Mapping the Inner Landscape

Lewis-born writer IAIN F. MACLEOD will see his new play open the brand new theatre space at An Lanntair in Stornoway.

THREE YEARS AGO An Lanntair was awarded funding to develop a new arts centre on the sea front in Stornoway. The new building was designed by architects Nicoll Russell Studios, and represents an important step forward for arts and culture in the North West Highlands.

The new building will have a flexible multi-purpose auditorium that will house theatre, cinema, concerts and ceilidhs. An Lanntair will open its doors to the public on 1 October 2005, and the theatre will have its official opening on 7 October 2005 with a performance of Iain F. MacLeod’s ‘I Was a Beautiful Day’ (and no, that’s not a typing error), commissioned by the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh.
 
Iain is delighted to have the honour of hanseling the new facilities, and believes it will be an important resource for the island.

His embryonic relationship with the Traverse really began while still at school. He attended the National Gaelic Youth Theatre course on Uist, where he met writer Bernard McLaverty and Philip Howard, now the artistic director of the Traverse itself, and the director of ‘I Was a Beautiful Day’.

“These were very inspiring people to meet as a young boy,” Iain said. “Philip has huge experience in theatre, and I always enjoy working with him, and always learn a lot. Later on he gave me an acting role in a two-hander called ‘Loose Ends’, which needed a boy from the islands. Eventually I wrote a short play for the Traverse, ‘Alexander Salamander’, which was one of their Highland Shorts series. They offered me the chance to write a full play after that, and that was ‘Homers’ in 2002.”

‘Homers’ told the story of two teenagers brought to the island of Lewis as “homers” in the mid-1960s, when the Catholic Church were active in sending young people from their care homes in Glasgow to live with island families. It was Iain’s first full length play for the company, but he had already had work performed elsewhere, including ‘Cliff Dancing’ for the National Gaelic Youth Theatre and ‘Salvage’ for TOSG, the Mull-based Gaelic theatre company.

To grasp the significance of that puzzling title, however, you need to see the play.

His television credits include writing scripts for ‘Machair’, where he was also assistant script editor. His interest in writing was fostered by his uncle, who is also a writer.

“My uncle, Findlay MacLeod, is a writer of children’s books and plays, and when I used to visit him I would write things, and got interested that way. He encouraged me to go to the National Gaelic Youth Theatre, and I decided I quite liked writing.

“I like the collaborative aspects of theatre as well. You need people to bounce off in order to bring your script to the next stage. It’s only when you work with the actors that they are able to bring out things they don’t feel are right with the script — they’ll say things like ‘I don’t think I would say that’ when in character, and that is all very useful feedback.”

‘Homers’ explored themes of identity, displacement and language that are central to Iain’s work, and recur again at the heart of ‘I Was a Beautiful Day’. It is set in a psychiatric institution in the mainland, but the action relates to the fictional village of Robhanis on an unnamed but thinly-disguised Hebridean island. To grasp the significance of that puzzling title, however, you need to see the play.

“It relates to something in the play, which is a little bit hard to explain because it isn’t lifted directly. It relates to one of the sections in the play, and I wouldn’t want to give too much away. In the play there is a lot of playing with language, and sometimes the grammar is affected or languages are combined to create different words which are still understandable.

“Because of the situation the characters are in, it isn’t always a naturalistic language that they speak, especially when they are put under stress. It comes from one of the characters and his imagining of himself back on the island.”

There are three characters in the play, and Iain described each in turn.

“Dan is from the village of Robhanis, which is an invention of mine, although there is an area of that name near where I was born in north Lewis, but nobody lives there, it’s basically just a lighthouse. It is a good bid of blank space to place a story.

The idea of inhabiting mental spaces and of psychological as well as literal mapping is central to the drama.

“Dan is a former soldier who went into the army when he was quite young and he fought in Ireland and then in the first Gulf War, when he was invalided out with Post Traumatic Stress syndrome. After going home to Robhanis for a wee while he realised he needed help, and he took himself into a psychiatric unit, and has been there for 15 years. He is quite institutionalised now, and likes to have everything just so.

 “The second character is another inmate named Lube, who brings about a lot of shaking up in Dan’s life, and provokes him into a lot of looking at how his life is going.

“Anne Williams is the third character, and she is cartographer for the Ordnance Survey. She is mapping the area that Dan is from at greater scale, and is looking for greater place-name detail. No one in the village remembers the old names other than Dan, she is told, so she goes to the unit to seek his help, but finds it is not as easy as that.

“All three have journeys that they take that change their lives quite a lot, and these journeys are sparked off and affected by the other characters. They are tied-in in that way, and they all have their stories to go through, and end up in very different places to where they started.”

The idea of inhabiting mental spaces and of psychological as well as literal mapping is central to the drama.

“It is very built into it. Dan is an outsider artist, which is art made by people with mental health problems. Sometimes they spend all their time making art, and for Dan it is a process of mapping where he came from and the stories behind it – he feels he has been cut loose from the world in many ways, and is trying to anchor himself again to a reality through that process, but that is also a false reality. His interest is in the stories behind the place names, whereas Anne looks at it from a scientist’s point of view.”

‘I Was a Beautiful Day’ will run for two nights at An Lanntair (7-8 October 2005) before setting off on tour. It can be seen in St Mary’s Hall, Benbecula (11 October 2005); Coigach Community Hall, Achiltibuie (13 October 2005); Village Hall, Cairndow (15 October 2005); Sabhal Mor Ostaig, Skye (25 October 2005), Pavilion, Strathpeffer (27 October 2005), Easdale Hall, Easdale (29 October 2005), Mallaig & Morar Community Centre, Mallaig (1 November 2005); Village Hall, Ballachulish (3 November 2005); and Jura Hall, Jura (5 November 2005).

Iain F. MacLeod’s first Gaelic novel, ‘Na Klondykers’, was published by Ùr-Sgeul in September 2005.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2005

Links

• An Lanntair website
• Traverse Theatre website
• Ùr-Sgeul website