GEORGINA COBURN checks out work by Arts In Motion, Fish & Game, Mull Theatre and Grey Coast Theatre Company

Brightwater presented by Mull Theatre.

ARTS IN Motion’s The Box It Came In (Merkinch Community Centre) is the follow up to their very successful “The Perfect Spot”. Evanton-based creative production company Arts in Motion have been experimenting with projection, performance and animation since the 1990’s.

Part of the same company and formerly known as Clown Jewels, Cartoon Theatre have developed several shows for children including “The Perfect Spot”, “The Comic” and “The Other Side”. “The Box It Came In” combines live performance with computer animation and front projection in an enjoyable show for a young audience.

Inventive staging brings 2D and 3D realities merging in real time as actor Brian Smith and audience react to the story and imagery as it unfolds. With his teddy bear for company the lead character travels from his living room to planet Zet at the edge of the universe. Audience participation is an important aspect of the show through drawing and active participation in repairing the space ship!

The style of performance owes much to slapstick comedy, the imaginative world of animation and panto. This combination and a largely projected set, bright colours and simplified design makes the show easy for its target audience to relate to. It’s a show that would fit easily into community halls and a good introduction for kids to a live theatre experience.

Brian Smith’s energetic solo performance, aided by silent sidekick Ted and inventive staging, kept the audience visually entertained throughout. A great accompaniment to touring such a show would be creative exploration of drawing and basic animation techniques in relation to performances in schools.

Expanding the lone experience of the computer generation into something larger through the collective experience of live theatre is extremely clever. This is an aspect of Cartoon Theatre that could be developed further in relation to a range of age groups in the future.

GLASGOW-based Fish & Game’s Otter Pie (Craigmonie Centre, Drumnadrochit) raised important questions about Scottish identity and the pursuit of happiness in the 21st century but failed to deliver a full and coherent exploration of its theme.

The show was performed and devised by Eilidh MacAskill, Robert Walton, Nic Green, Murray Wason and Jodie Wilkinson. Although the cast are skilled and energetic what they deliver is a convoluted mix of theatre, dance, comedy and the artifice of production, playing both themselves and fictional characters.

The ingredients for meaningful exploration, humour and irony are all there, but the writing is episodic, combining too many obtuse references for an audience to really grasp the mettle of the argument. The performance moves between characters and storyline from Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic Scottish novel ‘Sunset Song’, a range of other literary references and influences including Bill Bryson, Billy Collins, Carol Craig, Martin Seligman and Bill Duncan, and the personalities and interactions of the cast and director.

Set on a grid of tartan and beginning with a series of stylised dance movements to LA funk, the meaning of which only becomes clear at the end when the sequence is repeated, the staging and execution contains many clever cultural references.

At one point the story of ‘Sunset Song’ is choreographed to ceilidh dance movements but this is only one in a series of different plays on the original text. The way in which Scottish popular culture clings to the past, evoking a nostalgic view of a way of life all but extinguished is actively questioned by the play but there is more room for critical development.

If the play does offer a conclusion then it is the need to live for the here and now and for individuality without the selfishness of the “me generation” to define the nation and contextualise the past.

As the cast navigates its way through these themes beneath the deadly threat of falling meteorites the pie becomes more like a stew. Editing and revising would make a much stronger work. Moments of clarity, irony and real poignancy are never really allowed to develop and link to a cohesive performance or conclusion.

I hope that this production will evolve into a more coherent work in future incarnations. As a piece of experimental theatre it shows great promise but it is at this stage only a beginning rather than a finished work. Having said that, the issues it raises are vital ones and the production actively demonstrates that live performance is a great forum for visualisation and debate. How we define ourselves now will determine how we are seen in 100 years, if we are in fact seen at all.

MULL Theatre’s Brightwater (Inverness High School) also engaged with the life and work of a Scottish writer. Set on Eilean Ban near Kyleakin, “Brightwater” dramatises the life of Gavin Maxwell “naturalist, explorer, social renegade, basking shark hunter, racing driver, wartime secret agent, poet and one of the most popular authors of wildlife books this century”. The play is essentially a dialogue between Maxwell and his younger self with evocative sound and music design by Martin Low and lighting design by Mick Andrews setting the scene for earlier episodes as the author reflects upon his life.

Richard Addison as the older Maxwell and Richard Conlon as the younger are both excellent. However, choosing to explore the character of Maxwell in this way felt unexpectedly limiting. In devising a theatrical portrait, playwright Jon Pope reveals Maxwell’s human failings in a series of reminiscences of a life which centre entirely on the self.

