Paisley Arts Centre, 18 April 2007, and touring

Re:Union presented by 7:84 Theatre Company.

THERE WAS a time when 7:84 would have commemorated the anniversary of the Act of Union with an epic historical pageant about three centuries of border warfare.

Today the political theatre company prefers to take a more abstruse approach, looking for stories that might shed light on Scotland’s situation as the country goes to the polls with the pro-independence SNP leading the field.

Director Lorenzo Mele has turned to four writers, Nicola McCartney, Haresh Sharma, Selma Dimitrijevic and Linda McLean, to write short plays inspired, respectively, by civil war in Ireland, partition in India, war in the Balkans and some future reconciliation in the UK.

It’s a worthy attempt to reflect on questions of union and separation, but it stumbles by making us work so hard trying to figure out the thematic links that, having cracked the code, we run out of time to apply the ideas to our own situation.

This is why the most successful of the four pieces is Sharma’s monologue, ‘Eclipse’, in which a young man from Singapore retraces the steps of his father and grandfather as economics and politics drove them from Pakistan and India.

Unlike the other writers, he doesn’t rely on metaphor but tells the story directly, while interrogating the romantic idea of finding definition in the identity of our ancestors.

Strongly played by Umar Ahmed, the son discovers that his own identity as a gay man in Singapore means more than any tribal identity he can find as he tries to bury his father’s ashes in a land that even his father hadn’t seen for 60 years.

Sharma leaves us to make our own connections where the other writers force them on us. McCartney’s ‘Wound’ places the divided history of Ireland onto a squabbling family whose bloody dispute is brokered by a medic.

The medic is the peace-keeping force, the daughter is the aggrieved unionist population of the North, and so on. In the early days of 7:84 this would have been done as knockabout agitprop: as po-faced melodrama it just seems clunky.

McLean’s ‘Doch-an-Doris (A Parting Drink)’ is less forced, but relies similarly on its metaphorical meaning as it presents a family awaiting marriage guidance, just like bickering nations. As with McCartney’s piece, the unseen play is more interesting than the one presented to us.

Dimitrijevic’s ‘A Time to Go’ suffers more from uncertainty of meaning. It’s partly that she tells two parallel stories at the same time, which is a challenging experiment, but more that she doesn’t make it clear what those stories have to do with the events in Croatia in 1991.

On their respective wedding days a generation apart, a father (Billy Riddoch) and son (Umar Ahmed) misunderstand each other’s intentions, but I can only guess at the significance of those misunderstandings and at the relevance of the absent mother/wife.

Performed on Kai Fischer’s set of shattered glass, which looks great and sounds terrible, the playlets keep us working, but offer little insight in return.

(Re:Union plays at the MacPhail Centre, Ullapool, 24 April; Badenoch Centre, Kingussie, 25 April; Birnam Institute, Birnam, 5 May).

© Mark Fisher, 2007

Links

• 7:84 Theatre