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Wee Man

 
Stephanie Green Review by Stephanie Green 4 Published: 6 Aug 2025 Assembly @ Dance Base Show Dates: 5 Aug 2025-17 Aug 2025

Bim! Bam! Boom! The sheer energy and physicality of the performers is amazing. This is edge-of-the-seat, in-yer-face stuff that leaves you breathless. Both humorous and terrifying, Wee Man, choreographed by Natasha Gilmore of Barrowland Ballet, is both a celebration and a swingeing critique of the ‘rules’ of masculinity. The intergenerational cast, including teenagers and men, moves to the relentless pulse of music composed by Luke Sutherland. Set on a football pitch, the cast wear sports gear, making the parallels clear. Gilmore, as a mother of boys, clearly knows what it’s like to watch the perils your ‘wee man’ (an affectionate Scots term for a small boy) must face to become a man.

Testosterone fuelled, adrenalin high

The ‘rules’ devised by Kevin Gilday appear on screens inside the goalposts, starting with upbeat ones such as ‘wear no colour except in socks’ and ‘walk as if wearing soggy porridge in your sporran’ – but mostly they are negative, carrying darker hints of toxic masculinity and the self-destruction required through the denial of individuality and emotion in order to be accepted. The performers hurl themselves at each other chest to chest, leaping, rolling, punching, twirling almost nonstop, culminating in heart-wrenching scenes of bullying. Sweat glints on bald heads, dreadlocks fly. Testosterone-fuelled and adrenaline-high, it recalls the strength and stamina of Russian and other mid-European dance traditions, or even South American Capoeira and the competitiveness of New York street dance.

Gilmore’s work is always intelligent and warm as well as skilfully crafted. Here, the warmth is less evident until a gleam of hope appears at the end. The brilliant script occasionally gets a bit sentimental and squishy, but that’s forgivable as the performers carry each other – even the teenagers lifting the heavier men – suggesting the need to support one another emotionally, even if earlier it amounts to no more than a slap on the back.

The cast is made up of members from Gilmore’s intergenerational Wolf Pack, a non-audition company, plus a mixture of professional dancers who have appeared in many of Gilmore’s past shows, including her son Otis (aged 15), and at the end some local community dancers, whom she likes to incorporate at every venue. It was heartening to see an 80-year-old taking her teenage grandson. A must-see show for every male, their mothers and family.

Amir Nisi

Stephanie Green

Stephanie Green has reviewed Theatre and Dance in Edinburgh since 2011 but previously travelled widely, mainly in Eastern Europe and Russia, writing about puppetry. She also studied shadow puppetry and sacred dance in Bali. In the 1970s, she trained as a puppeteer at the Little Angel, London and later worked at the alternative In the Heart of the Beast Mask and Puppet Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. After training at the Place, the London School of Contemporary Dance, in her 20s she then gave up dancing until starting again in her 60s just for fun. She has recently danced in a community group with Barrowland Ballet (at the Edinburgh Fringe, 2013), Oceanallover and at the South Bank, London as part of the Festival of the Silver Age. She is also a novelist, playwright and poet. www.stephaniegreen.org.uk/

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Wee Man is a powerful and highly physical dance-theatre performance by award-winning choreographer Natasha Gilmore. Performed by an all-male cast of both men and teenagers, this candid and compelling work explores the shifting – and stubbornly static – rules of masculinity across generations. From 'Scotland's most successful contemporary dance companies' (TheReviewsHub.com), with evocative sound by Luke Sutherland and text created with Kevin P Gilday, Wee Man blends raw movement, humour and honest storytelling to unpack the "rulebook" of male behaviour – from everyday pressures to darker, inherited ideals.
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