Actor to showcase Sunday Herald illustrator�s work

THREE months after his death, the life and work of Sunday Herald political cartoonist Harry Horse is set to be commemorated on stages across Scotland.

Actor Tam Dean Burn, currently starring in the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) production of Tutti Frutti, plans to create an as-yet-untitled show using Horse's words and images as well as unreleased tracks the illustrator recorded with his band Swamptrash. His aim is to undertake a national tour of the resulting show in the late autumn.

"I'd be very keen to do it because I thought Harry Horse was fantastic," Burn said. "I was surprised at how shocked I was that he had died and that we didn't have him any more. I think he's among the most striking political artists that I have ever seen."

Burn plans to write the show over the summer, after he has finished performing in another NTS touring production, Venus As A Boy. To help him perform it, he hopes to enlist his musician brother Russell Burn, formerly of The Fire Engines, and Malcolm Ross, guitarist in cult Edinburgh band Josef K and Orange Juice. But he will do it solo if need be.

"I'm not out to make money from it," said Burn. "I just want to commemorate him. I'll do it for nothing if need be."

Burn has already performed a tribute to Harry Horse, real name Richard Horne, in the Sunday Play slot on London-based radio station Resonance FM, which also broadcasts on the internet. It consisted of an hour-long show called Harry Horseplay in which Burn read from the text which accompanied Horse's Sunday Herald cartoons, intercut with music from Swamptrash. Scottish film-maker and actress Alison Peebles also read extracts from his work.

Burn also offered to perform a version of the tribute at next month's Burns An' A' That festival but organisers were unable to accommodate him. Instead, he will give what he describes as "a scratch performance" of it in the cinema of the CCA in Glasgow on May 12, as part of the Radical Independent Book Fair.

Horse and his wife Mandy Horne died at their Shetland home in January. Mandy was seriously ill with multiple sclerosis at the time. As well as working for the Sunday Herald, Harry Horse had drawn political cartoons for The Scotsman and Scotland On Sunday and his work had appeared in The Observer and The Independent.

He was also the prize-winning author of a series of children's books, one of which was made into a cartoon for CITV. And as banjo player with the punk-bluegrass band Swamptrash, he recorded an album called It Makes No Never Mind, which included an unusual cover version of Johnny Cash's Ring Of Fire.

Burn never actually met Harry Horse, but they shared a love of the English poet William Blake, whose collected works Burn is also reading on Resonance FM.

"In Harry's poem All My Heroes Are Dead, when he lists them, Blake is the first one, then Robert Burns. So Harry recognised the power of William Blake and I really identified with that."

Burn is hopeful that his commemorative show about Harry Horse will be on the road in time to mark the 250th anniversary of Blake's birth on November 28.