Final run-through, An Lanntair, Stornoway, 19 February 2009

Iain Macrae

IT’S NOT easy to tour theatre shows in the Highlands and Islands. Facilities have improved, Transport links are better but it’s still not easy. The new Theatre Hebrides show continues the company policies of commissioning new work from the home area, looking outward to touring it and giving work to practitioners from the outer Islands.

This one aims to make a virtue of the demands of adapting to venues with differing levels of provision for theatre. It’s a one-man show, a virtuoso piece giving the very experienced Iain Macrae a chance to demonstrate his range.

The set, designed by Theatre Hebrides artistic director, Muriel Ann Macleod, is clean, elegant and very practical. It’s a section of a not very good hotel room and though you never see outside, you get that out-of-season chill.

I’ve seen Eric John Macdonald, a writer from the Uig district of Lewis, at work before. He responded to a tight commission to write a 15-minute promenade piece in response to the history of domestic and commercial life of one harbourside building in Stornoway.

His piece had a natural pace and rhythm but the local concerns were placed in the light of a swatch of European history. Within the local, his study of generations interacting was specific but also timeless and placeless at the best moments.

His writing here takes some huge risks. The premise is that an ageing actor is touring the Highlands with a one man show based on Edgar Allen Poe. Never mind the ominous raven, the subject is the worm of death. We glimpse one scene – where the actor enacts Poe’s deep fear of being buried alive. Of course the implication is that the man who delivers this drama is himself in a kind of living death.

He was Brodie – a kind of Dr Finlay of prime time TV. The series was killed and his career tumbled. It’s impossible not to think of the background story to The Killing of Sister George (Frank Marcus, 1964) where the dominant central character is axed from a broadcast serial. There are also nods to a screen genre of the subject – as the character’s career becomes more desperate he or she rages but is forced to attempt to assess how worthwhile all these pretences have been.

And there is a hint of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer – but instead of a reflective litany of Highland place names we have the cynical repetition of the name ‘Kinloch … somewhere’.

Macdonald takes a further risk. His actor is a pretty well unmitigated bastard. Between his lines we see the arrogance, manipulation and self-deceit which have left a debris of fractured relationships.

I saw a run-through before the first performance. Now bear in mind the last theatre work I’ve seen was the impressive The Tailor of Inverness – a work that’s been honed from tours and an award-winning run at the Fringe. And a family story that had to be told at the heart of it. One that must speak for the forgotten armies of unheroic survivors, caught up in the terrain between huge masses of power.

So I saw this rehearsal in a cold studio between the business of the day. It held me so I had no choice but to wait, late, to the conclusion. The set proved a key element – and the mirror cut to an angle is a simply brilliant device. The slant of that mirror shows other facets of Macrae’s face and body-tension. It also implies glimpses of his character’s fading charm but very few hints of human warmth.

The facets of his actor-character are revealed as much from the oblique angles of his stories as from the narrative drive of them. His relationships have been held only as long as they fit his career. When pain is imminent, it is time to escape.

But from another angle you could say that a domineering father who sees acting as dressed-up pretence is a hard bit of psychology to cope with. And the adulation that is offered to the media star is a weird aspect of human behaviour that certainly didn’t stop with TV series of the 1960s or any other decade since.

But Macdonald’s play is I think, more exploration than satire. It reminded me of another one-man show on the subject of death. Russel Hunter (Lonely in television’s Callan series) performed a series of plays by W Gordon Smith. This one, opened at the then very ecletic Wick Festival early in the 1980s, was a series of meditations on death. Its central image wasn’t a mirror but the electric chair which claimed the Rosenburgs, reputed traitors to the United States at the height of Cold War tension.

Macdonald uses less overt dramatic devices to hold interest and tension. There is a gruesome fascination in waiting for hopeful signs of humanity, beyond the actor’s personality, to be dashed again. There is awareness of the huge possibilities for theatre to explore what really is human. There is humour in abundance but the dark sharp humour is like that in a story translated from the Czech original.

Most of all there is wit, delivered expertly by an actor with experience and versatility and his own charm. Macrae seems at the height of his powers and the writing and direction give him scope.

Of course it’s all a bit too long at this stage but I wouldn’t mind betting that a few performances will see it tightened so the pace and wit become fearsome. Already it’s a strong piece, well worth turning out for. The production could well indicate a direction for Theatre Hebrides – perhaps a series of similar works.

Kinloch … Somewhere tours in the Highlands & Islands until 7 March 2009

© Ian Stephen, 2009

Links

• Theatre Hebrides