There’s a version of Heart of the Country that I’d love to have seen. One where the oddball premise – four Scottish performers spinning tall tales and tunes about Lyndon B Johnson around a campfire – lands with the charm and profundity it clearly hopes for. Sadly, this wasn’t it.
Thoughtful ideas flicker beneath the surface, but the storytelling rarely ignites
The show bills itself as “less a biography than a counter-mythology”, which is a poetic way of saying “we made stuff up”. Fair enough – fringe theatre thrives on imaginative leaps. But those leaps need somewhere to land, and here, they mostly just circle the fire and vanish into the smoke.
The structure is loose: stories about LBJ’s life (sort of), each ending with the refrain “and that young boy was LBJ”. Initially funny. Eventually grating. The performers take turns narrating in a style that lands somewhere between campfire anecdote and podcast audition – pleasant enough, but lacking the dynamism or theatricality that might elevate it beyond spoken word.
An audience coin toss supposedly determines whether we get a song or a story next, but as every piece is performed by the end regardless, the illusion of choice feels just that – an illusion. It’s a neat idea in theory, but without consequence, it adds little beyond mild confusion.
The cast are likeable and clearly committed, and there are flickers of musical and lyrical talent throughout. But for a show all about the power of storytelling, the stories themselves rarely ignite. There’s little movement, little interplay and a lot of sitting still and talking – which is fine if your words crackle. These mostly smoulder.
There’s potential here, and some thoughtful ideas flicker beneath the surface about myth, history and democratic storytelling. But Heart of the Country ultimately feels like a show still trying to figure out what story it wants to tell – and why we should want to listen.
