Review by Mark Fisher
The Silver Darlings
3 Sep 2009 in Aberdeen City & Shire, Dance & Drama
His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, 1 September 2009, and touring
THE STORY of the Highland clearances is usually told in terms of the move to far-away cities and even further away countries. Neil M Gunn’s 1941 novel, The Silver Darlings, by contrast, stays closer to home and focuses on those crofters who made for the Sutherland coast, turning from farmers to fishermen in a bid for survival.
Cameron Mowat, Finn den Hertog, Tom McGovern and Alan McHugh in The Silver Darlings (© Andrew Tobin of Events Captured)
One of the things he captures so well in this crisply written novel is the heady, scary novelty of the herring business for a generation of young men who had no traditional fishing skills. He shows how they were forced into the sea by economic necessity and, however bold and adventurous they were, their lack of experience made the enterprise highly risky.
It’s one of the details playwright Peter Arnott has to gloss over in adapting the book for the stage (for good reason: the novel is nearly 600 pages long) and it means it takes a while for us to get a sense of the story’s emotional impact on Catrine, its central figure. Indeed, the whole of the first act seems to be a busy string of incidents, restlessly jumping from one brief scene to the next in Kenny Ireland’s ensemble production. It is lively and colourful, but never settles into the meat of the drama.
Arnott is in it for the long-haul, however, and after the interval, he capitalises on his ground-work by slowing the pace and making room for Meg Fraser’s stoic Catrine to come into her own. Now we start to understand the stresses on Catrine of losing a husband at sea – press-ganged by the military on one of his early fishing trips and of sacrificing her independent spirit in order that she and her son Finn (played by Finn Den Hertog) might survive.
She suffers the heartache of watching Finn grow into a hot-headed young man, but his new-found freedom also gives her scope for self-discovery as she finds new love in an old friend’s arms.
With a cast of ten rarely off the stage, Ireland’s production creates a vivid sense of community, placing Catrine at the heart of a tight-knit group who depend on each other for survival in an unforgiving economic climate. Performing in front of an ever changing backdrop of period photographs, the actors evoke the novel’s combination of harshness and romance in an uneven but ultimately rewarding show.
