His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, 15 September 2012, and touring

ANYONE attempting to bring Robin Jenkins’s 1955 novel to the stage can’t proceed without solving one problem: how to present a story whose central characters spend most of the time in the treetops, gathering pinecones on a wartime Highland estate.

THE solution designer Hayden Griffin comes up with in Kenny Ireland’s absorbing large-scale touring production is both simple and effective. All over the stage are sets of ropes stretching high up to the ceiling. On their own they would suggest something of the vertical dominance of the forest, but in conjunction with the video projections by Greig Dempster, they also take on the haunting, all-surrounding, three-dimensional presence of the trees.

John Duror (Tom McGovern, right) and Roddie (Helen Mackay) in The Cone Gatherers (photo Donald Stewart)

With clever positioning, all it takes is for Ben Winger as the mentally disabled Callum and John Kielty as his ever-protective brother Neil to climb a relatively small ladder and we can believe they are labouring far above us.

It’s at ground level, however, that the greatest drama is taking place. Tom McGovern’s Duror, the gamekeeper, has been unsettled by the brothers’ appearance on his patch. He can’t explain his feelings fully (although in Peter Arnott’s adaptation, he is more explicit than in the book), but he comes to see Callum, well-meaning but of low intelligence, as a symbol of all that is wrong and inadequate in his own life. While the nation is fighting a war to bring to an end Hitler’s persecution of minorities, Duror launches a cruel supremacist fight of his own.

The novel, and the adaptation, are more than a simple allegory about despotic behaviour, however. What Jenkins does so well is pinpoint that moment in history where the old British class system was about to fall in on itself. Jennifer Black as the landowner Lady Runcie-Campbell seems to know her position of social superiority is untenable, yet until the tragedy has played itself out, she is incapable of behaving in anything but a high-handed manner.

She is unsettled by her son Roddie, played here by a cross-dressing Helen Mackay, who reacts instinctively at the sight of injustice and finds, for example, his mother’s refusal to give the brothers shelter from the torrential rain to be inhumane. Kielty’s Neil is vocal about being bossed around long before this incident, which only fuels his revolutionary temperament. His anger goes unheard.

Sadly, it is Duror who is victorious – albeit momentarily and self-destructively – but Arnott suggests it could be enough to jolt Lady Runcie-Campbell into the 21st century. The playwright gives her a closing speech that opens up the possibility of change, reminding us this is not just a story set in long-ago times but one that has wider implications about how we live together as a society.

With slick staging, ensemble singing and an actor-centred approach to storytelling, Ireland’s production does much justice to a compelling novel.

© Francis McLachlan, 2012