An Lanntair, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, 24-26 February 2011, and touring

THIS PREMIERE at An Lanntair ticked all my boxes before the curtain rose. Take a writer of local origins, Kevin MacNeil, with a reputation for courageous exploration of  challenging themes.  Forge a link with a Scandinavian writer, Torgny Lindgren, who may share some common concerns with Hebridean neighbours. Work with a Highland theatre company, Dogstar, which has consistently made successful drama which ranges over Europe but fears not the local.  Develop a new play and open it in the author’s home town, with a tour to follow.

Sean Hay (Murdo) Lynne Verrall (Kate) Matthew Zajac (Archie) (photo credit Leila Angus)

Kevin Macneil’s Callanish Stoned for Theatre Hebrides had a tighter shape on its second outing. With that experience behind him, he was well placed to embark on the challenge of creating theatre from an intense, near claustrophobic scenario. I have not read Lindgren’s novel so, like most of the audience, can only approach the work on the basis of what transpired on the stage on the night. The approach does not make it easy for either the writer or director Matthew Zajac.

Two brothers are neighbours who do not talk. There is a dividing line as sure as a barbed wire border between the two crofts. One drives to the nearest town to pay host to a writer who is giving a talk. He goes because he fears no-one else will. She will stay for one night and be gone. But the snows intervene and the lady writer stays on. She crosses the divide from one house to another and listens to both sides of an archetypal story of brothers at war with each other.

Now East of Eden was in a sense Steinbeck’s take on the Cain and Abel story. The film is a study of young men’s passion and the handsome intensity of James Dean does no harm at all in the film version. But the structure of this story means that the sick brothers cannot meet to provide drama on stage. A partition is swung as a simple but effective device to juxtapose Archie’s version of the story with that of his brother, Murdo. So any fights have to happen off scene. And indeed it is very classical, the way retrospective action is described as a dramatic crux, rather than seen directly.

The brothers have shared a woman and they’ve shared a son. But a tragedy happened and blame and guilt and anger have placed them in a conflict which takes an unusual form. The tense, wiry Archie has cancer and the obese Murdo has heart trouble but each wills himself to stay alive just to get one over on the other.

Now if this is comedy it’s bleaker than black. There is mitigation in wry humour and by the attempts at intervention from Lynne Verrall’s character, who is fascinated by the bizarre relationship of the antagonists. She is convincing  as a humane appearance into a situation which may have no resolution but which must be understood.

Archie, the brother who eats little but painkillers, is played with restrained tension by Mathew Zajac.  And Murdo (another strong performance from Sean Hay) consumes sugar till it oozes through his skin while he attempts a jolly persona to blur  emotional pain. That cocktail needed something stronger than the jokes and gags we were offered to take us through an intense first half where all the background story is sketched out and the characters bought to life and tied together. The strong simple set helped, however, as did Jonny Hardie’s excellent atmospheric music.

But I would say the level of ambition was achieved in the second half. The tragic loss of the one son, shared between two households, with only one woman moving between them, is re-enacted in two contradictory stories. That’s drama, and the shocking action is obscene – in the sense that you don’t see it but only encounter it in language.

Verrall’s character becomes stronger as she sets about building a device which will make the brothers meet again. It’s also very moving when she is able to offer strange intimacies, in turn, to both men. I’m not going to tell you if her plan is a success or a failure, but I would say that a humane impulse mitigates the bleak scene.

I felt that endings were not the strong point of either of Macneil’s novels, though each offers rewards and entertainments along the way. This play is early in its life and the shape will get tighter as the tour develops. But I’d call it a strong and brave piece of work already.  And I suggest, unlike the novels, it has a strong and convincing ending.

© Ian Stephen, 2011

Links

• Dogstar Theatre
• Kevin MacNeil
• Ian Stephen