We sat down with Mirren Wilson, writer of PALS, a female-led and female-produced Scottish adventure-comedy. Expect outrageous chaos, a sprinkling of Gaelic, and plenty of Scottish banter.
PALS is running from 30th July – 12th August at Gilded Balloon, Patter House, Doonstairs as part of Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Get your tickets here.
What drove you to centre PALS around a group of young Scottish women, and how did you balance authenticity with comedy in telling their stories?
I’ll be honest, frustration drove me to write PALS and a lack of representation drove me to focus the play on 4 young Scottish women.
When I was a young actor, I was consistently struggling to find roles that I wanted to play or monologues that I was interested in performing – I personally have zero interest in playing anything other than a strong woman. When I looked at the Scottish stages, the roles for me simply weren’t there in the same way they were for my male-counterparts. When I looked at the wider-stages of the UK, or even on screen, Scottish women are never given the lead. So I wanted to write something that could attempt to change that and fill a massive gap in the market.
I looked at the stories and experiences of my friends. Despite what the rom-coms of our generations tell us, our lives do not revolve around falling in love and getting a boyfriend. Our lives are complicated and messy; we’re trying to achieve our goals, but family, work, studying, social media and societal pressures all seem to be getting in the way. Using that as a starting point, the comedy came quite naturally from the banter friends create amongst themselves – I love that every friendship has their own language and in-jokes.
Why was it important to move beyond trauma-driven narratives for women, and how did that influence the tone and themes of the play?
I fully respect and appreciate that stories of women’s trauma are important and need to be told. However, as a young woman, I am enraged and heartbroken that that is all that we seem to be seeing on stage and screen. Women are not identified solely by our trauma, nor is that our whole story. It’s sometimes part of our story, yes, but there’s so much more to us; women are ambitious, strong, hilarious, bolshy, messy, emotional, and whatever the hell we want to be. The main goal was always to create a fun and uplifting piece of theatre, where women feel inspired and seen.
How did you approach writing each character’s personal struggles—like PCOS, caregiving, and self-doubt—while keeping the story uplifting and relatable?
It’s a very British thing to feel the need to present to the world that “everything is fine” but this has been negatively elevated by Instagram culture and there’s now a subconscious need to document and showcase that “everything is perfect”.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what is going on in these girls’ lives vs. what we actually get to see. It was a very intentional thing that we don’t spend too long in a moment of sadness, so that it’s not emotionally heavy for too long. We just see snippets of the girls’ struggles, before the rest of the girls jump in with chaos and the story moves on.
The tone is overall uplifting because there’s a lot of comedy in the way the girls cope with their individual issues; Taylor is a wind-up merchant to hide her self-doubt, Sadie is sarcastic and focuses her energy on her friends to distract her from her caring responsibilities, Flo is overwhelming positive to deal with her work/ money worries and Claire hysterically overprepares to remain in control when her body feels out of control with a PCOS diagnosis.
What role does humour play in PALS, especially in navigating serious themes without diminishing their emotional weight?
Humour is a huge part of Scottish culture and it’s an integral feature of PALS. Scots are naturally witty people, and I believe it’s ingrained into our observations of the world and the way in which we speak. We see men be crude and funny all the time, but it’s not something we see as much from young women – We’re not always pretty and polite! One of my favourite moments in PALS is when Taylor says “I can’t believe somebody pumped her,” and the audience would gasp, chortle and scream.
Humour is also a massive coping mechanism. A couple of reviews last year commented on how we’d ping from a really emotional moment, to heightened comedy and how it felt disconnected and clunky. I completely disagree – I’ve always been struck by how someone can reveal their deepest, darkest thoughts, but then immediately crack out a hysterical joke. I wanted to emphasise in PALS, that these characters all have issues in their lives that are getting them down, but they’re not immobilized by them. They just have to get on with their lives and cope as best as they can. We all know the saying: “If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.”
How have audiences responded to seeing messy, flawed, funny young women on stage, and did any reactions surprise you?
I think audiences came in expecting to have a laugh, but were then surprised when they connected emotionally to the show. It was lovely to hear audiences say “Oh my god, I’m such a Claire!” or “My sister is Flo”. We had so many messages on Instagram from all kinds of people thanking us for creating this show, how it moved them and how it inspired them. These characters have been so loved and appreciated.
Within the first few performances, audience members came out hysterically crying. We really panicked and thought “Oh no, what have we done, what’s happened?” Once we chatted more and more to our audiences, people wanted to hug us and we realised that these heightened emotions were due to the fact that people really connected with the show.Seeing middle-aged men and dads coming out, bashfully, with red eyes was a bit of a surprise, but also a truly beautiful thing.
Given the interest from teachers, what are your hopes for PALS in terms of its future impact on Scottish drama education and representation?
We had so many teachers last year asking if they could use the script for their curricular drama exams. They explained that it’s a yearly struggle to find comprehensive roles that can showcase the girls in their classes. This year we’re engaging with a couple of local schools and colleges to organised trips to PALS at the Edinburgh Fringe.
In an ideal world, I’d love to get the script published and dished out to schools, to show young girls that we are wonderful and we deserve the limelight, but simply to give them fun roles to play. There’s a small revolution happening in the emerging Scottish theatre companies, because we’re the ones writing these authentic stories for average gals. This needs to filter through to the big theatres and education, so that women can grow up with roles to explore and the knowledge that their stories can and should be told.