As he brings his one-man show about ‘rockstar’ poet Robert Burns to the Edinburgh festival, the star talks about desire, debauchery and dancing in his 50s
There can’t be many people having more fun in their job than Alan Cumming. Whether it’s giggling his way around Scotland in a camper van with an outrageously rude Miriam Margolyes for Channel 4, sending up musicals in the gleeful song’n’dance parody Schmigadoon! or doing cabaret at his own bar Club Cumming in Manhattan, the phrase he repeats most often when talking about his various projects is: “It was a hoot!”
His latest memoir, Baggage, recounts hedonism aplenty, unexpectedly becoming the toast of New York as the emcee in the musical Cabaret on Broadway in the 90s. But that book came after a much more sober and surprising 2014 memoir, Not My Father’s Son, recounting the abusive behaviour of his father during his childhood in Angus, Scotland. The disconnect between a person’s public persona and the fuller story of their life is one that fascinates Cumming and it’s the trigger for his latest one-man show, Burn, based on the life of poet Robert Burns, premiering at the Edinburgh international festival.
In popular imagination we think of Burns as “romping in the hay and ploughing, and ‘Oh, here’s a poem!’” says Cumming. But the actor had “inklings” there was more to Burns than that. “And actually I think he was quite a tortured soul.” In writing his own autobiographies, Cumming thinks he’s changed his particular narrative – he is not only the boyish pansexual performer in circular specs with a mischievous grin that glints at me over Zoom, but also a man with a complicated past and a commitment to emotional frankness. He wanted to do some of the same for Burns, to undermine the sentimentality, the inclination “to biscuit-tin” him, as Cumming puts it. “To make someone into this figure that doesn’t reveal their wholeness and hides any chance of finding out the real person.”
