Exploring the Story Nation

HAMISH MACDONALD is the co-founder and joint artistic director of Dogstar Theatre. Originally from Clydebank, he has lived in Inverness since the late 1970s, and has written several shows for The Collectors and its successor, Dogstar Theatre. They include Redcoats, Turncoats and Petticoats (1998), The Captain’s Collection (1999), Seven Ages (2001), The Strathspey King (2003) and the company’s current production, The Heretic’s Tale. His novels are The Gravy Star (2001) and The Girnin’ Gates (2003).

NORTHINGS: Hamish, we’ll get to Dogstar’s current production, ‘The Heretic’s Tale’, in a moment, but I understand it had its origins at the other end of Scotland in the couple of years you spent holding the Robert Burns Writing Fellowship in Dumfries and Galloway – what was your remit down there?

HAMISH MACDONALD: It had two distinct strands to it over the two and half years. One was to take language and literature into as broad a spread of the community as possible, including area resource centres, special needs, primary and secondary schools, setting up new writing groups, and working with existing groups. That was the community strand, if you like, and the other was that they wanted a project at the end of it that spoke something of the region. I was asked to decide what I wanted to do, and Dumfries & Galloway Arts Association would do their best to support it.
 

I think Dogstar kept going because we have always had ideas, and the will to make them happen

N: And that was The Story Nation project?

HM: Yes. What we came up with was a four-day extravaganza of story and drama and music that visited various places in the region. We had a residential audience that lived in a hotel, and I took them on a bus every day to different places and told them stories about people like James Clerk Maxwell and John Paul Jones and Elspeth Buchan and so on. Then at night they went to see a new play.

We dressed venues that weren’t usually venues. We did a play on St Ninian in a distillery at Whithorn, based around a kind of Dan Brown figure who goes hunting for the relics of St Ninian, and uncovers a lot about Scottish history and faith. We did a shorter version of ‘The Heretic’s Tale’, and another based on Robert Burns on his death bed and facing the unknown, and all the political and social stuff that was going on around him. On the final afternoon we did a piece on Hugh McDairmid, all of them written by me.

N: ‘The Heretic’s Tale’ is now the new Dogstar production, and is touring in the Highlands & Islands as this interview goes on-line. How did you come across that story?

HM: I had never heard of the Buchanites until early in the Fellowship. When we went down there I lived in a wee village called Kirkpatrick Durham, which had a fantastic antique bookshop. It was the only shop in the village, along with two pubs, so it wasn’t a bad place to be.

I picked up the first book I could find in there that would tell me a bit about the area, a wee book called ‘Discovering Galloway’. I looked up the index for the village, and discovered that one of the things that it was known for was being close to the centre of the activities of a sect known as the Buchanites, led by a woman called Elspeth Buchan. She was an enigmatic figure who claimed to be able to convert people by breathing the Holy Ghost on them, so there was a real kind of strange intrigue about the whole thing just from a throwaway couple of lines in this little travel book.

Her most devoted follower had spent his final days not far away from the village, so there was a lot of fanatical history alongside a lot of interesting history to do with achievement – James Clerk Maxwell’s family had lived just over the hill, and a lot of his early fascination with things like electro-magnetism were formed there. Thomas Carlyle had spent nine years further up the glen, writing his famous history of the French Revolution, and there was a Covenanting site nearby as well. There was an amazing clash of conflict and achievement in a tiny little area, so it was a fascinating place to explore.

N: How did you approach turning the story of the Buchanites into a play?

HM: It was really a matter of how to economise the story. The Buchanites had something like 80 followers at their maximum, and they were virtually under siege at one time. To refine it down for the stage I opted to have two voices, an actress playing Elspeth Buchan [Annie Grace] and an actor playing her most devoted disciple, a man called Andrew Innes [Matthew Zajac]. That allowed me to bring the whole world of the cult into a performance space in a refined fashion, and I think that it works better as a two-hander than with a bigger cast – otherwise it was going to have to be an epic movie!

N: And I guess the budget wouldn’t quite stretch to that …

HM: No. This production is about a third longer than the original in Galloway. The first version was done quickly as part of producing four plays in three weeks, which was madness, and we have had a little more time to develop it. We have shifted the music from fiddle accompaniment to cello accompaniment. We are lucky to have Christine Hanson on board for that. Gillian Frame really enlivened it in the Galloway version, but I think the cello gives it a different texture, and maybe introduces something more soulful as opposed to the lively lines of the fiddle.

N: Tell me about the set and staging?

HM: Again economy was the thing. We have two platforms connected by a walkway, and the audience are seated on either side, so it is a wee bit like a congregation as much as a theatre audience. It’s important to have a direct communication with the audience in this play. There is lots of movement in the play, it’s a very dynamic production. The Buchanites did lots of travelling and were chased from one place to another a lot, and one thing that the director, Stephen Docherty, decided at an early stage was that he didn’t want this to be an end-on, proscenium arch style of production. He wanted it in the middle of the audience, and we came up with this combination to achieve that.

