Northlink Ferry, Lerwick Harbour, 23 February 2006

One hundred white boiler suits represented an army of invisible workers. (Photo: Joanne Jamieson)

BY STAGING shows in all corners of Scotland in its inaugural week, the National Theatre of Scotland was making a clear statement of intent: this is an organisation determined to serve the whole population, not just a metropolitan elite. You couldn’t find a better example of that than in Lerwick, which, for all its charms, is hardly known as a theatrical hotspot.

But there was another equally potent message behind the Home project. It wasn’t simply about where the performances took place, it was about the very nature of those performances. ‘Home Shetland’ was a case in point. You couldn’t go through the mesmerising experience of this brilliant show without shifting your idea of what theatre could be.

This was a performance stripped of all the conventions you associate with theatre. You did not sit down; you behaved as an individual not as part of a group; there was no story; you saw things that no one else did; there was no curtain call and no opportunity to applaud.

Had there been one, you would have clapped very loudly indeed, because Wils Wilson’s production was a thing of rare beauty. If labels concern you, then perhaps you’d have called it an art installation rather than a piece of theatre, but that’s merely a matter of academic debate. More important was the beguiling, dream-like effect it had on the audience.

Greeted by one of the cabin crew on the Hjatland ferry as it rested in Lerwick between night-time voyages, each spectator was supplied with a set of headphones and directed, by recorded messages, to wander the deck.

Everywhere was a sense of life – past, present, maybe even future – as we walked past whisky drinkers at the tables, a lonely woman gazing out to sea, wartime lovers strolling in the breeze, children nestling down to sleep on the reclining seats, mechanics and sailors walking purposefully by.

Meanwhile, Jackie Kay’s elegiac poetry and Hugh Nankivell’s music drifted into our ears, enhancing the sense of the ferry boat as a place where people pass through, whether they’re leaving home or returning. It was hard to know if we were watching ghosts or if we ourselves were ghosts.

In one sequence of unsettling intimacy, each spectator was given a key-card and sent into a cabin where an actor – in my case a teenage girl – unpacked her things, visited the bathroom and leafed through old photographs.

Down on the car deck, we discovered an army of invisible workers represented by 100 white boiler suits, each hanging from the ceiling and concealing a speaker broadcasting a fiddle melody. Two actors wondered the deck, lost and alone, while images of Shetland life were projected onto the walls.

Finally we were ushered into cars and driven back to dry land, like so many travellers before us. We hadn’t been anywhere, yet the journey we’d taken was as emotionally rich as any.

© Mark Fisher, 2006