OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness,  5 October 2011

THE STORY of Nora Low from the little Aberdeenshire town of Strichen who ran away with a commercial traveller, became a highly successful Hollywood screenwriter and had a lovechild by Cecil B de Mille’s son sounds far too contrived to be true.

HOWEVER, as so often, truth is stranger than fiction, and so Nora Low became Lorna Moon, who published a collection of short stories about her hometown, far too thinly disguised as Drumorty, in 1925.

Michelle Bruce and Fraser Sivewright in Doorways in Drumorty

Mike Gibb has skilfully drawn some of these short stories together into a play which economically fillets and skewers smalltown life in the honourable tradition that encompasses such disparate creations as Cranford and the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. The stifling constriction of life lived under the constant, corrosive scrutiny of a hundred eyes peering through net curtains was economically reproduced by RedRag Theatre under the direction of Fraser Sivewright and designer Ewen Bruce.

Michelle Bruce, Belle Jones (ex-pupil of Eden Court’s Higher Drama course), and the director himself skilfully created a dozen different characters in the neatly interlinked stories, managing to explain the intricate semiotics of ribbons and daisies in the Doric and yet make all comprehensible to those few of the audience who didn’t hail from Aberdeenshire.

Humourous and moving by turns, the story of spinster Jessie Maclean (Belle Jones), was woven though the evening to make this that rare thing, a story arc in which a woman traces a lone, heroic journey. It made for a enthralling tale with plenty of surprises to move and delight the near-capacity audience.

After her early death from TB in an Albuquerque sanatorium in 1930, Moon’s reputation was soon lost in the mists of history but in recent years her life and work has been rediscovered, starting with her abandoned son Richard de Mille’s biography in 1998. On the strength of this play, whose themes and treatment of them show her to be at least a century ahead of her time, her Collected Works (2002) should be high on everyone’s reading list.

© Jennie Macfie, 2011

Links

• RedRag Theatre
• Jennie Macfie