Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh, 5 November 2008, and touring

Otter Pie

LOCAL IDENTITY is a nebulous thing. We all know what we mean when we talk about the character of place, but try and pin it down and it slips away. Not everyone in Glasgow is friendly, not everyone in Edinburgh lacks generosity and not everyone in Liverpool has a great sense of humour. Yet these are the images of each city that persist.

It’s the same with nations, few more so than Scotland where the desire to forge a collective definition is strong enough to have produced a whole year-long marketing campaign in the form of 2009’s Homecoming.

Typically, people shape their national definition through cultural talismans. Scotland’s love of Runrig and the Proclaimers, for example, goes far beyond mere music. Another such talisman is Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, a book not only voted the nation’s favourite in a recent poll, but also assuming its place as a very cornerstone of the country’s identity.

This is where Glasgow theatre company Fish & Game comes in. A mixed group of young Scottish and English performers, they’ve noticed that the world Grassic Gibbon so poetically describes has almost nothing to do with their own experience. These 21st century city-dwellers have no real feel for the Aberdeenshire countryside of 1912 with its sense of community, hand-to-mouth living and primitive farming methods. So for all the book’s many qualities, it speaks to them less directly than, say, a Michael Jackson record.

Recognising this, they’ve created Otter Pie, a show that sits – a little uncomfortably – at the interface between popular theatre and performance art, deconstructing Sunset Song with a mixture of deliberately clunky acting and abstract movement sequences.

What’s frustrating about the show is it only sporadically capitalises on its amusing premise. Despite a long period of development, too much of it feels like workshop exercises displaying an abstruse connection with the main theme.

When it gets into stride, however, Robert Walton’s production is refreshingly daft. The performers show more energy than technique, but they have a loveably self-deprecating sense of humour and a subtle awareness that Grassic Gibbon’s novel is both distant and close to them. It’s a bit of a curiosity – as you’d expect with a title like Otter Pie – but with just enough oddball entertainment to be worth a look.

Otter Pie is at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, on 11-12 November 2008

© Mark Fisher, 2008

Links

• Otter Pie
• Fish & Game
• Eden Court Theatre