Though as an audience we are left in no doubt as to the complexity and sometimes contradictory nature of Maxwell’s personality, I actually left wanting to know more about characters peripheral to the performance, namely poet Kathleen Raine and explorer Wilfred Thesiger.

I did not feel sympathy, empathy or interest in Maxwell himself as I left the theatre. His relationships and his influence on others, neither of which are really dealt with by the play, caused the most thought or speculation post-performance.

Although the Maxwell legend is brought down to focus on one multifaceted human being there are larger issues here begging to be explored. The play touches on many fascinating themes which would make for a far more compelling play in two acts than Maxwell engaging in dialogue with his younger self.

The influence of Maxwell and his legacy, our contentious relationship to the landscape of the Highlands and Islands, man and the nature of conservation, the freedom of the individual among the mass of humanity and the culture of “opting out” for those of independent means which still persists in the Highlands today are all themes worthy of greater exploration.

The way in which Maxwell’s ‘Avalon’, his West Highland idyll, disintegrates by being popularised is perhaps one of the most interesting facets of his story. Creating a sanctuary from the rest of humanity, the need for solitude and unconditional love are also central to this character and could have been developed further.

Like Maxwell the playwright seems to have banished the rest of humankind from his stage. As a result the stage narrows and it is hard to feel anything for the central character, which I suspect was not the author’s intention. Maxwell travelled widely and however destructive he did have relationships. He stepped in and out of society which was his privilege.

His love of animals manifested itself primarily in their captivity and although Maxwell has come to represent conservation, particularly of the otter, there is something about his character presented here that lacks integrity or sympathy. Loving something to the point where you destroy it and rating your own freedom above all others makes you neither a noble environmentalist nor a sensitive soul but a sad and spoilt eccentric.

THURSO-based Grey Coast Theatre Company presented a “script in hand” live reading of founder and Artistic Director George Gunn’s latest work about the Highland Clearances, Taigh Na Mara (Houses of the Sea) (Merkinch Community Centre), on the final evening of the festival.

Caithness actors Drew Macleod, Heather Calder-MacPhee, Ian MacDonald, Helen MacKay and Anthony Carberry presented the journey of preacher Norman MacLeod and his followers from Assynt to Ullapool, Pictou Nova Scotia, St Anne’s Cape Breton, Adelaide, Melbourne and Waipu New Zealand. (I did wonder about staging and design as all these various locations unfolded through stage direction during the reading.)

Though the subject matter is topical and the premise for a play is fascinating there are scenes here which neither develop character nor further the action and would benefit from cutting, especially during the less taut second half. Scenes with outlaws and miners in Australia didn’t really seem to serve a purpose.

What begins as a semi-historical drama becomes infused with symbolism in the second half and an attempt to reinterpret the subject in terms of the universality of human experience. The refugee status of Highlanders cleared from their land is somewhat clumsily fused with references to modern war, conquest and injustice.

“The Highland capacity for survival” is a human capacity for survival. Whilst this sentiment is perfectly valid it is lacking in subtlety much like the oft referred to moon imagery throughout the play.

Though there are some strong and lyrical moments in the play, I found the central character of Norman Macleod lacking in depth, framed by his preaching, fanaticism and dwarfed by the scope of his epic journey.

The characters of his wife Mary and mistress Mhairi are interestingly explored in more detail. This is a tale well worth telling, but I found the description that “with a company of community actors themselves from the Highlands only Grey Coast Theatre Company is qualified to tell this story” in the Festival’s listings strangely parochial.

If writing is powerful and well crafted whether the cast comes from the Highlands or not isn’t really relevant. The desire for cultural distinction and regional character sits uneasily with the universal elements of the play. Gunn’s scene that exchanges sexes and extinguishes the past therefore sits confusingly in a play of two halves.

The Highland Clearances are still an emotive issue today and the play relies heavily on that sentiment of injustice. Though I have no doubt that art can transform our understanding of history and be part of vital re-examination of individual and collective identity, I would question whether this play in its current form succeeds in doing so.

That said I very much enjoyed seeing a play being read in this way rather than presented as a finely finished performance. It has been wonderful as a viewer throughout the festival to engage with drama at all stages of conception, development and performance.

© Georgina Coburn, 2007

Links

• Dràma Na h-Alba