‘I love that there’s this big gay thing in the middle of Scotland’: Ian McKellen and Graham Norton join Alan Cumming in Out in the Hills | Pitlochry Festival Theatre

Sir Ian McKellen on stage blowing up a red balloon. For an 86-year-old man, he has amazing lung capacity. He lets it go and watches it take a satisfying, theatrical trajectory, rising to altitude, then plummeting. “Free the soul,” he says, in the role of Ed, an elderly gay man searching for freedom.

There was a lot of spiritual liberation over the weekend at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. In a bold pre-season move by new artistic director Alan Cumming, the UK’s hottest venue has launched its first LGBTQ+ festival in an atmosphere of exuberance. Programmed by Louis Hetherington, Out in the Hills was a three-day compendium of talks, performances and workshops that transformed a quiet theater into a bustling social hive.

She arrived as the audience for Coinneach MacLeod, also known as The Hebridean Baker, was growing. There was a large, colorful group taking a photo in the lobby, while queues lined up outside the bar. Many of them were in a state of joy after the Queer As Folk show the night before! ceilidh led by malin lewis trio. Others were anticipating the Sunday afternoon conversation between trans playwright Jo Clifford and her daughter Catriona Ennis. I failed to find anyone who did Finlay Wilson’s Skirt Yoga, but it was a big deal.

McKellen was there to rehearse a reading of Equinox, a new monologue by Laurie Slade, the playwright who draws on his professional skills as a psychotherapist to juggle ideas about Freud and the Oedipus complex. Written with a tone of intense regret, the film revolves around Ed abandoning his family and becoming attracted to a domineering younger man. Under Sean Mathias’ direction, McKellen grabbed the microphone from the table in front of him and held it close to him, the better to enunciate the phrases of an irascible man struggling to find the right words at the bitter end of his life.

“Be slow to judge,” Ed pleaded as he thought back to an estranged daughter, a neglectful wife, and the desperate patient he had failed to help. The relationship with the “Midnight Man” he met in a gay bar was no less humiliating.

McKellen earned a second round of applause simply for sitting in the audience for the next event, a suitably frothy conversation between Cumming and Graham Norton about the TV presenter’s career.

With Cumming wearing the legend “Ae fond pish” on his black T-shirt and wearing a pair of ankle boots he got from the US set of The Traitors, his tone was light-hearted and funny, even as he gently delved into questions about homophobia, representation and rights.

“I love that there is this big gay thing in the middle of Scotland,” said Norton, who is delighted to be taking part in such a happy event. Wearing a zebra-striped fleece he picked up in New York, he answered audience questions about difficult guests, awkward TV moments, and of course, a zebra-striped fleece he picked up in New York.

He spoke with his trademark blend of wit, gossip and genuine affection for his celebrity guests, and his condemnation of conversion therapy was greeted as enthusiastically as his jokes about Cher and Tom Cruise.