A Play For Torry: part ceilidh, part protest, part love-letter to a community that refuses to be quiet (Interview: Director, Emer Morris)

Emer Morris is one of two directors behind A Play for Torry which has been built from real voices and lived experiences of people who have suffered from the rise and decline of industry, while fighting for land, health and home. 

A Play for Torry is a bold, community-led theatre event co-created with residents, artists and campaigners in Torry, on the outskirts of Aberdeen. It fuses verbatim storytelling with original music to create a rich, multi-sensory night out – part ceilidh, part protest, part love-letter to a community that refuses to be quiet. It tells the story of a community wracked by industrial land grabs over the years.

Having been cleared from Old Torry to make way for the oil industry, their Bay of Nigg became a concrete industrial harbour, whilst St Fittick’s Park, is a biodiverse regenerated wetland and Torry’s only green space, is surrounded by the city’s landfill and waste incinerator. Now to add climate emergency to climactic response, Ian Wood – the father of North Sea Oil – wants to bulldoze the park to make way for an ‘Energy Transition Zone’. 

We got to speak to the Director of A Play for Torry, Emer Morris as they were travelling up to Aberdeen  for the final rehearsal process before the play opened to find out more about the process behind fusing artists, locals and campaigners into one artistic protest play. 

A Play for Torry asks urgent questions like who is the ‘Just Transition’ really for. Who has come together to make and who is the Play For Torry by? 

The play is a co-authored piece, gathered together by the residents of Torry, local artists and other collaborators. It tells a story of Torry’s past, present and future in the words of people who live there. It’s a story of land and of the people fighting for their land, for their homes, of people coming together and saying, well, we’ve sort of had enough. It’s not always a story of people winning, but it poses a question about what keeps people fighting, even when the odds seem stacked against them – hopefully in a joyful way!

The story being told may be local to Torry, but you believe it has a wider message, am I right? 

Yeah, Torry is a place where things have been done to it rather than it has demanded or asked for things to be done. People who are not familiar with Torry but come from Scotland, the UK or other parts of the world will know a place that has also been treated in the way that Torry has been treated. 

Getting the locals onboard is clearly vital, how have the locals responded?

People have been very involved – local residents, organisations, campaigners, activists and ordinary residents across the entire period. That’s involved a lot of one-to-one interviews, which are then recorded and form parts of the script.

We’ve also used historical and archival material, done a huge amount of workshops with young people and adults which has really developed some of the ideas. We worked, over the course of the last couple of years, doing drama and music workshops, working with an amazing local rapping hip-hop artist, Jackill and producer Ben Vardi to make a soundtrack for the play. That feels really important because that work is for all the young people. 

Their influence over the process has kept it real? 

Yeah. We’ve always gone at the pace of trust. Every step of the way people have been involved in this whether it’s deciding what the idea is going to be, speaking back on that writing process, the auditions for the professional actors and the performances. The cast is a mix of professional performers from Aberdeen and local residents who are all speaking their own words. One of the real successes from its early development is that folks who’ve been involved in this and been part of the writing and characters in it have felt real ownership over it. It is their story. They own this. That’s fundamentally important. 

Am I right in saying that Doric features in the play? 

Obviously! Many of the people we interviewed are direct speakers themselves, which means that we get that, at the forefront. It represents in dialogue different identities that make up Torry, which is an incredibly rich area: we really wanted to reflect that. 

I also noticed a local organisation involved called Big Noise Torry. 

Big Noise Torry is a really incredible and very under-celebrated youth music project in Torry which happens across Aberdeen as well. Everyday hundreds of young people come and do their music lessons there after school. It’s doing really undervalued work. Due to cuts in education, music is not part of the school curriculum, and I think they had a huge amount of their funding cut from the local council but they’re very cool.

So, what at the end of this does success look like? 

We have plans to tour the show. What happens here in Torry definitely has resonated to other places across Scotland and the UK. We hope that we can open that dialogue.

Preview: Saturday, 31st January 2026, 7pm (2.5 hours with interval), Aberdeen Arts Centre Children’s Theatre 

Premiere: Sunday, 1st February 2026, 5pm (2.5 hours with interval), Nigg Bay Golf Club, Torry 

Book tickets for A Play For Torry: https://www.aplayfortorry.com/