The Dream Train (2020)

"The music is inexhaustible. If I reach the end, I can repeat it, or just play a part of it again"

The Dream Train was Magnetic North’s debut production. It was commissioned from legendary Scottish playwright and musician Tom McGrath and performed for three nights at the Traverse Theatre in November 1999. 

In September 2020, we spent two weeks creating a new version of The Dream Train with live music to jointly celebrate our 21st birthday and what would have been Tom McGrath's 80th birthday.  The staged reading was filmed with social distancing in place in the atmospheric Main Hall at The Hub, Edinburgh and was premiered on Tom's birthday, 23 October 2020.

The play is based on the structure of J.S.Bach’s Goldberg Variations and the probably mythical story of its composition. The music is for keyboard and consists of an aria, played at the beginning and end, and 30 variations; it was supposedly written for a young pupil of Bach’s who had a night-time job playing music for an insomniac nobleman. The music of the variations threads in and out of the text, sometimes underscoring it, sometimes accompanying rhythmically-spoken sections.

The 2020 version was available to watch on demand from 6-29 August 2021 as part of Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021.

"In a castle somewhere on Scotland's east coast, a moth-eaten baron obsessed with the music of Bach struggles to sleep. He is tended by a strange androgynous figure, sometimes the young 18th century pianist Goldberg, sometimes a beautiful young girl who seems to love him; meanwhile, on a train lumbering up the same coast, the baron's beautiful but ageing wife meets an intensely attractive young man heading for the same station. For 90 minutes this quartet of characters weave their way in and out of one another's dreams and realities."

Joyce McMillan in The Scotsman (1999)