Stealing the show: Restless Natives rides again

“The thought occurs that if we would have had Boris Johnson’s head sitting in a pile of shite on a Highland road, that might have been quite a crowd-pleaser,” says screenwriter Ninian Dunnett.

He’s talking about the requests he’s had, and rejected, to reboot the 1985 cult film Restless Natives for a contemporary audience.

The tale of the scheme-boys-turned-Robin-Hoods – “the most charming bandits in world history” – was Dunnett’s first foray into professional filmmaking. Now it’s taking him into the world of stage musicals. Because while Dunnett and producer Andy Paterson are convinced there’s no need to retread the story on the silver screen, treading the boards is another matter. It is, says Paterson – whose work includes dramas like The Girl with the Pearl Earring and The Railway Man biopic of Edinburgh-born POW Eric Lomax – “a proper musical” with the potential to capture audiences in London’s West End or in the US.

But it’s starting off at Perth Theatre, where an 18-show run will kickstart a Scottish tour taking in Stirling, Aberdeen, Inverness, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Shows begin on 24 April. “What I want you to do,” says Dunnett, “is come and see the show and think it’s fucking fantastic.”

Born of a screenwriting contest and released on 9 April 1985, Restless Natives is the tale of Will and Ronnie (Vincent Friell and Joe Mullaney), two Edinburgh pals facing adulthood with little hope and fewer prospects. What they do have is imagination and they dream up an audacious plan – robbing tour buses in the Highlands.

Disguised using clown and wolfman masks from the joke shop where Ronnie works, riding a Sukuzi motorbike and armed with ‘puffer’ filled with sneezing powder, not only do they pull it off, but they become a tourist attraction in their own right – an international sensation with a US lawman and Japanese news crew on their tail. In one memorable scene a holidaymaker asks what bus they can go on where they’ll be robbed. In another, a rubber Thatcher mask on a pile of dung is used as roadblock. The whole thing plays out, police chases and all, to a soaring soundtrack by Dunfermline rockers Big Country, and the love interest is none other than Take the High Road sweetheart Teri Lally.

It could not be more 1980s if it tried. So how on earth will this new version speak to audiences 40 years later?

Restless Natives has been assessed over time as social commentary; a critique of inequality, a crack at tourism and an assertion of a Scottishness far removed from the shortbread tin

“You can’t escape how some of these background things that made the story work in the 80s are still with us,” says Dunnett, whose film was released six years after the 1979 devolution vote in which a majority for a Scottish assembly was dismissed on the basis of turnout. “We’ve got a Scottish Parliament now, but it’s not changed the fact that we still live in a world of haves and have-nots, there’s still an abrasive relationship with Westminster.” 

“Opportunity is talked about a lot,” adds Paterson. “We talk about the need to open up opportunities to a much wider group of people, and a lot of young people are sitting there going, ‘have you seen what it costs to rent a flat? Have you seen what my student debt is?’ The story is very much speaking to that younger audience.”

Unemployment in Scotland had been climbing in the years before the film’s release, doubling in the latter half of the 1970s and doing so again at the start of the 80s. There was argument over just how many were out of work thanks to more than a dozen changes to categorisations, data collection and the benefits system, but it was estimated by some that the jobless total had surpassed the levels of the Great Depression by January 1985. While North Sea oil and gas had brought job creation to the north east, that was little help to the people of Edinburgh’s Wester Hailes, from where Restless Natives drew its characters.

Developed to combat a housing shortage, the area’s high-density model was as modern as it came and home to a large number of children and young people who were growing up at the height of Thatcherism. Most of Scotland didn’t vote for Thatcher, with Labour winning 44 seats to the Tories’ 22 in the year she came to power, and if the country’s relationship with the new PM had a poor start, it only got worse thanks to the economic and social policies that followed. Pits, factories, shipyards and steelyards closed, leaving deep scars in communities. 

While the political composition of the UK Government has changed, with Labour now in the majority, Thatcher’s legacy and reputation persist 40 years on. Labour MP Brian Leishman has said the closure of the Petroineos oil plant at Grangemouth will have similar effects to the industrial losses seen during her premiership, comparing this “disaster for workers” to “what happened to the mining communities”. And the Iron Lady was also invoked by Keir Starmer in defence of his plan to boost the economy through deregulation.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate may have improved over 2024, but Covid and the cost-of-living crisis have increased the gaps between the richest and poorest, and big employers like Tesco, Sainsburys and Bank of Scotland recently announced closures and job cuts. Like many areas, Wester Hailes, designated as an area of multiple deprivation, continues to face challenges around housing and household incomes in a city where the average monthly rent for a flat is £1,200 and the average first-time buyer forks out £267,000.  

Ned Beatty was part of the original cast | Alamy

Despite the comedy and caper – an angry mother battering Ronnie with a pair of rubber boobs he sold to her son, hapless police chasing sheep – Restless Natives has been assessed over time as social commentary; a critique of inequality, a crack at tourism and an assertion of a Scottishness far removed from the shortbread tin, but without the unrelenting grimness of later hits like Trainspotting.

