Rhythm of the night

When Whatever Gets You Through the Night premiered last year at The Arches—the infamous multi-arts venue beneath Glasgow Central Station—it felt more like a festival than a theatre show. Put together by Cora Bissett, star of 2009 Fringe hit Midsummer and the director of multi award-winning Roadkill, prolific Scottish playwright David Greig (also of Midsummer fame) and acclaimed Edinburgh band Swimmer One, it's a landmark collaboration between playwrights, musicians, dancers and visual artists in Scotland.

"David and I are more theatre people," says Bissett, who began her performance career in music, "and Andrew, Laura and Hamish from Swimmer One traverse theatre and music. I think we just thought, 'why wouldn't you create a piece that uses all that brilliant stuff on your doorstep?' For me, it seems obvious – why not?"

Essentially, the show is a series of vignettes—some drama, some dance, some visual and performance art—set to original music, all of which take place between the hours of midnight and 4am. Its contributing artists feature acclaimed writers like Greig, Kieran Hurley, Stef Smith and Alan Bissett, as well as digital artist Kim Beveridge. And its gaggle of lauded contemporary musical acts, most of whom will play live at each performance in Edinburgh this August, include electro-rock outfit Errors, 2013 Scottish Album of the Year Award-winner RM Hubbert, former Delgado Emma Pollock, Eugene Kelly of The Vaselines, beatboxer Bigg Taj and indie-folk band Meursault, in addition to many others.

"I know there have been bands that write music or soundscapes for theatre, but I really wanted to place the music bang in the centre of the action," explains director Bissett, who was influenced by Chemikal Underground's literary-music collaboration album, Ballads of the Book, the collection of short films Paris Je T'aime and Sarah Kane's play 4.48 Psychosis.

"The development process involved people like Dan Wilson [of Withered Hand] and Drew Wright [of Wounded Knee]," she says, "with a couple of actors in the room. It really was a genuine, absolute experiment. I said 'OK, we have no text, we have no scene. We have Dan so let's take the lyrics from his songs and those are the only words we have to play with.'"

"It was amazing," says Wilson, whose acclaimed first album Good News has made him one of Edinburgh's leading musicians. "Sometimes, it felt really organic, that things fed off each other. I'm not a theatre-going guy, as much as I keep meaning to do more. It was amazing to be that close to actors just running with something. I'd never seen anything like that before in my life. It was educational."

Though most of the show's contributors are based in Edinburgh or Glasgow, Bissett was always keen to encompass the entirety of Scotland. "We've got our Edinburgh festival," she says, "we've got our Glasgow thing going on but you know, there's a lot of strong writing voices and music voices coming through from different areas as well. So I liked the idea that you'd hear a song from Greenock or Fraserburgh or Wick at the same time as someone who's written a song in the middle of Glasgow."

Its Edinburgh run is part of the Made in Scotland showcase, but the show was originally funded by a Creative Scotland Vital Spark award, which explicitly promotes cross-sector collaboration within the arts. So in addition to its live incarnation, there's also a Whatever Gets You Through the Night soundtrack, as well as a book and a film, which was screened at Summerhall last August.

"Theatre is ephemeral," says Swimmer One's Andrew Eaton-Lewis. "Unless it tours, it sort of disappears. But this show is very well documented. The film will still be there, and the album will be there for as long as people want it to be. When people went to see the show last year, I liked that there was a souvenir that they could take with them that was more substantial than a programme. This time, people will go into the show having lived with the music for a year, so it might have a different meaning."

"We wanted to reach as many different audiences as possible," Bissett adds. "In theatre, we're always going 'how can we pull people into our territory?'. But maybe some people don't want to come see the theatre show, they just like the album. So that's available as well."

Perhaps surprisingly, given the number of successful artists collaborating on Whatever Gets You Through the Night, the creators report no tension between them. "What I particularly enjoyed was the lack of ego," says Eaton-Lewis. "There were lots of people working together, some were very well-known like [Deacon Blue's] Ricky Ross, others less well known. We were all sitting together and making this thing, and it was really lovely. Everyone was quite generous."

"I think the collaborative thing was a positive thing for everybody," says Wilson. "I do feel that in Scotland, people are generally supportive of each other's creative work because it's a small pond. But this made it really concrete, it felt great. And subsequently I've gone on to work with some of the people that I was in the show with. Eugene Kelly was playing on the album I just made. So, there were some existing allegiances and some new ones have come out of it as well."

For Whatever Gets You Through the Night's Edinburgh run, every musician involved in the show will play live each night, except for Ricky Ross. And though it's technically a theatre show, the music has absolutely equal billing says Bissett. "I think there's so much diverse, eclectic, experimental, exciting, innovating song-writing talent in Scotland, I really wanted to make them core to the piece. And in that sense, they've not been an add-on or a prettifier of a theatre production. The songs are absolutely key."

And she's hoping that the universality of the show's subject matter will bring in an audience as diverse as its contributors. "We all need people in our lives, things to hold on to, to get us through the night. Hopefully you come to this show and there's a kind of joy in going 'we're all just trying to survive in the best way we can,' and there's a beauty in sharing that."