Empire Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, 9 November 2009

Vivien Heilbron and Michael Mackenzie in Grassic Gibbon (Photograph by Donald Stewart Photography).

SUNSET SONG is one of the pinnacles – if not the highest summit, as some would argue – of Scottish literature, certainly in the 20th century. Its career since its publication in 1932 has seen it become a critical tour de force, be banned from some public libraries, barely hang on in print, and be listed as a set book in schools.

It is, of course, only the first part of the much longer trilogy, poetically named A Scots Quair, in which James Leslie Mitchell, under his pen-name Lewis Grassic Gibbon, created a fictional version of the history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in rural Scotland.

I discovered the book when I was a student in Aberdeen. Its language and its story spoke directly to me. This was my world on the page. Jack Webster’s reaction when he first read it, as a young reporter, was similar: “… when I read Sunset Song it opened my eyes to my background, my culture …”, he said in an interview in the Press & Journal. Webster held on to an ambition to put on stage a play about Mitchell.

The result is not a play. Vivien Heilbron, who played the trilogy’s heroine Chris Guthrie in the 1970s BBC serialisation and now appears as one half of the cast in this production, calls it a homage to Grassic Gibbon.

It is that, and none the worse for it, although a few of the audience expected something more like the stage equivalent of a biopic, and it took a few moments to tune to the wavelength of what is really a documentary, a biography, a lecture in two voices.

Both Heilbron and Michael Mackenzie, who is the voice of Grassic Gibbon himself as a much older man than the original was at the time of his death in 1935, read from their scripts. Heilbron provides the narrative spine, with Mackenzie chipping in with Grassic Gibbon’s own view.

It works. The two actors read well as they move around a simple set – a table on one side, and a desk on the other with an old typewriter of the kind in use in the 1930s – in front of beautiful shots of the Mearns landscape by Andy Hall.

I thought that a few historical images, of the streets of Aberdeen, say, when the hero moved there to work on the Aberdeen Journal, would have been appropriate.

Grassic Gibbon/Mitchell wrote at a feverish pace in the last years of his life, churning out over 4,000 words on the best days on an astonishing range of work. This production, though, keeps its focus firmly on the trilogy, if not on Sunset Song, blending extracts from the prose with Webster’s enclosing narrative.

When Sunset Song was first published, one hostile review in the North-East – one among many – said the book was “crude and no credit to Scotland.” Clearly in the north the ethos of the kailyaird still reigned supreme.

Out of curiosity, I checked the response of the Inverness Courier in 1932. The reviewer, probably Ewan Barron the editor, found Sunset Song “extremely powerful and arresting”, but feared that the sex would prevent readers from recognising its “great merit”.

The evening in the Empire was an excellent tribute to one of our greatest writers that deserved a larger audience than it got.

© Jim Miller, 2009