Hiya Dolly!
Every family justly proud of their first child, the white-faced Finnish Dorset born on Friday 5th July 1996 at Roslin outside Edinburgh was a cause for special celebration to the team led by Doctors Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell, the postponed announcement of her birth causing headlines around the world seven months later when it was publicly announced that Dolly was the first animal successfully cloned from an adult rather than an undifferentiated cell.
Hiya Dolly! a new musical dedicated to her memory written by Vince LiCata and directed by Andy Jordan, it celebrates her life along with the scientists who worked together to develop and refine the theories and techniques which created her, the daughter of two human fathers and three sheep mothers, one providing the ovum, the second nuclear material and the third carrying the embryo, opening new avenues of research into stem cells and biotechnology.
With Mark Beauchamp and John Fagan as Wilmut and Campbell, two men possessed of very different personalities yet who form a close friendship and strong working relationship, unique individuals ironically obsessed with making identical copies, they are supported by Alana Johnson, Justin Newell and Alice Wilkinson as their post-docs and lab technicians, but the star of the show, predictably, is Jessica Donnelly as Dolly.
Dressed in a frilly white woolly jumper, kilt and white woollen socks, she frolics, poses, gambols and sings her way through her conception – figurative and literal – life, death and afterlife, charming the audience as much as Dolly did the world during her too-short life, she and several members of her flock succumbing to a retrovirus induced pulmonary cancer in 2003.
A story about science, Hiya Dolly! does not hold back on the details of nuclear transfers and blastocysts but all is clearly articulated in lively demonstrations, often accompanied by songs appropriately familiar yet repurposed, the crowd invited to join the chorus of I would poke five hundred cells and My mammy came out of a freezer, the ensemble supported by live music provided by Adam Smith, Ciaran McGhee and Sean Findlay (alternating) and Donnelly herself.
The challenge of the groundbreaking work compounded by the frustrations of dealing with the scientifically illiterate press, looking for The Boys from Brazil rather than the sheep from Roslin, a story to sell copies of newspapers than the truth, featuring a singing sheep Hiya Dolly! cannot perhaps be regarded as entirely accurate but it places those who were actually there at the centre of the story, expressing their intentions and ambitions and recognising their achievement.
Hiya Dolly! runs at theSpace at Surgeons Hall until Saturday 27th August
