Portland Arms Hotel, Lybster, Friday 4 June 2004

THIS PLAY WAS written and performed by drama students from North Highland College, in collaboration with Grey Coast Theatre Company, and was the yearly culmination of a new drama course whose potential impact on the arts in Caithness and throughout Scotland must yet wait to be measured.

The play in Lybster was ending a tour that began in Thurso a week before, and went into village halls, hotels and community centres. The craic is that the students have experienced the highs and lows of theatre touring anywhere: big audiences, small audiences, nerves, glitches, etc. According to the leaflet, all life promised to be here:

Secrets and reputations, money and drugs, life and death; all on a Caithness croft.

I expected a nervy performance, full of energy, maybe some hesitancy, missed cues and so on. What I got was a good performance, mostly fluid and believable, rarely hesitant or uncertain. All the actors spoke with an impressive authority that drove the story on.

Four Caithness siblings return home for their mother’s illness and death and all hell breaks loose as old tensions bubble to the surface. Calum Greig grimaced and swaggered as Jamie, the dodgy London wideboy. Jacqueline Barclay carefully presented the contradictory character of Izzy, content to be at home in her croft but inept with the wider world, victim to her own fears and prejudices. Helen Mackay as Becca was as bold and vibrant as her troubled character; Iain MacDonald chose a skilful under-stated approach as the quiet student- cum- cocaine addict Iain.

Either the casting was superb or the actors wrote parts to suit their own temperaments because all came across as empathetic to their respective roles. The direction was sure and the lighting enhanced the whole performance. It was good, on its own merits.

Defects? Minor ones – sometimes one felt the actors were so determined to get their cues and lines right that their earnestness got in the way of the fluid jazz that is always good acting. That fluidity will come in time but was present often enough to offer encouragement.

The play dealt with what young Highland people can do besides go to cities and despair or stay home and stagnate. This pioneer drama course and the fruits of its labours witnessed tonight are part of at least one real solution. Creative young people like those on stage can find a reason to stay or go, without being coerced and might even find a job at the end of it.

The arts can do that for people. The young actors did communicate a real sense of conviction and urgency about their performance. The small audience thus felt that there was more than acting going on. This was real. In Lybster I saw ample vindication to keep the course going.

Like life on a croft, it won’t be easy. There were about 15 people in the audience to watch a valuable and ephemeral piece of theatre but this “critic” would aim his criticism anywhere but at this capable quartet of people with a better future than that of the characters they ably brought to life. On a hotel stage in a largely indifferent Caithness village they proved their point about what might give some hope for a future where so-called “real” jobs (i.e. outside the arts) are actually more make-believe than this drama, and far more fickle.

© Tom Bryan, 2004