KELI Comes to Scottish Stages in 2025

Best known as the virtuoso accordionist in the visionary folk trio Lau, Martin Green has spent the past two years on an odyssey deep into the world of brass bands, culminating in this staging of KELI, marking its world premiere as a stage play. Making his professional debut as a playwright, Green was inspired by conversations he had for the BBC Radio 4 series ‘Love, Spit and Valve Oil’.  

KELI will feature brass band music from Green’s acclaimed album SPLIT THE AIR. Through collaboration with Whitburn Band, and other local brass bands around Scotland, this production continues to sustain ongoing relationships with Scottish brass bands and the communities they represent. 

KELI tells the story of a fiery, sharp-witted teenager in a former mining town. Coal means little to Keli, but the mines left music in the blood of this place. 

As the best player her brass band has ever had, music is easy. Everything else is a fight. Feeling trapped in small-town life, pressure mounts. 

When the chance to change everything arises, can Keli keep a lid on it all? 

Marking 40 years since the miners' strikes and featuring a sharp, hilarious script and live brass score by Ivor Novello winner Martin Green, KELI is a gripping show about community, creativity, and the power of music.  

Touring Scotland in 2025, the show will reach audiences across the country who belong to communities that were hugely affected by the miners’ strike of 1984-85. 

Green’s journey began by chance near his home in Midlothian. Following a poster advertising ‘BRASS IN THE PARK’, he discovered a self-sustaining world of music-making that – like the folk tradition – had retained its social function and was part of the warp and weft of the communities that performed it.  

The fictional play has evolved from the critically acclaimed BBC Radio 4 series Love, Spit and Valve Oilwhich explored the phenomenon of modern brass banding and featured interviews with members of brass bands. These interviews have inspired aspects of the characters in the play. In 2022 KELI was commissioned by The Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh as a three part audio drama. 

“KELI is a hard story about the limitations placed on working-class lives, capturing teenage desperation, depression and fulfilment through music…forces of dialogue, music and folklore harmonise to a riveting final episode.”  The Guardian (on the audio drama, KELI) 

Martin Green is a multi-award winning musician and Ivor Novello winning composer. As a member of Lau he has won four BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards for Best Group an unprecedented four times. In 2014 he received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in recognition of his talent as a composer. In 2019 he won the Ivor Novello award for his large-scale installation Aeons that was part of The Great Exhibition of the North.

Most recently Martin has gone on to create critically acclaimed work for BBC Radio 4 exploring different communities all over the UK and their relationship with music. These have reached millions of listeners and been highly commended by Association of International Broadcasters.

Martin shared the stage with Whitburn Brass Band as part of a Celtic Connections gig at Tramway in early 2024 – “a profoundly moving affair” ***** The Scotsman.

Martin is the Artistic Director of Lepus Arts, who are co-producing KELI with National Theatre of Scotland, marking the first time the companies have collaborated. 

Bryony Shanahan directs, marking her NTS debut. Previously Bryony was Joint Artistic Director of the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, and most recently directed the acclaimed, Same Team – A Street Soccer Story for the Traverse Theatre. Other notable productions include Bloody Elle (Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Soho Theatre and West End) and also for the Royal Exchange Theatre, No Pay? No Way! Beginning, Let The Right One In, Nora: A Doll's House, Wuthering Heights, Queens of the Coal Age, Weald, and Nothing.

  

Martin Green, writer and composer, said, "To be making KELI with National Theatre of Scotland and Bryony Shanahan forty years on from the Miners’ Strike, feels absolutely right; an incredible team of visionary people. Perfect." 

Bryony Shanahan, director, said, “My introduction to this project was that it was about a 17 year old called Keli - foul-mouthed, hilarious and a virtuoso flugelhorn player  - who finds herself in a disused coal mine with a 150 year old Marxist miner after the strangest night of her life. Oh and that it features a live brass band. I was in! I am so thrilled to be working with National Theatre of Scotland, Lepus and Martin Green to bring Keli to life. It’s a story about community, legacy and above all, music and I can’t wait to invite audiences into Keli’s remarkable world and heart.” 

KELI was developed with National Theatre of Scotland and The National Theatre, London’s Generate programme and was originally commissioned as an audio drama by The Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh.  Both KELI and SPLIT THE AIR were developed with the support of Creative Scotland and The Space.  The music for KELI, Split the Air, was originally commissioned by PRS Foundation for the New Music Biennial at The Southbank Centre, and UK City of Culture. 

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