Magnetic North Theatre Company

The Dream Train began with Bach's Goldberg Variations. It developed from an interest in both the music and the bizarre circumstances of its conception (it was commissioned by an insomniac diplomat who wanted music played to him each night as he tried to sleep). The play explored the form of the music - an aria played at the beginning and end with thirty variations in between - and the language of dreams as the basis for telling a story.

"In a castle somewhere on Scotland's east coast, a moth-eaten baron obsessed with the music of Bach struggles to sleep. He is tended by a strange androgynous figure, sometimes the young 18th century pianist Goldberg, sometimes a beautiful young girl who seems to love him; meanwhile, on a train lumbering up the same coast, the baron's beautiful but ageing wife meets an intensely attractive young man heading for the same station. For 90 minutes this quartet of characters weave their way in and out of one another's dreams and realities."
Joyce McMillan in The Scotsman

Cast

Production opened at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, November 1999

Revised version opened at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, September 2000

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