point does he stress any particular line. Instead, he allows the contradictions that seem to have been inherent in Burns' personality to manifest themselves in front of the key women who knew him - and at the end of the day he invites us, the audience to judge the man for ourselves - assuming, of course, we have the nerve to."
Ian Mowat, The Herald
"The impact of the play is tremendous. It is powerful and sensitive and imaginative, laced with poetry and songs, and leagues away from gossipy biography."
Kathleen Rantell, The Herald
ISBN: 9781906220044
Price: £6.99