Empire Theatre, Eden Court, 23 September 2008

Sunset Song

Not for the first time this year, not for the first time even this month, this writer found herself hoping fervently that at least one of those who doubted the value of a theatre fit for the capital of the Highlands was there to see their constituents massed and revelling in the results.

From the first moment we entered the Empire Theatre to see the rolling hill-fringed darkly fertile land of the Mearns evoked elegantly and economically by a rising sweep of particoloured wooden floor, a plough and a backprojected image, it was apparent that we were in the hands of both a director who understands design and a designer who understands production.

A section of floor was lifted, first to become one of the standing stones that are a recurrent motif in the book for that part of heroine Chris Guthrie (Hannah Donaldson) that will not allow her to leave the land she loves and loathes equally, later to be the war memorial to her dead husband, Ewan Tavendale (Graeme Stirling).

Using a few such telling elements, Hayden Griffin’s design succesfully scaled a whole landscape down to meet the stringent demands of a touring set. The integral use of back projected images was an example of the way digital projection techniques produce a virtual stage architecture – here, a stained glass window created a church, there a narrowed landscape became a train window. Praise is due also to both lighting designer John Harris and musical director Paul Anderson for some understated, highly atmospheric work.

But the play’s the thing. In reworking Alastair Cording’s adaptation (originally made in the early 90s for TAG), Kenny Ireland focused on the relevance of heroine Chris Guthrie’s ambivalent relationship with the land to a devolved Scotland’s equally ambivalent feelings about itself and the world it finds itself in.

So many plays and books have mourned the devastation the First World War wrought on rural England, but Sunset Song shows that it was also “the auld Scotland that perished”, that rural Scotland that had endured almost unchanged for centuries and encapsulated in Long Rob’s elegaic (and perhaps, on the downward path from peak oil, prophetic) cry of “The scythe will return!”

Ireland, his team and his evenly talented company took us through the novel voted ‘Scotland’s favourite read’ at a brisk and at times rather breathless pace. I missed the slow but steady carthorse inevitability of Grassic Gibbon’s prose, rooted in the rich blood red clay of his Mearns home, but the vivid warp and weft of the closely woven tapestry of life in Kinraddie was retained.

Stylised, balletic chorus movements (Andrew Panton) created the wedding and harvest sequences in a few well chosen steps, though the choreography for Chris’ love scenes with her various partners felt awkwardly stylised and the battle charge from the trenches skated dangerously close to bathos.

No matter; overall, this was a lively and thoroughly enjoyable ensemble piece. Outside the theatre, audience members stood and talked, reluctant to bring the experience to an end – a sure sign of a good evening. Congratulations to all at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, for embarking on their first production for half a century in such style and giving the Central Belt a run for its money.

Sunset Song runs at Eden Court until Saturday 27 September.

© Jennie Macfie, 2008

Links

• Eden Court Theatre