George Gunn Part 1

1 Oct 2005 in Dance & Drama, Highland

A Voice from the North

GEORGE GUNN is a Caithness man born and bred, and the county is never far from the heart of his writing, whether in his poetry or in his theatre work. He began writing as a child, completed his first play for the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, and launched Grey Coast Theatre Company in Thurso in 1992

KENNY MATHIESON caught up with George en route to the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, where his latest play, ‘The Bear King’s Daughters’, was about to be performed in a reading as part of the theatre’s Close Encounters season.

ARTS JOURNAL: George, let’s start with the new play – what can you tell us about that?

GEORGE GUNN: It’s a new one, and an old one in another sense. It’s called ‘The Bear King’s Daughters’, and is based on an ancient Danish story that was written down as a saga in the middle ages, but the original is either contemporaneous with or older than ‘Beowulf’, and has some of the same characters in it. It’s a reading that is done in a day – you meet the actors in the morning, read the play, work on it in the afternoon, and it’s done as a reading in the evening.

AJ: Have you updated the story?

GG: The story is a great story about power, and I have taken several of the characters from the play and made them oil men. I’ve made the two central characters brothers from Stroma, and I’ve set the whole thing in Stroma at Christmas. It’s all about international oil on one hand, and on the other it’s about their family, which is a dysfunctional one – but do you know any other kind? – and the way that you can never take what you see for granted. It’s a mad kind of play – the language is not naturalistic, it is quite heightened, but they are identifiable Caithnessian characters.


A poem for me is a thing in itself, with its own reality and its own force field around it


AJ: I understand you have a new book of poems due soon from Chapman as well?

GG: It’s due out later this year, I think – I just did the final proofs. It’s called ‘Winter Barley’, and winter barley is the thing they plant early on and harvest in late July and August for the winter ahead. It is a collection of poems, and the only real continuity other than my particular manias is the location in Caithness and the north of Scotland. Caithness is the backdrop for the poems in the new book, or they are informed by it.

AJ: Caithness is very central in your work, isn’t it?

GG: Yes, but you have to have somewhere to come from, don’t you? The thing about Caithness is that it has an equal measure of both sides of the song – ‘Caith’ is from the Gaelic ‘cait’, and ‘ness’ is Norse for point, and the people are 50% Norse and 50% Gaelic, although that probably comes as great surprise to most of them. On top of that you have the Dounreay influx. I am roughly the same age as the plant, although I don’t think I’ve been declared a World Heritage site yet.

AJ: No, but you haven’t been decommissioned yet, either.

GG: Hopefully not, no. That was a big influx into the west of the county, and those people have pretty much gone native now, I think, although I can see a marked difference in youngsters brought up in the west, in Thurso, and those brought up in the east around Wick. The western ones seem more mature. Wick is suffering much more of an economic downturn, so there is also a contrast between the more affluent west and the depressed east.

AJ: Do you write poems with a book in mind?

GG: I never work with a book of poetry in mind. A poem for me is a thing in itself, with it’s own reality and its own force field around it, but obviously over a period of time themes and concerns emerge. This one is a distillation of all the work I have done since the last one, ‘Whins’ – well, I also had a pamphlet out called ‘Black Fish’, and those came from the same kind of period as ‘Winter Barley’. They are books, but they are also collections of individual poems that mark the poet’s journey through time. Hopefully people who read them will discern some kind of development. For me it is very much a honing down of the language. My aim is to keep it as minimal as possible, but never to lose the music of it, because that is inherent in where I come from.


Although theatre is an art form that is all about conflict, as a form it has to be in harmony with its component parts.


AJ: That’s interesting, because you lean toward a heightened language in your theatre work.

GG: Heightened language is necessary in theatre, I believe. The problem with contemporary theatre in a Highland – and probably a Scottish – context is that naturalism doesn’t work for us. I want what Brecht called ‘gestic’ language, language with movement and action and breath in it, and in a theatre context that is the language that you need for your story to exist. It has to exist on the tongues and in the gestures of your actors. I think that’s essential if you want your audience to remember it, and they only have one shot in the theatre, it’s not like a poem they can go over and over. So often the language that dramatists use is flat – it doesn’t stick in the imagination or engage with the imagination or stimulate or have a dialogue with the intelligence of your audience, and it doesn’t excite the actors, and what I am always trying to do is to help the actors.

