
I Want My Hat Back Trilogy
Nemesis; hubris; redemption; headgear. Those are pretty much the main themes of Jon Klassen's wonderous trilogy of picture books that kicked off in 2011 with the seminal I Want My Hat Back, in which a dopey bear wanders the forest looking for his missing red party hat, eventually clocking that it has been nicked by a rabbit, which it's then very strongly implied that the bear goes on to kill and eat. Followed by This Is Not My Hat – in which a small fish soliloquises to the reader about how he's definitely going to get away with stealing a big fish's bowler hat – and We Found a Hat – in which two tortoise pals must decide what to do with a sombrero – the three books contain no shared characters or plot, but are linked by Klassen's gloriously deadpan, almost woodcut-like drawings, sparse dialogue and bracingly morally ambiguous humour.
The same qualities have also made the books tricky to adapt: the National did a sort of maximalist fantasia on I Want My Hat Back a few years ago that was a lot of fun but didn't especially resemble the source material beyond the key plot beats. The basic problem is that a literal stage adaptation of I Want My Hat Back would only be about ten minutes long, and it's difficult to see how you can convey Klassen's distinctive visual style with human actors.
But that was before there was a trilogy, and – crucially – before the pandemic. This stage version of the three books started life as a lockdown project for designer Sam Wilde and director Ian Nicholson, who adapted I Want My Hat Back into a short digital film using cardboard puppets made from recycled materials that exactly copied the look of Klassen's book. This Is Not My Hat and We Found a Hat followed and now here's a live version of all three.
The trilogy immediately solves the runtime issue: the revamped show – performed with a perfect mischievous glint by puppeteers Imogen Khan and Simon Lyshon – now stretches to a walloping 35 minutes. I sincerely doubt a cardboard version would be commissioned if starting from scratch, but it looks great: pure Klassen, with the puppets' extremely limited mobility perfectly replicating the static nature of his drawings. Instead of being individually expressive, the puppets are continually swapped for new ones at different sizes or in different poses – eg the bear sitting down is switched for the bear lying down is switched for the bear running. It's an amusingly laborious touch that also feels in keeping with the source material.
Moreover, for a show aimed at ages three to six, there's something startlingly profound about seeing the three stories together. Each has a surprisingly sharp twist. For I Want My Hat Back, it's the extreme, shocking nature of the bear's vengeance. In This Is Not My Hat, it's the sense that the fish's unwise grandstanding has cost it dear. And in We Found a Hat it's the reversal of the earlier darkness and ultimate triumph of friendship, as one tortoise decides not to steal the hat after its friend shares a dream in which they both had hats.
It would maaaaybe be a stretch to compare it to Greek tragedy, but there's something of the devastating emotional clarity of the 'Oresteia' trilogy here: after two stories with shocking denouements, there's a definite catharsis to the end of We Found a Hat, beautifully manifested as the flat cardboard tortoises are swapped for three-dimensional ones with mirrorred shells that hover over us dreamily, like a pair of disco balls reflecting the light.
Yes, they're funny stories about animals fighting over hats, nominally aimed at young kids. But the reason the books have enjoyed such cult success is that they go to places that other stories for preschoolers won't. Wilde and Nicholson's adaptation is in many ways good because it's so literal. But staged as a single piece of theatre, the stories take on a surprising profundity that transcends the books. All life is under these hats.

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The Herald Scotland
10 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
Dougie MacLean's anthem causes Scots to start greetin' and drinkin'
This is one of these weeks when I must think carefully (reader's voice: 'That's a first!') about whether the Icon is the person or their most famous work. But there's more to illustrious songwriter Dougie MacLean than 'Caledonia', Scotland's unofficial national anthem. That said, he actually had Perthshire in particular in mind when he wrote the song as a homesick young man abroad. However, 'Perthshire's been everything I've ever had' would have had limited appeal. It's a song for the nation. 'Wester Hailes has been everything I've ever had' wouldn't have worked either. Not that Wester Hailes has been anything to Mr MacLean – no fault on either part – but his love of the land in Perthshire is very real. He lives and works where he grew up, even converting his old school and teacher's house in Butterstone, by Dunkeld, into a music studio and home. Dougie told punk rock fanzine Scottish Field in 2015: 'When the school closed in the 1970s it lay empty for a long, long time, then I was able to buy it. We also bought the old teacher's house, which my mum used to clean. We live in it now – it's really bizarre!' Born on 27 September 1954 in Dunblane, Dougie MacLean has described his childhood in Butterstone as 'idyllic'. His father's side of the family hailed from Mull, his mother's from around Taynuilt. Father, a gardener on a big estate, played the fiddle. Mother played the melodeon. Grandfather was a shepherd on the hills above Butterstone. When full of whisky, he'd sing old Gaelic songs with tears flooding down his face. 