Dermot Healy delivers on Metagama

PETER URPETH, a co-founder of Theatre Hebrides, reflects on the company’s forth-coming production Metagama, and the road to the fulfillment of a major new commission.

Dermot Healy

THE NAME METAGAMA is totemic in the history of the Outer Hebrides, and furled within its rolling mouth music, like energy stored in a cultural battery, are sentiments of hope and despair, longing and ambition, success and failure, history as cruel as has ever been written in the British Isles set beside a desperate idealism, unequalled in its scope. The name is a megalith, a doorway through which all Hebridean history passes and its alien sound was heard in the houses of most families living in the outer islands.

Metagama, with its central theme of emigration, was ripe, therefore, to be selected as the subject of a drama, and that, as the first major show from the company, is the ambitious journey upon which Theatre Hebrides embarked.

As the then company chairman of that theatre company, working with its Artistic Director, Muriel Ann Macleod, I can recall the meetings in which themes and names, ideas and dreams were discussed until a brief for the commission for a play about Metagama was complete, and a short-leet of some ten playwrights was drawn-up.

The commission would be advertised across the world, and our short-leet would be contacted directly. But, the main consideration in deciding upon the theme of Metagama was that it would not be good enough simply for a writer to wallow in sentiment and produce drama that pandered to preconceived notions.

If the play was to work, the writer would have to be able to struggle with some of the most enduring and painful episodes in Hebridean history and would have to be able to wring something new from the familiar in order to engage with his or her audience.

“Dermot’s short and intense visits to the Islands were hall-marked by a focus on the subject matter at hand that underlined the fact that central to the production of powerful drama is the revelation of truth.”

Within a few weeks, applications and treatments of the theme were arriving in Stornoway. Some came from the USA and Canada, one came from Israel, all selected this or that angle on the theme and on emigration in general, most were earnest. All but one seemed to be in danger of being swamped by the scale of the subject matter. That one exception was the award-winning Irish writer, Dermot Healy.

Healy’s unsentimental engagement with the subject in his ‘treatment’ was stark, aware and energetic, and drew unanimous backing from the company’s reading panel. Healy’s pitch promised to deliver the kind of arresting drama that theatres are built for and his distance from the subject would enable him to write without the effort of rethinking his own preconceptions. The commission was granted, and the writer set to work.

Over the following few months, Dermot visited Lewis and researched his work in both the conventional manner of seeking documents, photos and interviews, the reading of swaths of history and oral accounts; but also his research was unconventional, involving an engagement with the landscapes and seascapes of the islands. He took all that he had learned back to Sligo and took up the pen.

Dermot’s short and intense visits to the Islands were hall-marked by a focus on the subject matter at hand that underlined the fact that central to the production of powerful drama is the revelation of truth. Any reader who wants to find the quality of truth in previous Healy’s work should consult his novel ‘The Goat Song’, ironically about the toils endured, some self-inflicted it must be said, by a playwright from the west coast of Ireland.

Also central to that book is a desperate love story and profound and understated sentiments on the force with which landscapes infect and control the mind. But perhaps, the ultimate love story in that book is that of the writer’s love of theatre.  Otherwise, look to Healy’s poetry; any reader from the islands will recognize at once the world created in the ‘Ballyconnel Colours’ – written from the edge of the world in tones of immense emotional surety.

“There are no simple answers, but as real drama motivated by the desire to bring to the fore issues that still dog our community, culture and history, it is poignant and electrifying.”

Two months ago, almost out of the blue, a package was posted to Muriel Ann and inside was the first large draft of the play, and on its pages the history that launched that vessel from our shores, echoed in minute detail. Here is written the story of the clearances, the coming and going of the kelp and Leverhulme, the ambiguity and the idealism, the battles of will and the bowings to the inevitable. Each strand is considered, argued, dissected and left behind only to return, and shocking truths are revealed that show that the familiar narrative that surrounds this moment in island history is no more than the gloss of fresh paint on a rotten hull, through which, sooner or later like truth coming out, the weeping iron of bitterness will bleed.

Has history been kind to those who saw this as a solution to the islander’s poverty? Has history badly treated the workings of a few governmental visionaries? There are no simple answers, but as real drama motivated by the desire to bring to the fore issues that still dog our community, culture and history, it is poignant and electrifying.

One small note of history: as the boat arrived, like many before it on the far side of the Atlantic, Toronto newspapers were full of gossip about those disembarking for a new life. Islanders who had gone before testified to the Godliness of the island people but could not believe how the islanders’ (presumably meaning men) ‘allowed’ their women to work in the fields.

A regional Canadian politician had complained about previous human cargoes being full of delinquents and short of the sort of quality, high class people, Canada needed, and demanded change.

The boat, after its various troubles, finally sets down its passengers, and then silence. The immigrants disperse to their hovels and hell holes, some make out well, others are treated like slaves forcing upon them not only poverty and a life far worse than that which they left behind, but also the need to escape. At all stages this story is riven with ambiguity and doubt, and then how strange it is to read of efforts to revive the programme of emigration as recently as the 1940s.

When the show opens in Stornoway on the 18th August for a four night run in Studio Alba, the ghosts of this most perplexing episode in island history will doubtless walk again.

© Peter Urpeth and Theatre Hebrides, 2004

Metagama can also be seen at:

• Sgoil Lionacleit, Benbecula, Tuesday 24 August 2004
• Castlebay School, Barra, Wednesday 25 August 2004
• Nevis Centre, Fort William, Friday 27 August 2004
• Village Hall, Lochcarron, Saturday 28 August 2004
• Sabhal Mor Ostaig, Skye, Tuesday 31 August 2004
• Aros Centre, Portree, Wednesday 1 September 2004
• Glenurquhart High School, Drumnadrochit, Thursday 2 September 2004
• Culloden Academy, Friday 3 September 2004
• Macphail Centre, Ullapool, Saturday 4 September 2004
• Nethy Bridge Community Centre, Tuesday 7 September 2004
• Peterhead Community Theatre, Wednesday 8 September 2004
• Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, Thursday 9 September 2004
• Carnegie Hall, Clashmore, Friday 10 September 2004
• Strathy Hall, Strathy, Saturday 11 September 2004
• Macrobert, Stirling, Tuesday 14th September 2004
• Gilmorehill G12, Glasgow, Wednesday 15 September 2004
• St Brides Centre, Edinburgh, Friday 17/Saturday 18 September 2004