Cullipool Hall, Isle of Luing, 11 September 2009

SOME PLAYS linger in the mind long after the hall is empty and the company has moved on. Walden is one of those plays. A view which was borne out for me the day after this show by a woman I met on the shore who asked me where she could get a copy of the Magnetic North booklet which contains the script. A lot of scripts were sold that night to the islanders of Luing, Seil and Easdale who filled every available seat.

Ewan Donald in Walden

One reason it lingers is the remarkable set design by Sans façon which consists of a series of high-backed cedarwood benches which interlock to form an intimate elliptical space within which the play takes place. They have something of a minimalist Shaker beauty about them which is appropriate to the period and sometimes creak and smell sweetly, but their crucial function is to bring audience and actor face to face in close proximity so that this extended monologue based on Henry Thoreau’s renowned book becomes almost a dialogue in which the audience experiences his life in the woods as if it were its own.

The other reason is the outstanding performance of Ewan Donald in this tight one-hander. His strong sense of physical theatre, whether sitting down, lying on the floor gazing up at the sky, clutching a stick and spreading sand with it, or standing high on a bench cracking it hard against the wood and howling to all the creatures of the forest, is spell-binding.

I once had the good fortune to see Spalding Gray live, who, as I recall, remained seated throughout, but Ewan Donald brings not only Gray’s virtuosity and rich American drawl to the part, but considerable grace and movement to his innovative solo performance. He is a young man not playing Thoreau (although about his age and speaking his words), yet managing to bring his feelings and thoughts vividly to life. When he looks you directly in the eye, as he does many individuals in the audience, you cannot but give him your complete attention.

The story of how Thoreau went into the woods near Concord, Massachusetts in 1845 and built himself a wooden cabin by Walden Pond where he lived on his own for two years and two months is fairly well known, and his book Walden adorns many a shelf, albeit like other classics, sometimes unread.

It is widely regarded as one of the key founding texts of environmental thinking and a pioneer work in ecology and nature writing, but it is also perhaps the first book ever written which speaks directly to us about how we might “live deliberately” in harmony with the planet.

The great achievement of Nicholas Bone’s adaptation and direction, which was developed in 2007-8 through a lengthy process of artistic collaboration with Ewan Donald and others, is that he has distilled the very essence of the book and rendered it accessible to all whilst retaining and indeed highlighting the poetic elements which make it so special.

Thoreau’s purpose in going to Walden was “to confront only the essential facts of life and see if I could learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived at all.” He tells us his “life was being frittered away by detail” and he had “an urge to simplify, simplify, simplify.” He says “This nation … is ruined by luxury and heedless expense” – an observation and an approach to life that could not be more timely in today’s consumer orientated and digitally distracted world.

Donald takes us through Thoreau’s year from the building of his hut which began in late March to his occupation of it, symbolically on Independence Day, through reddening autumn to the frozen pond of winter and returning spring. A pile of golden sand is appropriately multi-functional being used to measure his height between two stones on the ground, to count the spartan contents of his home, to depict the field in which he plants and hoes beans, the lake whose width and depth he measures, its frozen surface on which he lies, and even the snow on which he assiduously retraces his footsteps.

Through him we hear the sounds of the woods – the honking of geese, the rush of their wings as they descend on the pond, the hooting of an owl, Sunday bells from distant villages, the trump of bullfrogs. With him we smell the produce of the world stored on passing freight trains, we see the blue and green colours of the lake, the bronze glimmer of a myriad of small perch dimpling its surface.

We share his laughter at the values by which most of us live: “If we do not devote days and nights to work but go tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if the railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven?”

He is alone, but not lonely. He has companions – a mouse, a snake, a woodchuck, hawks, pigeons, no shortage of visitors, and his books – “the treasured wealth of the world”. He advises us to direct our eye inward to discover the inner workings of our mind and open new channels of thought, to lead the life we imagine in our dreams, and he assures us that if we do so we will meet with success. But, influenced by his readings in Hinduism, Confucianism and Buddhism, he also says we must think outside ourselves, letting good and bad go by us.

Most tellingly of all, the play, particularly in its still, quiet passages, demonstrates the value of living fully in the moment – tenderly recalling timeless mornings sitting in his sunny doorway with the birds singing around him, lying on his back in a boat “dreaming awake” until it touches the shore, illuminating his non-separation from the earth: “It is no longer beans that I hoe, nor I that hoe beans.”

In these moments it takes on an almost elegiac quality, and when we hear him saying “This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore” – just as it was that late summer night on the Isle of Luing – we are moved to know that it is true and that there is joy to be had if we are but open to the world and willing to utilise all our senses to experience it. In this lies the wondrous poetics of the earth which Thoreau and Magnetic North have gifted us.

Nicholas Bone has done us all a great service in conveying Thoreau’s wisdom so beautifully, and Ewan Donald has succeeded splendidly in making that wisdom come alive. His is a five star performance in a five star play. Walden is an unforgettable experience which deserves to run and run.

© Norman Bissell, 2009

Links

• Magnetic North