Playwright Eve Nicol on transforming Belle and Sebastian's iconic If You're Feeling Sinister album into a heist for Edinburgh Fringe play

Sarah Swire in If You're Feeling Sinister: A play with songs

When it comes to inspiring a stage production in the style of a heist movie, a Belle and Sebastian album from the 1990s may not immediately spring to mind as the starting point.

But the iconic sounds of the Scots band’s If You’re Feeling Sinister (IYFS) have been re-imagined as such for the Edinburgh Fringe by Glasgow-based theatre director and playwright Eve Nicol.

“As much as we love the album and working with it so much, we want to be able to surprise people with it,” Eve tells The Sunday Post.

“There’s almost a Belle & Sebastian universe which we’re keen to be alongside but not necessarily within that.

“The show’s not necessarily a nostalgia fest, but it still delivers on what people hope for as it’s so close to people’s hearts.”

The idea of a heist would certainly come as a surprise to many, but Eve reckons it fits very well.

“There’s something about the drive and the energy – it may not be the first thing you think of when listening to the album – but it does fit,” she explains.

“It’s really fun trying to map this fixed genre idea of the heist as well as the ebb and flow of the album.

“There’s some lines there that open up huge ideas for scenes, there’s a couple of lines in Mayfly about a celebration – you work out what that was and suddenly you’ve got that scene. Simple things like that have been so helpful.”

Over the years, Eve and director Paul Brotherston had always talked about the idea of adapting an album for the stage, and IYFS proved to be the one to do it with.

“Scottish theatre’s so good at incorporating music into what it does but only usually adapts books or films for the stage,” Eve explains.

“We didn’t necessarily have an answer but we had wanted to explore it for a long time. Paul had been listening to IYFS recently and thought this was the one. It’s such an evocative piece of work.”

With easy access to the band themselves through one of their collaborators Sarah Swire, a choreographer who now stars in the play, the wheels were set in motion.

Added into that is the fact that the album had no singles released from it, so it can be looked at in its entirety as one continuous piece.

Eve says: “You can look at the whole album as a complete thing, thinking about how you replicate the feeling that someone might have when listening to that album on stage in a way that it is its own beast, it’s own thing.

“If you want to listen to the album, the best thing you can do is go into a darkened room with a great set of headphones.

“We’re looking at how we can do the theatre version rather than just trying to do a poorer version of this kick-ass album.”

Released in 1996, IYFS was Belle and Sebastian’s second studio album. Lead singer Stuart Murdoch believes it to be one of the best collections of his work.

Critically acclaimed, it regularly features on top 100 albums of the nineties lists in music magazines worldwide.

“It came from a time before the internet was fairly ubiquitous,” Eve says. “You just came across it and it felt like a real discovery. It wasn’t something that just landed in your lap.

“Despite the fact that it’s over 20 years old there’s still that sense of discovery for people coming towards the album for the first time. Talking to people of Stuart’s generation, it’s gorgeous to see their faces light up and hear what a core part of peoples’ life it was at the time.”

Eve compares adapting the album to “working with someone else’s poetry”, insisting that she doesn’t want to mess about too much with another person’s art.

“It’s no small feat,” she says. “It’s been really great talking to Stuart and anytime I’ve been stuck, I’ve been going back to our conversations or things he wrote from that time and that’s always opened up a new understanding and appreciation for me.

“It’s very much about how to put the world and language of the album into a new story that feels like it’s from the same world, using the same palette and the same notes but is maybe just looking at it from a slightly different angle.”

To that end, writing the play became a case of capturing the character of each song. From every track on the album, Eve extracted the lyrics that stood out and what atmosphere it conveyed and from that, she could map a story from it.

“It’s quite a different way of working to if I was just doing a straight play on its own,” she admits. “It was really important for us to try to use the album almost as a first draft and build on top of that and work with that, follow the pathways that it’s going.

“I can never replicate what Stuart was thinking when he wrote it at the time, but I can imagine what the character’s journey is like. In the album it’s Stuart singing the songs, so it’s a case of how we put that into someone who’s imaginary.”

Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian performs on stage in New York

Eve is delighted to be able to show the production at the Fringe, saying that this one feels a little different to the others she’s done before on different scales.

“It’s completely fresh for the festival and we want to see how audiences respond to it,” she says. “It will be such a live thing as we go on and see what works and what doesn’t.

“You’ve got a good idea of what it is but you never know until you get that last element in – the audience. It’s such a key part of it.”

Eve is also proud of the fact that the team is Scottish and they’re bringing a very Scottish text to the festival.

“So often local work gets hidden amongst all the really exciting companies that travel to Edinburgh. We’re really excited that we’ve got the support through Avalon and BBC Arts to have the resources to do it.

“Edinburgh in August is probably the least likely time you’re able to do anything because all the rates go up, there’s no spaces and the actors are unavailable. It’s a bit like the whole world’s turned up to play but you don’t have a ball!

“It’s really pleasing to throw ourselves into that festival environment. Festival audiences, more so probably than any other time of the year, want to be entertained and there’s nothing better that tell a good yarn, play some good songs and get them back in the bar afterwards and you can’t beat Edinburgh for that kind of experience!”

If You’re Feeling Sinister… a play with songs Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose, July 31-August 11 & August 13-26 https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/if-you-re-feeling-sinister-a-play-with-songs