Gary McNair performs A Gambler’s Guide to Dying
What are the odds of living an extraordinary life?
This is the story of one boy's granddad who won a fortune betting on the 1966 World Cup, and, when diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1998 with weeks to live, gambled all his remaining winnings on living to see the year 2000. An intergenerational tale of what we live for and what we leave behind.
Gary McNair's award-winning solo show opens in New York following highly-acclaimed sell-out runs at Spoleto Festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Adelaide Festival and London's Off-West End.
McNair shines in this beautifully-written, deceptively simple, warmly comic piece that accumulates layers of meaning through the act of storytelling itself. Rich and earthily funny--a genuine pleasure. - The Guardian (UK).
The review: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/aug/08/a-gamblers-guide-to-dying-edinburgh-festival-review-gary-mcnair-traverse
The title of the latest one-man storytelling show from Gary McNair has a double meaning. The gambler is the narrator’s grandfather, a man who apparently placed a winning bet on the outcome of the 1966 World Cup. When he was subsequently diagnosed with cancer he placed another bet that, against the odds, he would survive to see the new millennium. But the title refers to us too: we are all gamblers, betting on outwitting death and achieving some kind of immortality through our genes and the stories we spin to our children and grandchildren.
It’s been a real treat seeing McNair bloom as an artist over the years, and this Gareth Nicholls-directed show is a genuine pleasure – a beautifully written, deceptively simple, warmly comic piece that accumulates layers of meaning through the act of storytelling itself. It’s rich and earthily funny in its depiction of Gorbals in the 1960s, and delicate in its portrayal of the relationship between a grandson and his grandfather, and the desire we all have to be seen as special: the hero or heroine of our own story.
It is both a celebration of the act of storytelling itself and a sly reminder that fiction and truth are hard to distinguish from each other. Like Sarah Polley’s brilliant movie Stories We Tell, it exposes the unreliability of memory and and the gap between what we know is true and what we want to believe is true. “The details, the facts, they’ve become blurred, like soft focus in an old movie,” says McNair.
This is a light-touch meditation on luck, probability, fate, love and the chances of falling in the Clyde and coming up with a salmon in your mouth. Odds are, audiences who secure a ticket will feel as though they’ve hit the jackpot.
