'It made me blush': Actor returns to Glasgow play after 20 years

“Some we look back on fondly, and some we look back on with regret,” she says, smiling. “I can honestly say that this role - this is the one I look back on and blush.”

She laughs. “Because I was SO not very good…”

Annie as Poker Alice (Image: Annie Grace with director Laila Noble)

The role in question is the eponymous heroine of Poker Alice, the one-woman play which kicked off Oran Mor’s lunchtime theatre series A Play, A Pie and A Pint 20 years ago.

Written by Still Game co-creator Greg Hemphill, it follows a poker-playing widow who is determined to win big after being left in debt by her recently-departed husband, and it is being revised to kick off the new season with Annie back in the title role.

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“It was 20 years ago but I can still remember it all as clear as day,” she says, enthusiastically. “Dave McLennan, who founded PPP, was a mentor to me, he obviously saw something in me that made him offer me this role.”

She groans.

“But I was so green,” she says. “It was a great script, a great story but I was new and cocky, ‘look at me with my one-woman show’…”

Annie pauses.

Annie as Poker Alice (Image: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)

“And back then, we did the plays upstairs in Oran Mor, so it was broad daylight, and I remember Alasdair Gray was actually in the mezzanine above us, painting his fantastic mural,” she says, laughing. “I was there, in this bright, big, boom-y room, trying to be An Actor, and all the while Alasdair is painting…

“During one performance, he dropped a pot of paint and it went clanging away – it was bizarre.”

Nevertheless, it was “a wonderful experience,” smiles Annie.

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“I don’t think for a second David imagined then what PPP would become,” she says. “Nor do I think he would have thought 20 years later I’d be back up on stage revisiting this role, and very much thanking the universe that I have the chance to do it again - and be better.”

Alice is a fascinating character, says Annie.

“There is loads I missed about her the first time," she says. "She is an underdog, and I didn’t see that back then. She’s been through sexism, gaslighting, an unhappy marriage she put up with because she didn’t think she was good enough to do anything about it….”

Annie pauses. “Back then I was gallus and going for it, but now I see all these aspects of her life, having lived MY life, I have a lot more sympathy for her.”

Annie in rehearsal with director Laila Noble (Image: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)

Annie grew up in the Highlands, where she learned to play the pipes from the age of 10, “marching up and down Fort William high street on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons,” she recalls, with a smile.

“I came to Glasgow for art school, and got involved in the folk scene, serving my apprenticeship performing in all the pubs and busking on the streets."

After 12 years with the band she co-founded, The Iron Horse, Annie decided to leave and try her hand in the theatre.

“It was like jumping off a cliff with my eyes shut,” she admits. “I served my next apprenticeship on stage, by grafting and watching other actors and learning from them on the hoof.”

Annie has appeared in a variety of projects and shows, including performing with Sting in his musical The Last Ship, and most recently in the successful Fisherman’s Friends tour, and Runrig musical The Stamping Ground.

She also performed in the RSC’s all-Scottish production of Macbeth in Stratford-upon-Avon, and with David Tennant at the Donmar Warehouse in another Macbeth.

“I was Macbethed oot ma nut after that,” she says, cheerfully. “Stratford was great, I got the big pipes out for that. That doesn’t happen very often.

“Actually, on the last day of PPP I’m heading back down to London for the West End transfer of the Donmar show, which I’m really looking forward to.”

Life as an actor has “such a buzz”, says Annie.

“I didn’t choose this job,” she says, thoughtfully. “No-one plans to be an itinerant musician or an actor who works sometimes but falls on their a**e for months at a time, but I wouldn’t change it because I get so much joy from it.

“If you can put up with the financial insecurity of it all…and for a lot of people in our industry, it’s just become too hard to do that. The current funding difficulties are making it harder.

“The creative arts are such a significant part of the fabric of our society but it takes money to make shows, to develop them. We have to support the arts.”

Annie adds: “That’s why PPP is so important, in giving a platform to new writers and emerging actors. David would be so proud of what he created and it’s a privilege to be part of it.”

Poker Alice runs from Monday, September 2 to Saturday, September 7.