The Long Way Home

MARK FISHER looks at the Highlands and Islands component of HOME, the National Theatre of Scotland’s ambitious launch project taking place in ten locations across Scotland

PEOPLE HAVE been talking about setting up a National Theatre of Scotland since as long ago as 1822. That was when King George IV paid a visit to the Edinburgh Theatre Royal (long since gone), and a buzz of aspiration whipped round the theatre community.

The idea has been batted about with varying degrees of intensity over the intervening years. Playwright James Bridie had ambitions for the Glasgow Citizens’ in the 1940s, director Bill Bryden thought it should be a role for the Edinburgh Royal Lyceum in the 1970s, and the touring Scottish Theatre Company fancied its chances in the 1980s.

There were others besides, none of them quite able to make it happen, which means the arrival of the National Theatre of Scotland this month will put an end to nearly 200 years of dreaming.
 
With this in mind, Vicky Featherstone was faced with a very particular problem as the artistic director of the only national body to be formed since the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. Although her attention had to be focused on the programme for the organisation’s first year and beyond, she knew the production she did first would come under the closest scrutiny.

And what possible theatrical event could bear the weight of two centuries’ worth of expectation? If the production had been a classic, it would have disappointed those who like new plays. If it had been in Aberdeen, there would have been grumbles in Edinburgh. A star name performer would have grabbed the headlines and alienated the many good but unknown stage actors. And so on, and so on.

… this is a theatre for the whole of the nation and not some Central Belt indulgence

No, what was needed was something that could sidestep all these irreconcilable conflicts, while at the same time reflecting something of the nature of the new organisation. After all, this National Theatre was conceived like no other. Built on the premise that the National Theatre of Scotland already existed in the sum total of theatre practitioners at large in the country, the NTS would have neither a building nor a company to call its own.

Instead, it would have a lean artistic team, with Featherstone at the helm, that would stage work in collaboration with the country’s existing talents. Unlike most other national theatres, which exist in prestigious buildings and stage plays on traditional proscenium arch stages, the NTS could embrace community shows, children’s theatre, site-specific performances and studio experiments just as easily as high-profile city-centre blockbusters.
 
Any opening show that didn’t express something of this flexibility would have given a misleading impression of what the NTS was about. Thus, Featherstone’s inspirational opening gambit is not one show at all, but ten of them, dotted about the country and performed within a period of five days in spaces as unlikely as a derelict house in Aberdeen and an art gallery in Dundee. All of them are called ‘Home’, and all of them adhere to the broadest definition of what theatre can be.

Demonstrating from the start that this is a theatre for the whole of the nation and not some Central Belt indulgence, Featherstone has commissioned Home performances in locations across Scotland, including Caithness, Inverness, Shetland and Stornoway.

Each is the responsibility of a different director who has found a group of collaborators and somewhere to perform – the stipulation being that it couldn’t be a conventional theatre – on a performance that should somehow embody the idea of home.

By their nature, these performances will tend to be intimate, yet the NTS reckons that with ten productions, each being shown three or four times, as many as 10,000 people will get to see them. Unconventional or not, that’s a pretty inclusive way to begin.

The most northerly of all the performances is in Shetland, where director Wils Wilson is staging a show on the Northlink ferry as it sits in Lerwick between voyages. The audience will be welcomed on board as if they were travelling but, instead of being shown to their cabin, they’ll be given a set of headphones and a recorded set of directions, and drawn to a series of mini-performances around the upper deck. Contributing to the live and recorded atmosphere are poet Jackie Kay, writer Jacqueline Clark, musician Hugh Nankivell and artist Karen Club.

Eventually gathering on the car deck, they’ll be entertained by 100 fiddle players (“There are quite a lot of fiddlers up here,” says Wilson) and ushered back to dry land in a most unexpected way that should remain a surprise.

Wilson, who specialises in site-specific theatre and installation art in the north of England, recognises the emotive power of the ferry in a community dependent on the sea.