N: This is Dogstar’s first production since you did Ali Smith’s ‘The Seer’ earlier this year, which was the first time that the company had staged a play by a writer other than yourself – how did you feel that worked out?

HM: It was very well received, I would say. It got mixed reviews, and we thought that might be the case, but the feedback we got was fantastic. It was an unusual piece that took a few risks, and that wasn’t going to suit everyone, but I believe it was a play that was well worth doing, and I think by and large audiences enjoyed it. We had really vibrant nights in places as different as Stornoway and the Traverse in Edinburgh, and we felt it was successful in both drawing and pleasing audiences.

N: How did you get interested in writing in the first place?

HM: I guess I’ve had a deep interest in literature since I was quite young. I think it was probably song-writing that I first got into, turning out three-chord songs when I was younger. I then got into poetry and literature as I grew up, but I grew up not really knowing about Scottish literature. It was something that nobody told us about at school – we had to discover it for ourselves. I grew up knowing more about American writers than Scottish, and it was the same with Scottish history. I grew up in Clydebank practically on top of the site of a Roman encampment, but in school all they taught us was the Romans in Chester and London. I think it is better in schools now.

That was quite negative, but it meant that as I got interested I had to go on a wee voyage of discovery to find out what it was all about. I think all of that was quite influential on me when I did start to discover it. What I did get on Scottish literature actually came from home – my father was very keen on Burns. I suspect it is more accessible now than it was in the 1970s. It used to be an event when a Scottish novel was published, and now you can’t keep up with them.

It started to dawn on me that you could write about Scotland. I was reading James Kelman and Alasdair Grey, and realising that where I lived wasn’t just a place to go to work and come home at night and go to the pub, there was this amazing other fictional dimension going on and being exposed. That was very influential on my own desire to write.
 
N: You moved to Inverness in the late 1970s and got involved in the Faultline Festival?

HM: When the Faultline Festival started in Inverness in the early 1980s, we produced a touring show called ‘The Kilt is Our Demise’, which was a kind of cross between ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘Calum’s Cèilidh’. It was the Thatcher era, so there was a lot of satire, and a lot of stuff about Highland history and economics and so on. We toured that around the Highlands for a few years, and took it down to the Tron Theatre in Glasgow as well. That led to being offered radio work. There is an immediacy about writing comedy and having to perform it that is always there, whether it’s a full house in the Tron or a handful in a hall in Caithness. You learn a lot about engaging an audience and getting to the point, and it was all part of the learning curve. I think maybe sometimes getting thrown in at the deep end is the best way to learn.

N: How did The Collectors and then Dogstar come about?

HM: It really just evolved through the need to produce work. I did ‘Redcoats’ as a one-man show for the Highland Festival in 1998, and Alastair McDonald then commissioned us to do ‘The Captain’s Collection’ the following year. There was a good buzz around the shows, and you either walk away from it or try to keep the momentum going. We did a short tour with ‘The Captain’s Collection’ in 1999, but we were keen to do a bigger one.

It was a case of how do you go about that – how do you set it up, how do you get money, what kind of structure do you need to actually run a tour and make sure it is done right? It was another steep learning curve for me. I was able to start writing full-time from 1998 – I used to operate industrial machines, and I worked in shipyards and the oil industry. I was writing on the side until I started to get commissions, and it became more difficult to do both – doing a day job and then getting home and writing until one or two in the morning you can only sustain for so long.

We then did the ‘Seven Ages’ show, and I think it kept going because we have always had ideas, and the will to make them happen. Matthew came on board as joint artistic director two years ago. We were looking to share the workload, and to expand the ideas and not get too rutted in one genre or style of production. It would be easy to get focused on one mindset, and the danger there is that you get repetitive. Matthew had lots of experience in running companies in the 1980s and 1990s, and he is full of great ideas and energy.

N: What is coming up next for Dogstar – is the MacBeth outdoor project for Highland 2007 still on the cards?

HM: MacBeth is in the bottom drawer, I think. Definitely not for next year, unless someone wins the lottery! We do have lots of work coming up, though. We have just won a project grant to tour ‘At The End of the World and In The Morning’ by Henry Adam, a writer from Caithness, on the same scale as ‘The Seer’, which is quite remarkable – 70 odd performances in the space of a year. That will probably happen in May-June next year.

Doing work by other writers is very much part of the plan, to broaden the whole thing. We have started with writers with Highland connections in Ali and Henry, but that isn’t written in stone. It is good for us, though, and good the them as well, but we wouldn’t want to restrict our potential to do whatever we wanted.

N: Your contribution to the Highland Festival’s ‘Miniatures’ production, ‘Slainte Mhath, Mr Capone’, was also being talked about for a full production – where are you with that?

HM: It’s in the middle drawer! It’s still an idea that’s there, and it is nice to have these projects floating around. It can be frustrating that you don’t get the opportunity to do them all, but who does?

© Kenny Mathieson, 2006

Links

• Dogstar Theatre