Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson are performing together on stage for the first time in their four-decade friendship, appearing in A History of Paper at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, where Cumming serves as artistic director.
The two first met as young actors on the STV drama Shadow of the Stone. Henderson was 20 and had just left drama school. Cumming was 21. ‘I thought I was such a sophisticated older man,’ Cumming said. ‘I had a mortgage. I was married. And yet when I look back now, I see I was just a child.’
A History of Paper: from radio to the stage
The History of Paper began as a radio play in 2017, with words by Oliver Emanuel and music by Gareth Williams. The pair then developed it into a musical at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2024. The show follows a couple who tell their story through the scraps of paper they accumulate across a lifetime.
The production carried added weight after Emanuel died in 2023. Cumming saw it during a day off from filming Glenrothan, the directorial debut of Brian Cox, which also brought him back together with Henderson.
‘I went back to work on the film and I said to Shirley, “I’ve seen this incredible show. It was just so moving,”‘ Cumming said.
Around the same time, Cumming had applied for the artistic director role at Pitlochry, and was already planning his first season before his appointment was made public. The original production had featured two younger actors imagining their older selves. Cumming proposed a different approach to director Andrew Panton of Dundee Rep: cast older actors who could play younger versions of themselves. He and Henderson, now 61 and 60 respectively, took those parts.
Alan Cumming Shirley Henderson on chemistry and vulnerability
‘We both have a sort of childlike quality to us,’ Cumming said. ‘And we’re both prepared to be vulnerable as actors.’
Henderson was equally direct about what makes the pairing work. ‘It’s just easy to be with Alan,’ she said. ‘We have a good chemistry. We don’t over analyse it.’
The show moves between tenderness and raw emotion. ‘Even in the happy bits, I want to cry,’ Cumming said. Henderson described the feeling it produces: ‘It’s like when the first snows come. It’s a tenderness, but there’s a rawness to it as well.’
Cumming said he visits Henderson before each performance. ‘I come to see you before the show, each night, and I say, “let’s have fun”. If we can, because it’s terrifying.’
Both were asked which pieces of paper they treasure most personally. For Henderson, the answer was letters from her late father sent while she was living in London. ‘I’ve still got letters from when I was a teenager and living in a bedsit. Occasionally he would send me a bit of money too.’ For Cumming, it is drawings made by his illustrator husband, Grant. ‘I have thousands of them, on letters and hotel notepads. He’ll leave them by the bed or I’ll find them in my luggage when I go somewhere.’
Pitlochry looks ahead to 75th anniversary season
The Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson production sits within a broader moment for Pitlochry Festival Theatre. According to its own press material, the venue will celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2026, with a season that includes world premières, Scottish and UK premières, revivals of musicals and plays, a visiting production and two festivals.
A History of Paper runs at Pitlochry Festival Theatre until 12 September, then transfers to Dundee Rep Theatre from 16 to 19 September.
