Studio Alba, Stornoway, 23-24 June 2007

St Kilda European Opera - Cliff Dancers

THE STORY of St Kilda is, in many respects, a simple one: a small community, isolated from the mainland and the modern world by nearly 100 miles of raging, unpredictable sea, eke out a living on some of the world’s most spectacular – though barren – territory.

Eventually, dwindling population and contact with modern technology makes island life unsustainable. At which point, the last remaining band of some 36 souls ask to be evacuated.

There’s more to it than that, of course, but as a narrative, it’s pretty basic fare. The production based on this story, however, is anything but basic. The brainchild of Gaelic Arts agency Proiseact nan Ealan (PNE), it’s a huge undertaking, with a budget pushing £1.5 million.

The Stornoway performance of ‘St Kilda: A European Opera’ was just one of five taking place simultaneously across Europe (the others were in France, Austria, Germany and Belgium). All five featured the same script, the same score, and the same pre-recorded footage of cliff dancing experts Retourament shot on St Kilda last year by Keith Partridge, used to hanging off cliffs with a camera in his hand after working on Oscar-winning climbing documentary ‘Touching The Void’.

If this were not complexity enough, the show also included footage beamed live from St Kilda on the nights of the performance, ten musicians and a choir of 25. All this technology, and the associated logistics, though, were there at the service of story, and they serve it wonderfully.

It’s not so much a conventional opera as an envelope-pushing blend of a contemporary score, sometimes as jagged as St Kilda’s cliffs, traditional Gaelic ballads and laments, and a play, in Gaelic, about the islanders’ fate.

The music, scored by David Graham and Jean-Paul Dessy, is alternately jagged and plaintive, with melodies circling back on themselves like graceful birds kept aloft by the wind. And though, on paper, a blend of traditional Gaelic song and sometimes harsh, clanging contemporary classical music seems like a strange fit, it never feels that way as it’s being performed.

The story kicks off with the footage from St Kilda itself: a gorgeously empty place, save for a few hardy souls, one of whom, John the Caretaker, seems to be some lost spirit guide – there’s a ghostliness to his presence, and he crops up throughout the show as a kind of eerie interloper.

Back in Stornoway, the eight actors and two dancers playing the islanders have their work cut out – the music is a constant presence – but deal with it admirably. In particular, Simon Mackenzie’s statesman-like island elder, and Catriona Lexy Campbell, playing a young bride whose life transforms from ecstatic to grief-stricken, give fine performances, wrenching emotion from their words.

The show condenses the story of St Kilda and its population into 80 minutes, and it fairly zips along. Key moments of island life are dramatised: the ascent of the Mistress Stone, which every young man must do, standing one-legged atop a treacherous rocky outpost, in order to prove his manhood and his marriageability.

The stranding on Boreray, one of St Kilda’s four islands, of four men whilst cholera ravages the main island of Hiort is also dealt with. It’s this which, in the production, serves as the tipping point for the remaining few – though in reality, the cholera outbreak and the evacuation were separated by some 150 years.

When the finish comes, it’s almost unbearably poignant and sad: an exodus which serves to stand as an allegory for the gradual, and not so gradual, end of so many island communities in the Highlands. As the islanders depart, a lowing, single cello plays their lament.

There’s a final, ambiguous metaphor on screen regarding the islanders’ life, but the final ten minutes, from the start of the exodus onwards, is characterised by a sighing resignation. This had to happen eventually, it says, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t grieve in the meantime, for like all deaths, the death of a community is a tragedy.

‘St Kilda: A European Opera’, weaves this tragedy through with hope and, at some points, a refreshing sense of humour. There’s a genuine collective spirit at work on the entire production, which is perhaps fitting: after all, when staging a show about a small group of islanders living against some fearsome odds, you have to band together.

A live webcast of the performance was filmed for the BBC Alba website. See www.bbc.co.uk/alba to watch it again.

© Leon McDermott, 2007

Links

• Proiseact nan Ealan
• St Kilda – A European Opera

Associated Page

• Malcolm Maclean interview