'We would say, 'What's wrong with Seanair [Gaelic for grandfather]?' MacLean told the National earlier this year. 'My mum would say, 'Oh, no, it's fine. He's just happy'.' HALL OR NOTHING THE kitchen table would then be pushed back, as mother and uncles produced their melodeons. By the time he was five, Dougie could play 'Morag of Dunvegan' on the harmonica. A year later, taken round village halls to hear Scottish country dance bands, he wanted to be a drummer: 'I used to sit up on stage beside the drummer with a pair of drumsticks and play along.' Soon, mandolin was added to his repertoire and, while at high school, he and buddy Ewan Sutherland (singing Corries songs) would play the Angus Hotel in Blairgowrie, earning £1 a night. With a few more pals, they formed a band called Puddock's Well, with Dougie on fiddle, the instrument for which he became best known in his early years. In 1976, while working as a gardener in Aberdeen, the 20-year-old was invited to play for the Tannahill Weavers – beginning in Germany the following day. After quickly consulting friends – 'Do it or you'll regret it for the rest of your life' – he gave up his job and flat and ended up, as he told Klof magazine, 'travelling all over Europe, sleeping in sleeping bags on people's floors and going through some real hard times'. Good times for folk, though, which was growing in popularity on yonder Continent. In the late 1970s, MacLean spent six months touring with Silly Wizard. Wanting to focus more on his own songwriting, he left the band, taking up an invitation from a friend living in Germany, the late Alan Roberts, to form a duo. (Image: PA) SICKENING TALENT AROUND this time, in just 10 minutes, he wrote 'Caledonia' while homesick on a beach in Brittany with a group of Irish buskers. It received its first airing at a concert in West Berlin and has since been embraced in Ireland, Norway, Denmark, all sorts of places, but mostly in Scotland, the homesickness capital of Europe. As MacLean has said: 'It's a magical thing when you put a bunch of words with a melody. When it works, it's really powerful.' It's been played during childbirth and in folk's dying moments. A commenter on the National's website called for it to be sung in schools as Americans do with the Star Spangled Banner. A version sung by Frankie Miller was used in a Tennent's Lager advert, which was quickly pulled for allegedly promoting a pro-independence message. It's since been watched by hundreds of thousands on yon YouTube. 'Caledonia' was written near the start of MacLean's stellar career, during which, while still in his early 20s, an English record company told him his music was 'banal, stupid and parochial'. This was at a time when cosmopolitan sophisticates Chas & Dave were all the rage. The insult led him to set up his own recording studio and label (Dunkeld Records), 'the best thing I ever did'. Musically, 'Caledonia' may have been the best song he ever did, but he also won plaudits internationally for 'The Gael', a dramatic and ominous version of which was used as a theme tune in 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans. READ MORE Rab McNeil: Get your Boots on, we're going shopping for unicorn hair gel Rab McNeil: No wonder the whole Scottish nation loves Nicola (no, not that one) Scottish Icons: William McGonagall - The poet who right bad verses wrote still floats some folk's vessel or boat Scottish Icons: There is a lot of tripe talked about haggis – so here's the truth BY ECK ANOTHER song, 'Holding Back', received a particularly emotional outing in 2013 when the late Alex Salmond presented MacLean with the BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for Lifetime Achievement for Contribution to Songwriting. It's a song about contentment: 'That's one of the great things about being an older musician – you can feel content with your place in the greater scheme of things.' Among other awards, in 2011 MacLean was conscripted as an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE), a higher award than the Quite Good Order of the British Empire. In 2014, Till Tomorrow, recorded in collaboration with The Royal Scottish National Orchestra, revisited some well loved songs. In Perthshire, MacLean set up the Amber Festival, so that fans might visit the places that inspired his songs. This coming November, a revitalised Shades of Amber will light up life in the county. In April, Dougie returned to New York's Carnegie Hall for a special concert with celebrated Scottish musicians Julie Fowlis and Mànran, while last month saw him perform at The Reeling, Glasgow's summer celebration of traditional Scottish music, at Rouken Glen song, though. Here are some final words on 'Caledonia', from the man himself: 'People sing it at weddings, they sing it at funerals. It becomes a kind of tool that people use in their everyday life. Music is much more than just a commodity. When it's done right it's a tool in life's toolbox to keep you from getting depressed or for celebrating in your own home.'

