I needed several pieces of paper to watch Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson perform live in “A History of Paper” – a theater ticket, a train ticket, a plane ticket (in reverse order) — at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre in the Scottish Highlands.  The musical had the feel of a fable in the opening number, when the two Scottish characters (both unnamed) show us a cardboard box full of paper. “To anyone else, what is in this box is a load of rubbish,” the woman tells us. But even before we are guided through some of its contents —  her angry postcard; his origami rose; their confetti from the wedding – the musical seemed to promise that it would be the story of their life and love together over the years,  a tuneful, charming chamber musical (and star vehicle) reminiscent of a straight play like A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters.” And that is what it was for most of its 70-minute running time — until, three thousand miles away from home, “A History of Paper” hits home, swerving abruptly into a musical about 9/11.

Alan Cumming, who had a pronounced Scottish accent on stage that I don’t recall from the times I’ve see him on stage in New York (Macbeth, Cabaret) or on screen (The Good Wife), is not just one of the two stars of the musical. He is celebrating his first season as the artistic director of the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, which is billed as Scotland’s only “rurally-located, major arts organization.”  Since 1951, it has produced musicals on an 11-acre campus that is two hours by train from Edinburgh.  

It certainly feels like the countryside for the 15 minutes that it takes to walk from the train station and over the swaying suspension bridge to the theater. 

.But everything about the festival gave off a distinctly suburban rather than rural vibe. Even the Explorers Garden — steep woodland overlooking the River Tummel that takes up more than half of the theater’s acreage — is so carefully designed and labeled that it could be one of the attractions at the New York Botanical Garden.

The main auditorium of the theater, had enough seats to qualify for a Broadway house, but was far more modern, spacious and comfortable. The audience for the matinee I attended appeared well-dressed and mostly older, and they had arrived early to fill up all available seats and tables at the sprawling in-house eatery in the lobby for the pre-theater menu before the show.

So I wasn’t necessarily expecting a cutting-edge work of theater, even when I learned “A History of Paper” began life at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2024,, where Cumming reportedly caught it and “became obsessed with it.” (It was presented then at the Traverse Theater, one of the larger and more ornate venues, which far more resembles Lincoln Center than, say, Under St. Marks.)

Still, after that opening number, there is a cheeky wit from the very first piece of paper in their lives, a postcard of a beach, which she has slipped under his door, with a note on the back: “Could you shut the fuck up.”  She is his next-door neighbor, and for days on end he had been loudly playing Radiohead for solace; his girlfriend had just broken up with him; this was the only album the ex-girlfriend had left him. As an apology, he gives the neighbor of a origami rose (the next paper in their history.)  They had been neighbors for five years but he wasn’t sure they had ever actually met. “No, no, he’s not unfriendly,” Cumming says, talking about his character (and as his character) in the third person. “But recently, he’s just fully committed himself to his own misery, and so he might have missed a few things.” They finally introduce one another; she’s a journalist, he is an aspiring writer (half a terrible novel is in the box), who works at a bookstore. 

At their first date, at a Pizza Express (a menu is in the box), they discuss what he calls “the coming Y2K apocalypse.” The play is set in 1999, when there was a genuine fear that the computers throughout the world would massively crash when 1999 became 2000, a new date for which the computers had not been programmed.

This bolsters the use of paper as theme and metaphor throughout the piece. “Everything’s done by computers now,” he laments. “Gone are the days when it was all done by paper, banking, air traffic control, even the little strip on your train ticket. It’s all read by computers.”

“What if the worst stuff did happen,” she asks skeptically.

“Economies collapse. Planes fall out of the sky. I miss my train for work.”

A reply that’s glib, ironic and on-the-nose – by the character, but also by the creative team.

She gets an offer of an interview for a job in New York. He accompanies her to the city, but not for the interview, which is at the World Trade Center. The play shifts in tone, and the title takes on new meaning. He remembers what it was like in downtown Manhattan. “There’s paper everywhere. It falls from the sky and out across the lower path of the island, as far as the eye can see.”

That’s not how I remember it. I was there at the World Trade Center that morning. I long ago largely stopped talking about it, just like I’ve stopped talking about my having written a book in which Donald Trump was a central character (way before he became a politician) — silence in both cases for much the same reason, embarrassment and guilt. 

But I tell you about it now so that you might understand why I can’t accept the facile artistic choice to graft on this tragedy, and to time the run of this production during the 25th anniversary of the attack — even as I appreciate that there is a modicum of beauty and insight in “A History of Paper” — an effort to use paper as a metaphor for loss, and grief. and impermanence. “Why is it that what’s made of paper seems permanent, absolute money, birth certificates, a passport, but it’s not. It’s thin and flimsy and easy to tear.”

A History of Paper
at Pitlochry Festival Theatre through September 12 and then at Dundee Rep, September 16-19
Running time: 70 minutes, no intermission.
by Oliver Emanuel and Gareth Williams
Directed by Andrew Panton
Musically Directed by Gavin Whitworth
Designed by Ana Inés Jabares Pita
Lighting Design by Bruno Poet
Sound Design by Alexandra Faye Braithwaite
Starring Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson

Rehearsal for the opening number