Forget about Australians appropriating our cultural icons; the Scots are getting in on the act. Bruce Strachan, artistic director of Scotland's Nonsense Room Productions, says Lynley Dodd's Hairy Maclary, a favourite with children since it first appeared 30 years ago, has been adopted as one of Caledonia's own. "Indeed, I've even seen the odd bookshop list him in their 'Scottish' section."
Now we can see what the Scots make of the much-loved pooch when Strachan's company brings the musical, Hairy Maclary and Friends, timed to coincide with Hairy's 30th birthday, home for the July school holidays. First performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2010, the show has been touring the world on and off ever since.
Strachan believes one of the keys to its success is being true to Dodd's words and making the dogs look as life-like as they can. However, he and Nonsense Room Productions co-founder and producer Simon Beattie have made human narrator characters more prominent than in the books and weaved a few of the stories together to create a loose narrative about a day in the life of Hairy Maclary and his friends. "The words are so lyrical and have such clever rhymes and rhythms, we felt using music was the best way to really bring them to life; although some stories do work better with a spoken narration, using music in the background. The melodies work so well with the words in the story, and are so catchy, they stay with you for days."
Auckland's Tim Bray Productions, which staged its own version of Hairy Maclary to royal visitors Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, in 2012, has long used children's books as the basis for its plays.
These holidays, it reprises Pippi Longstocking in a new production which, says Bray, is far more physical, featuring acrobatics, than its previous interpretation. In September, the company will premiere author Joy Cowley's much-loved Mrs Wishy-Washy which Bray has spent months poring over to devise a script.