AJ: Is that key for you?

GG: That is your job as a dramatist, to help the actors tell the story, and I believe that language is something that Highland audiences and Highland actors really enjoy, because it is in them, and it is what makes the theatre memorable. George Byatt used to say that poetry was the language of the theatre, and naturalism was the language of the novel. As dramatists we are not here to present novels, we are here to tell stories within the theatrical space that we have to work with, and we must put all of our skills into that space. Actors respond to that, or so I think, anyway.

AJ: But it’s also a visual space, isn’t it?

GG: It is, yes, but if you have heightened language, and by that I mean language with its own heightened theatricality, then you have lots of space already. Although theatre is an art form that is all about conflict, as a form it has to be in harmony with its component parts. There is no point in having a fantastic set if it jars with what you are trying to say, for example. The kind of theatre I am interested in is theatre that allows the actors space and allows the audience time, and allows everyone else involved with the play to have space to express themselves. We tend to work in quite small physical spaces up here, but even if we had 25 Eden Courts I would still be arguing the same thing – you want people to remember your play, you don’t want them to remember the set. I remember Billy Riddoch telling me that when he worked at Perth Rep the curtain would go up and the audience would applaud the set, and he would think, well, what do we do now – we might as well just go home!


I think any writer has to embrace the political, otherwise they are not embracing society.


AJ: Do you like the communal aspects of theatre?

GG: I do. A lot of my professional life has been spent working as part of a company with other people, and I like that feeling of the writer being part of the creative process in much the same way as an actor or a musician or whatever.

AJ: Are you keen on directing?

GG: I don’t really direct main stage projects – I think it is quite dangerous to the creative process to be both the writer and the director. I think it compromises the creative process, and often leads to very uninspired theatre. I like to work with directors, and I am not precious about material in that way. I take a practical approach to playwriting in that sense, and the emphasis for me is on the ‘wright’ element in playwright – it’s is on the fact that you make plays.
 
AJ: Is poetry different in that respect?

GG: Poetry is maybe more personal, but what you are doing is externalising internal reality, and that is true of theatre as well, just in a different way. Writing for the stage and for the page, to use those glib terms, has always been much the same thing for me, like two strands of a rope. I can’t imagine doing one at the expense of the other.

AJ: You alluded earlier to the way that the political and personal are knit together in ‘The Bear King’s Daughters’ – that is central to your work, isn’t it?

GG: I think any writer has to embrace the political, otherwise they are not embracing society. Poets have to take cognisance of economics. If you come from somewhere like Caithness in the middle of the 20th century with that huge nuclear reality on your doorstep, then you would have to blind or desensitised not to be affected by that and the social issues it raises.

AJ: Is theatre inherently political for you?

GG: Theatre is a political art in any case, I think, yes. For one thing, you have to be a bit of politician in order to get the money to do it in the first place! It is also political in that it is a public art that takes place in open public spaces, in a place that is difficult to control. In fact, I think the theatre is one of the last places in our society that you can actually be free, and if you ignore the opportunity that presents then you shouldn’t really be in the business, I think.

AJ: No escaping the political, then?

GG: No – everything is political anyway. You have to be interested in every aspect of society. I find it hard when people say to me that they are not political writers – do they drive a car? How many political issues are there around that? It annoys me when I see things that don’t engage with the possibilities that art offers them. I feel physically hurt by that. When I see so much money thrown at things that are basically just dilettantism, it offends me. I think the powers that be are interested in artistic engagement, but I also think that engagement makes them nervous.

AJ: Is that true for your poetry as well as theatre?

GG: Yes, broadly. What I am looking for in the poems is a voice. In my poems I write for the inner audience of me, then it goes between covers and there is a bigger audience, and my aim is that they will engage with a voice that is in those poems.

In the second part of this interview in November, George Gunn reflects on his upbringing in Dunnet and the path of his writing career.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2005

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