Frances Poet. Small Acts of Love . Directed by Dominic Hill, music and lyrics by Ricky Ross. Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, 9 September–4 October 2025

Emerging from a seven-year renovation, the old-new Citizens Theatre of Glasgow reopened with an ambitious historical-docudrama-musical play based on the most difficult of topics: the bombing of Pan Am 103 on 21 December 1988.The deliberate destruction of a Boeing 747 en route from London to New York in the skies over the Scottish borders remains the largest case of mass murder in Scottish history and the deadliest terrorist atrocity in British history.In total, 270 people died in the attack attributed to Colonel Muammar Gadaffi's Libyan regime: 259 onboard the flight and a further eleven on the ground, as the majority of the wreckage crashed into residential areas in the town of Lockerbie.It is not a subject that would initially seem fitting for a musical play, but Deacon Blue's Ricky Ross composed a score that was joyful, upsetting, and uplifting; whatever tone was required by Poet's writing and Hill's direction was achieved and delivered with aplomb by the cast and five-piece band in this outstanding piece of theatre.The play takes place across different time periods and geographies, from the disaster to the present day, from Lockerbie to the United States.After the opening songs, which emphasize the cruelty of the disaster occurring when families in Lockerbie and the United States were preparing for Christmas, the central thread of the play is established.We meet Claire Dorrance and her father Colin in a retelling of a real conversation they held in 2012 when Claire was chosen to study at Syracuse University as a Lockerbie scholar, and it is this relationship that provides the play's overarching narrative.A positive legacy of the disaster has been the establishment of the Lockerbie Scholars program, where two students from Lockerbie study at Syracuse for a year.Colin Dorrance's experience as a rookie police officer working through the emergency has been at the forefront of public accounts of first responders for two decades, but this event purports to be the first time he properly talked about what happened in December 1988, as Claire, in preparing to move stateside, pleads with him to tell her what he witnessed, so that she can fully understand the significance of representing the town at the Central New York institution.It is from this conversation that the play shifts towards the events following the disaster, and we are introduced to Lockerbie residents suddenly in the middle of a global disaster, and the American families separated from their dead loved ones by the Atlantic Ocean

Lyrics · Performance art · Popular music · Samuel Beckett and Modernism · Sound Studies and Aurality · Theatre and Performance Studies