Dunnett recalls reading a review which described his film as “a cinematic critique of Thatcherism”. “It would be wrong to say those ideas weren’t in my head. I was a newspaper reporter and living in a world of crime and social deprivation,” he tells Holyrood. He’s been accused of a “naïve nationalism”, he says, and thinks “god save us from sophisticated nationalists”. And he says the “ideological quality” it has acquired for some, including the suggestion that it helped fuel interest in independence, was never the point. “Restless Natives is an awful lot before it’s a political film. The biggest thing we tried for was the word ‘fun’. Politics and fun don’t always sit in the same sentence.

“It’s about breaking chains for our characters and finding some dignity,” he goes on. “That spreads out to the community through the family and beyond and becomes national in a sense. Actually, I’m very fond of Scotland, but Scotland really makes sense to me mostly in the idea of community.”

“There is a sense of local pride that’s there in Scotland, and the story kind of feeds off that and tells you that family, friendship and a sense of belonging to a place really matters to people,” says Manchester-based Paterson, whose grandad was from Glasgow. In the making of the stage show, he’s found himself “driving a lot of roads we’d recced 40 years ago”, asking himself “what is it about this place that’s so special?” and relating it to the lyrics of Stuart Adamson’s Big Country tracks. “I do feel some kind of sense of belonging there. When you drive through Glencoe you completely understand what Stuart is talking about, about being ‘proud again’, about what that is.”

It was the “ambition” of the script that drew Paterson to the project – an assumption by crew members that Highland scenes would be shot in the Campsies, rather than the real thing, was swiftly dispelled – and he’s equally ambitious about the stage version. His “first rule” was an all-Scottish cast, and one with the technical chops to deliver. “We think this is commercial theatre,” says Paterson, “it’s not a jukebox musical. We have spent many years getting it, I hope, to a good place.

“There was an absolute driving force to the adaptation that it has to please the people who have seen it 1,000 times and speak to what it is to be young today and everything you are up against.

It survived because people love it. Scotland took it to heart

“Ninian has an extraordinary gift as a lyricist. My God, can he create those words. That was something that was a huge bonus in the whole process.”

That process has not only included creating new musical numbers, but also “asking a lot of questions” about what changes to make to the script. The US detective, memorably played by Ned Beatty, is now a woman, and tour guide Margo’s share of lines will grow to “the sort of role that she deserves”. But the action remains firmly in the ‘80s. “This story doesn’t work in a world of mobile phones, drones, GPS and all the rest of it,” says Dunnett. “If there’s a phone on that bus there’s no story. Keeping it in the past made perfect sense. 

“We’re having to cut through to these silly boys when we are writing the musical now and their spirit and their positivity and so on, and it doesn’t make sense to make the world they live in sophisticated, really.

“Tourism is something we’ve had to think a lot about. It’s an issue that’s kind of sharpened with the passing of years. We’ve been asking a lot of questions like, what does tourism do? What are we selling? ‘Scotland the Brand’ and whatever else, what does that mean to how we’re viewed by the world, and what does that make us that are selling that thing? I’d like to think that we find a tricky way to make everybody come out of that well.”

Paterson and Dunnett know success is not assured. Restless Natives had a mixed response on its cinema release, with English reviewers finding it decidedly unfunny. “It was an early lesson in complacency,” says Paterson.

“BFI, who financed it, loved it. There was a general sense, which I think is reasonable, that this was a very, very good and entertaining movie, but the English press basically went to a preview and all those journalists were in the same room on a rainy morning. I would never, and have never since, have allowed all the press to go into one room and see the movie together.

The show will stop at Leith Theatre | Colin Hattersley

“It survived because people love it. Scotland took it to heart, and it kept going that way.”

“Where I care, it was a hit,” says Dunnett. “It was on in three cinemas in Edinburgh at the same time – there was a nice sense, locally. I don’t think England particularly took it to its heart. And we had a bit of a fight, a bit of a hard time with the critics, and honestly, we couldn’t have possibly imagined we’d be sitting here 40 years later. As time’s gone on, people have liked it more. It’s been really nice, and I haven’t had to do anything, and now it’s head-above-the-parapet time.”

“These characters who felt so real, that core friendship is what the entire story is about,” Paterson says. “They become this huge deal, but it breaks up their friendship, and Will has to put it right. That’s a very simple, emotional journey written on a big Hollywood stage. Britain wasn’t doing that; it wasn’t having the ambition to.”

Emotion and friendship are writ large in the duo’s triumphant journey through Edinburgh city centre, police in hot pursuit and crowds of people cheering them on. By this point they’ve fallen out and back in again, having become, as one police officer puts it, “bigger than the Loch Ness monster”. 

Filmed in the kind of sunshine Scotland often only dreams about, the sequence embodies the sense of optimism that pervades the movie, and – it is hoped – will translate to the stage. “Our team had had nine previous conversations with police about where we could go and couldn’t go, but by the time we got to Princes Street most of Edinburgh was there,” recalls Paterson, and such was the sense of anticipation that some of that planning went out of the window. “It was a case of, ‘we are doing this’. The police were just as enthusiastic as anybody else about this being a great thing.”

There’s a parallel there with the story itself. In the end, Will and Ronnie’s legend has grown too big for the police to contain. Detectives tell them they can’t let them go. But, having become a political problem and folk heroes, prosecution isn’t an option either.

Before the end credits roll, Will, Margo and Ronnie are hiding out abroad, having faked their deaths. “Do you believe in ghosts?” Ronnie asks. It feels like the set-up for a sequel that has never been delivered. But with the musical about to open, Restless Natives has been given new life. The Clown and the Wolfman ride again.