The National
12 hours ago
- The National
Play explores if it is possible to love someone whose views you hate
That's the question being asked by a powerful new drama based on the relationship between an award-winning US playwright and his brother, a convicted murderer and high-ranking member of a white supremacist prison gang. An explosive exploration of race, power and cultural divides in the 21st century, Rift is to be given its UK premiere at the Traverse in Edinburgh during the Fringe. It has already won critical acclaim from both audiences and critics in the US, but playwright Gabriel Jason Dean told the Sunday National he was a little nervous about showing Rift in Edinburgh this summer. READ MORE: 'Not in our name': Hundreds gather in Scottish cities to protest Donald Trump 'The context has changed from when [Joe] Biden was president,' he said. 'Then it was a little bit safer to be talking about these things. Now it feels like I'm holding a stick of dynamite. There has been political anxiety in the States my entire life to some degree, but things are really coming to a head.' Rift certainly doesn't stray from tackling political controversy and Dean said he was looking forward to seeing what the audience reaction would be like in Edinburgh. 'In the US if you say a play is political, that is a stroke against it for audiences, but in my experience, drama here is the opposite of that,' he said. 'I'm excited to see how what feels a little more aggressive to an American audience will land in a place where political theatre is just the status quo.' The play is based on Dean and his half-brother's relationship and different trajectories in life. Both were sexually abused by the same person but were brought up separately until Dean was a teenager. He lived with his father and mother and, despite the abuse, had a less traumatic upbringing than his brother, whose mother was in and out of incarceration. Eventually, their father took a paternity test and agreed to bring the boy into their home but by that time, much of the damage had been done. In later life, it is the sexual abuse they both suffered that allowed them to connect despite their ideological differences. 'His was enduring because he lived with this person,' said Dean. 'It happened to me one time but it doesn't need to happen more than once to leave a mark on you.' Talking to his brother, along with therapy, helped Dean come to terms with the sexual abuse and enabled him to write about it. However, while that is part of the play, it is not the centre of it as Dean still has difficulties with his brother's ideology even though it appears to have mellowed slightly during his incarceration. Now 46, he was jailed for life without parole when he was 21, after being involved in a murder. In prison, he joined a white supremacist gang, possibly as a survival tactic, but then became more and more extreme in his beliefs. It was more than Dean could take and he stopped contact with his brother for 10 years, only resuming it a year or so after Donald Trump was elected President of the US in 2016. 'I started thinking I needed to talk to my brother,' said Dean. 'I couldn't explain it at the time, I just felt this need to reach out to him. 'I had no intention of writing anything – I just felt that if the outside world was starting to look like the inside, then he needed something else in his life.' Dean admitted 'a bit of a saviour complex' may have motivated him but it swiftly became more than that. 'Being so close to extremism with him made me start to understand the ways in which the tentacles of white supremacy had weaved their way into my life too,' said Dean. 'I'm still trying to unweave that tangled web in my own life and hopefully my children's lives too.' Although he thinks it's misguided, he understands why people would vote for Trump. 'I think the answer that they're seeking with him is wrong but I think what they're seeking isn't,' he explained. 'They want to have enough, and be able to live the life that has been promised.' Dean added: 'The play really gets into this idea that it's actually the lie of whiteness that's killing us all. It's killing folks of colour yes and it's also killing poor white people.' He believes the political situation could turn around in the US if there were a truly progressive presidential candidate that would appeal to those who voted for Trump. 'Essentially we have two conservative parties,' Dean said. 'We desperately need a legitimate third party in the US. And to take big money out of politics.' Although the circumstances of Dean and his brother's lives are unique, he believes the conflict of ideologies is souring many relationships all over the US and elsewhere. 'At first I was full of self-doubt about the play, thinking nobody would understand it or want to see it but the opposite has been true,' he said. Rift has resonance in Scotland too, with the rise of Reform and topics like climate change and gender recognition continuing to split society. Yet while Dean finds many of his brother's views abhorrent he can still find qualities in him he loves and admires. 'He's a charming individual which is both his strength and his Achilles' heel,' said Dean. 'He is so loving but he's not been exposed to the best people a lot of times and they've taken advantage of that.' His brother's giving nature was exemplified when Dean said he was considering writing about their relationship. 'I felt like I had to absolutely have his permission, no matter how much I fictionalised it and without hesitation he agreed. That demonstrates the way that he moves through the world, and especially in relation to me. He's always put me on this sort of pedestal.' Dean recognises that even if he and his brother had grown up together in a stable environment they would still be very different people, but writing the play has helped their relationship. 'We talk on a weekly basis now and, you know, he kind of filled a hole,' he said. 'I think I filled a gap for him too, and now we have some kind of family, the two of us. 'I think it's shown me I have a capacity for love I didn't know I had. And if there is anything I'd like an audience to take away, it's that if you have that rift in your life, whatever it is, it is possible to mend it.' Rift opens at the Traverse Theatre on Thursday, July 31


Evening Standard
3 days ago
- Evening Standard
Jeremy Deller is inviting London to a party it won't forget
And with this little tour of these wild and true artworks, we arrive at why Deller is here. Which is that to mark the bicentenary of the National, the Turner Prize winner is holding a huge free party in Trafalgar Square this Saturday. Titled The Triumph of Art, it is a public revelry beginning at 11am with a parade along Whitehall to the square, where a carnival of performances, music and general mayhem will take place. It is the climax to a nationwide series of events by Deller and the National, that have dovetailed with local culture and folklore and politics, such as one in Derry, Northern Ireland which showcased the bands who played there during the Troubles. This final London happening is, quite simply, not to be missed.