Edinburgh pubs and streets form the backdrop for a literary tour with a difference.
Thom Dibdin gets a taste of the experience. (part 1)

Its 7.30 on a Friday evening and the pubs that line the Grassmarket area are beginning to liven up for an evening of serious imbibing. Not, you might think, the best place to stage a piece of theatre. But the McEwan's 80/- Edinburgh Literary Pub Tour is no ordinary piece of theatre. Nor, come to that, is it an ordinary walking tour of Edinburgh's historic old town.

The tour plays on the image of the city's duality, noted for centuries by visitors and epitomised by the phrase ' fur coat and nae knickers'. It takes the form of a heated argument - scripted by playwright Vivienne Adam - between two local characters, Clart and McBrain. Clart is keen to describe the drinking dens which the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Burns were noted for frequenting and from which, he suggests, they drew more than a little inspiration. Feted by the bourgeoisie in the New Town drawing rooms by day, they, and many like them, would take their pleasures - carnal and bucolic - in Edinburgh's seedier old town howffs.

McBrain tends towards the Muriel Spark train of thought, pointing out that Miss Jean Brodie was wont to bring her charges through the Grassmarket . Edinburgh's rich literary heritage is based, she contends, on refinement and genteel living - and the taking of a drop or two was no deviation from the city's normal air of moral rectitude. " The two characters are acting parts" explains Vivien Devlin, project manager of the Scottish Literary Tour Company. " "The actors have to take on the personalities but also act outside them as Stevenson and perform part of Jekyll and Hyde or Walter Scott or Burns. "There is a contemporary aspect to it as well", she adds. "They wear their own clothes as they go in and out of different characters - they do not just stand there dressed as Burns and then say: ' This is where Burns drank and wrote'. It goes beyond simply leading people through the streets - I think of it more as a dramatised debate."

Edinburgh pubs and streets form the backdrop for a literary tour with a difference.
Thom Dibdin gets a taste of the experience. (part 2)

The tour was conceived by Morris Paton after seeing a similar idea in Dublin. As an actor and director who leans more towards the Clart attitude to literary history, he was quick to see the potential for Edinburgh. With advice and assistance from those behind the Dublin tour, the Scottish version was soon set up.

Now it employs four actors through the winter months, when there are weekly performances as well as regular private bookings. During the summer, when the tours take place daily, the acting team is increased to eight or more.

But while the initiative is doing very well, Devlin is emphatic about the importance of sponsorship to its success. Last summer, Scottish and Newcastle saw the potential of bring its McEwan's 80/- brand into partnership with the tour. Two of the four pubs visited are owned by the company. "They were very good about it, and we never changed the tour", says Devlin. "They did not say we had to change to four Scottish and Newcastle pubs. We had a lot of publicity over the summer because of rebranding the name, and in the winter we have noticed a huge increase in the number of students, locals and young people coming on the tour. "We love visitors to Edinburgh coming on the walks. We get a lot of Americans and Germans, but we really want to make sure that it is an event for locals."

The way in which the tour is written and performed certainly makes it a viable proposition for Edinburgh residents. Insights into the lives into the lives of the literary figures are revealing in themselves, but the use of the city as a set is also telling. Featuring different extracts from Scott or Burns' more salacious poems to illustrate points, Clart and McBrain are aided and abetted by the closes and courtyards in which they perform.

Edinburgh pubs and streets form the backdrop for a literary tour with a difference.
Thom Dibdin gets a taste of the experience. (part 3)

With the tenements soaring above, there is an added sense of atmosphere and Pace to the promenade performance by the time it has moved onto the Lawnmarket. The Edinburgh Literary Pub Tour is not the only one organised by the company. There have been Borders tours which have gone to Scott's View, near Abbottsford - the house that Scott built and lived in.

It has also applied for funding from the Scottish Arts Council to create different version of the pub tour - this time without the pubs and aimed at schoolchildren and families. This would be performed in the Makars' Court outside the Edinburgh Writers Museum. "Makar is the Scots word for poet, " explains Devlin. "The Writers Museum is very keen for us to wok with them, and we did a trial run at the Edinburgh Book Festival a year and half ago. "I think there is a lot of potential there. We've invited teachers to come on the tour and they said they would recommend it to school children without the pubs."

While the tour starts with arguments in the Old Town, by the time Clart and McBrain are reconciled to the fact they are both right in their different ways, it ends up at Milne's Bar in the New Town, a haunt of 20th century poets and thinkers such as Hugh MacDiarmid. And in Milne's, over a post-performance pint or three of 80/-, Clart's view is proven. All sorts of ideas are dreamed up about how a new tour could take in more modern works by the likes of Ian Rankin and Irvine Welsh. And it was not the drink talking - honestly.