A Bit of Random Thought

In the introduction to Scottish Theatre, Randall Steven claims that the recent (that is, the 1970s) growth in Scottish performance is related to the use of Scots in scripts. Admittedly, it's a little out of date (printed 1996). Having watched Sunset Song, the adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's novel, I am not sure that this correspondence can be read as causal. The language of LGG is Scots, with some lovely poetic twists, but the language itself is not enough to carry a plot that takes in WWI, female oppression, the move away from an agrarian economy and the connection between humans and their land.

The adaptation takes as much of LGG's text as it can handle without collapsing into a book reading. Plenty of key moments, including the birth of a baby and the death of the heroine's husband, are told as they are shown: despite a few moments of choreography, Selladoor's production gives reign to the script's verbosity. This is  nothing to do with Scots as a viable theatrical language, nor a critique of Julie Ellen's  direction: rather, it is a problem with a theatre that is literary in nature, and has too much respect for language.

Randall Steven's claim is not necessarily supported by the subsequence growth of Scottish theatre: not only are many of Scotland's new wave of creators less interested in the script as the singular foundation of a performance (since 1996, Cryptic, Untitled and Vanishing Point have become major players, all of whom are intrigued by theatre's visual aspects), they have not noticeably taken up works in Scots. And even those writers who often visit Scottish themes do not recognise Scots as the lingua franca of Scotland. In the contemporary multicultural Scotland, it isn't.

That said, Sunset Song uses Scots because it is about a people who spoke Scots - and, despite some rather obvious metaphors about the woman as the land, there are moments of poetry and passion that Scots is perfectly balanced to express. What might be the case is that theatre, with its opportunity to craft a language's identity, offers a place for Scots to grow....

Get on the Guid Foot

I'll admit that I was confused by the press release for The Guid Sisters. Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland, called it "not only a Scots classic but it is also a timely portrayal of women and economic survival." Then director Serge Denoncourt added "Forty years ago, in Quebec, everybody was talking about a new play: Les Belles-soeurs by Michel Tremblay." I had to go straight to Wikipedia and find out how a Scots classic could begin life as a French Canadian revolutionary drama.

Tremblay's original shook the conservative theatre of 1960s Canada, and was written in local dialect. His plays, which often feature that rare phenomenon, good parts for women, reflect his belief in the matriarchal nature of Quebecois society and he has been an outspoken, if awkward, advocate for Quebec's independence from English speaking Canada.

Given the tradition of Scottish plays that emphasise the power of women (The Steamie, She Town), and the political arguments about Scottish national identity, the translation into Scots, by Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman, was probably inevitable. 

The NTS/Lyceum co-production has managed not only to find a cast of fifteen women, including Karen Dunbar, but has enlisted the author's director of choice in Serge Denoncourt. Denoncourt is perhaps most famous for his production with Cirque du Soleil, but says that "Les Belles-soeurs became a fetish play, a lucky charm for me," following his first stab, at about ten years old, when he learnt it by heart and performed it in the street for his mates.

Denoncourt was mostly recently in Scotland working on Ana for Stella Quines - visually ravishing, this time-travelling epic attempted to compare the status of women in different eras: the presence of Karen Dunbar, best known for Chewin' The Fat, suggests that this production might be bigger on the laughs. And although the plot revolves around a grand prize of Green Shield Stamps (something else that probably needs to be checked on Wikipedia), the meat of The Guid Sisters is in the banter and conflicts between the large group of women.

Despite its origins in Quebec, it does fall nicely into the tradition of The Steamie - it's set in Glasgow, it's working class, it's about financial hardship, it has plenty of humour and community.

Lyceum, Edinburgh

21 September – 13 October 2012

Kings Theatre, Glasgow                                                                 

Tuesday 23 – Sat 27 October