Be Near Me: Adapted for the Stage

Father David Anderton is assigned to a crippled Scottish town on the Ayrshire coast, where sectarianism is rife. He is a cultivated - if naive and unworldly - man, ill-suited to his new parish. Drifting from his peers, he is drawn to Mark and Lisa, a feral teenage couple who attend the nearby school. Their untamed nights of booze and drugs are as exotic and entrancing to him as his solitary and cloistered life is to them. But, as events take a perilous direction, this combustible liaison will leave Father David's world in pieces. Adapted for the stage by Ian McDiarmid from the Booker Prize nominated novel by Andrew O'Hagan, "Be Near Me" premiered in a co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland and the Donmar Warehouse in January 2009.