OFFSET YOUR WORLD CUP TRAVEL WITH GREENERTRAVEL
Date: 8th May 2026
Black Diamonds and the Blue Brazil is a novel dressed up as a love letter to Cowdenbeath FC by Ron Ferguson. Originally published in 1993, in 2020 it became a podcast, adapted by Gary McNair and is now a play at The Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh. Artistic Director, James Brining is bringing it to the Lyceum stage from the 8th of May through to the 23rd. With music composed (and performed) by Deacon Blue frontman, Ricky Ross, it stars Dawn Steele (Skye: A Thriller, Eastenders, Holby City, Shetland, Granite Harbour) as Sally and Barrie Hunter (The Angels Share, Smile, Tay Bridge, All My Sons, Death Of A Salesman) as her dad. Whilst Ricky and Dawn were whisked off to see a piano with STV, our correspondent, Donald C Stewart got an opportunity to hear all about the production from co-star, Barrie Hunter, who ended up speaking to him from the Lyceum’s panic room! As it turns out there was no need to panic…
We began with talking about the superstar artistic team, Brining, Steele, Hunter, Ross, McNair, a solid spine. “I’m still pinching myself, to be honest. I think Gary’s crafted a beautiful story and Dawn has that incredible career that so many people know her from, more screen than stage, but she’s holding this whole thing together. We’re circulating around her gravitational pull.” And the play is, according to Barrie, “a beautiful love letter to lower league Scottish football and a beautifully crafted piece of theatre: or it will be by the time people get to see it!”
The story follows Sally, a successful businesswoman, who reluctantly comes back to Cowdenbeath to deal with her father’s death. Unfortunately, as Barrie explained, “she thought she’d left everything behind and she was only going up for a very brief farewell, to sort out a few bits of paperwork. But oh no there’s unresolved business, so she has to keep coming back.”
That’s because her father’s dying wish is that his ashes should be scattered in the centre circle after a Cowdenbeath win, but as Barrie points out: “She thinks she only has to go to one game, but no she’s got to go to all the games, and it takes that whole 92-93 season! (In that season Cowdenbeath were relegated after winning only 3 games out of a possible 44 in the First Division).” Football is, only one of her challenges as Barrie continued, “she has to confront a lot of her past and make peace with a lot of family and personal parts of her life as well.”
Written in diary form the book is already theatrical and as Barrie outlined, “to use a mining analogy, there is a rich seam of stuff to be threaded through it. It is a kind of rollercoaster because there’s some very funny moments but then it’s tinged with a lot of sadness, regret, dashed hope and everything else!”
The pull of fitba’ is something that Barrie knows all too well, as he described a recent jaunt down south, “I was down in High Wycombe for the UK Panto Awards, (Barrie has been Dame at Perth Theatre for at least a decade) and on the Sunday, I found this park which was beautiful and there were three games of Sunday league football getting played. I found myself gravitating towards it, watching it for longer than I thought I was going to. I watched these guys running about, with all their friends and family. It wasn’t like they had a massive support, and it was most probably people who were part of those clubs, but it just draws you in.”
As for The Blue Brazil, Barrie did admit that he, “didn’t know too much of their history,” and was now using Ron Ferguson’s book as, “a useful dip in tool because once it gets into the nuts and bolts of the book, it’s a really easy to pinpoint moments in time , most of which are miserable, but written in a beautiful way! It’s that spirit of lower league football, community, that ability to comprehend the importance of something, that’s absolutely in people’s hearts and veins. There is, at times, almost gallows humour, but clubs in these small communities can be the main focal point, with a real coming together of people; where people can go to laugh, cry, meet up, give them the excuse to go for a pint.”
We lead seamlessly, from the fortunes of Cowdenbeath to this summer’s World Cup, “let’s keep our fingers crossed that it does happen. There might be a few world events between now and then that could get between that and football being played. It’s kind of extraordinary, Scotland being back in the mix for the first time in all that time.”
As for the play itself, it has that stellar Premier League winning backbone of a team and as Barrie said, “There’s a great excitement of putting anything up on a stage. Gary’s such a wordsmith and anyone who likes a beautiful tune and a wonderful lyric, you need look no further because Ricky Ross can more than fill that brief. His songs are just so beautiful. I think he puts together the most amazing succinct lyrics to songs. There’s nothing unnecessary in them, they’re spare, but they’re poetry. We’re doing something that has never been in front of an audience before. There’s always that slight fear factor that for whatever reason, it might not work, but underneath it all, we know that it will. There is something really special about that.” All that remained as we concluded our chat was getting onto the stage where they, “get in under the lights and we all start going, oh, God, I knew this last week. All the other elements get added in, and you’re like, they never told me about that, although they will have done, you just haven’t listened!”
Black Diamonds and the Blue Brazil is at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh from the 8th of May until the 23rd. Detail can be found here: – https://lyceum.org.uk/events/black-diamonds-and-the-blue-brazil
Photography credit: Jessica Shurte / Poster by Jed Berry
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Tags: oor Donald, Scottish fans, SFSA