“When you’re on the ferry you’re either going home or coming back home,” she says. “The show is about the home you carry round in your head. The ferry is also a temporary home for all sorts of different lives and stories, because you’re on it for 15 hours. It’s such a lifeline service that everyone has a relationship to it. The performance will be like taking people on a journey home.”
 
Moving south to Caithness and Sutherland, director Matthew Lenton of Glasgow’s Vanishing Point theatre company, is moving into the Caithness Glass Factory and Visitors Centre in Wick to devise a play about a resident of an old people’s home who gets so involved in watching a film – ‘Once upon a Time in the West’ – that she decides to make a break for home herself.

The “spiritual odyssey” stars Myra McFadyen and Sandy Grierson, as well as Caithness performers and musicians.

“It’s about an old woman who’s in a home from home because she’s suffering from the early stages of dementia,” says Lenton. “She wants to return to the place she remembers as being her home and the person she associates with that place.

“She goes on an imagistic odyssey through space and time, injected with fantasy and magic realism, until she is apprehended. The glass factory is a massive, empty room that allows us to play with space and light and, although the subject matter sounds bleak, the show is very celebratory and colourful.”

Once upon a time in the west of Scotland, Glasgow director Stewart Laing has been inspired by the theme of the project to build a doll’s house – the ultimate home in miniature. You can see him and his colleagues at work in a shop in Stornoway: the same shop where they’ll perform their custom-built puppet theatre for 20 people at a time.

But this will be no ordinary doll’s house. There are seven artists including Stornoway’s Moira Maclean, who specialises in photographing the abandoned homes of Lewis, and each is taking responsibility for a room in the house. As the puppet performance moves from room to room, the house will cast off its romantic associations as one of the most nostalgic of children’s toys.

“We’re trying to subvert the traditional notions of doll’s houses which tend to be very backward looking, Victorian or Edwardian, and aspirational,” says Laing. “. They’re to do with idealised living. We’re taking more interesting ideas of home and putting them into miniature.”

For the Inverness project, Scott Graham, the Glasgow-born director of England’s Frantic Assembly, is bringing his highly physical techniques to the various rooms of Evanton’s Arts in Motion Creation Centre. He’s making a piece of theatre inspired by photographs taken of local people in their homes.

“I started with the idea of people playing at living in a home and the excitement of setting up a home for the first time with a partner,” says Graham. “It’s also about what happens to your feelings towards the bricks and mortar when the relationship turns sour. I’m looking for a high-energy, highly visual piece.”

Graham admits that being given the chance to direct one of the inaugural shows of the NTS made him “absolutely terrified”. Meeting the other nine directors, he was relieved to discover everyone had felt the same way when they got the call. “It’s taken me a long time to realise I’m not going to play football for Scotland,” he says. “But this is the equivalent call. It’s really exciting to be part of the National Theatre of Scotland on its launch.”

But, as Stewart Laing says, one of the beauties of the project is that it takes the pressure off the individual artists while at the same time setting out the agenda for the future.

“Because there are ten projects, I personally don’t feel a huge responsibility,” says Laing. “If somebody had asked me to do the opening production of the National Theatre of Scotland and it wasn’t part of ten, then I wouldn’t have chosen to do it. But being one of ten gives you freedom to be a lot more personal. I was thrilled to bits to be asked to do it and it’s a really interesting way to launch a national theatre company. It’s a great statement of intent.”

Highlands and Islands performances of Home:

Caithness & Sutherland, 23–26 February 2006: Caithness Glass Factory & Visitors Centre, Wick; box office: Lyth Arts Centre, 01955 641270

Inverness, 23–25 February 2006: Arts in Motion Creation Centre, Evanton; box office: Eden Court, 01463 234234

Shetland, 23–27 February 2006: Holmsgarth Ferry Terminal, Northlink Ferry, Lerwick; box office: Islesburgh Community Centre, 01595 692114

Stornoway, 23–25 February 2006: 14 Church Street, Stornoway; box office An Lanntair Arts Centre, 01851 703307.

© Mark Fisher, 2006

Links

• National Theatre of Scotland website