Kenneth Steven

THERE could hardly be a more appropriate setting for this celebration of the work of Neil Gunn than the Heritage Centre presided over by Nan and George Bethune that was once his school, and if this year’s event, organised and programmed by Scotia Review,  was on a smaller scale than last year’s three-day spread, it provided a fascinating day.

The morning session was given over to a presentation by novelist and poet Kenneth Steven, chaired by Diarmid Gunn, Neil Gunn’s nephew and an authority on his work. It took place in the main room of the Centre, where a painted map on the floor charts the course of Dunbeath Water through the strath, and commemorates the main events of Gunn’s novel Highland River.

Kenneth Steven spoke about the revelatory impact of being introduced to that book by a teacher at his Perthshire school, a deviation from an official curriculum in which Scottish history and culture was otherwise absent (although he did once have to write an essay justifying the Clearances).

He acknowledged the powerful influence it had on his own Highland Trilogy, and especially the opening volume, Dan, and its successor, The Summer Has Ended. Just as Gunn’s protagonist, Kenn, seeks self-discovery on his search for the source along Dunbeath Water, so Steven’s main character in Dan walks the circle of the perimeter of his smallholding at the end of his life, reflecting on its many phases.

He emphasised the importance of the themes of the people and the land and the relationships that bind them together and shapes both the way we are and the landscape itself. It was a fascinating session, and underlined the persistent resonances from Gunn’s book that echo down the decades.

Sandwiches and a seemingly endless supply of home-baking – like much of what on here, provided by volunteer efforts – saw us through lunch, when we were entertained by local girl Jennifer Ross playing a facsimile of a Pictish harp.

As Nan Bethune pointed out at the start of the day, Dunbeath Heritage Centre is located in the only school that Neil Gunn ever attended (he was privately tutored at his sister’s marital home in Kirkcudbrightshire from the age of 13), and is well worth a visit in its own right. As well as the schematic map of Highland River and some wonderful accompanying photographs, the centre has exhibits reflecting the history and artefacts of the area.

Last year, George Gunn’s Grey Coast Theatre mounted a musical dramatisation of Neil Gunn’s novel Butchers Broom with local school-children, and the Thurso-based company returned this year with a more obscure slice of the writer’s work.

Donna Swanson, Darren Manson and a third actor who introduced himself simply as “TC from Scrabster”, all members of The Skraelings, the community wing of Grey Coast Theatre, read excerpts selected by George Gunn (who read the “novelistic” stage directions) from Neil Gunn’s forgotten three-act play The Ancient Fire.

The play had been performed only once, by the Scottish National Players at the Lyric Theatre in Glasgow in 1929, and remains unpublished. Diarmid Gunn had been able to supply copies of the manuscript from the Gunn holdings at the National Library in Edinburgh, enabling this taste of the play.

They read extracts from Act 1, set in a small clothes shop in Glasgow in hard times for the local shipyard workers, and from Act 2, when the shop-owner, Lachie, has returned for a holiday to his native Caithness, and gets tangled with the American owner of the big house. The actors had the opportunity for only one previous run-through of the work, and if the odd hesitation and stumble – and one missed cue – betrayed their lack of familiarity with the text and characters, they coped well with the challenge.

In the discussion which followed, George Gunn agreed that it was very likely the original failure of the play had been on the back of an inadequate staging. It was difficult to gauge the overall quality or practical stage-ability of the play from this degree of exposure, but George was adamant that a proper staging of the play was not only entirely possible now, but should happen.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2008

Links

• Neil Gunn
• Kenneth Steven
• Grey Coast Theatre
• Scotia Review
• Dunbeath Heritage Centre

Dunbeath Water, © Dr Paul Basu

AMONG THE GREAT things a long walk through the hills offers are the rivers you walk beside.  A lot of deep thinking has been done in that environment and it would take a very determined materialism, or a depressed spirit, to maintain getting and spending at the forefront of the mind.

At this range there is no telling which river summoned up the ideas that run through Dunbeath Water, but it was a long appreciation of Neil Gunn that placed them in the context of The Atom of Delight and through that Highland River and the events of 1937.  A similar appreciation of 20th Century choral music such as Brittens War Requiem, Shostakovichs 14th Symphony, and Schnittkes Choir Concerto suggested the oratorio as the medium most suitable for the ideas to travel through.

An Oratorio!  At the time it seemed unimaginable.  Who would score it?  Or perform it?  Come to that, who would pay for it?  The ambition remained a silent one for several years, but in matters of creativity time is never wasted.  Like whisky the ideas lay maturing in the barrel and, when eventually writing was begun, went down easily.

The Highland Festival’s Centring On A Woman’s Voice in 2001 placed a dozen new songs, scored by seven different musicians for singer Liz MacLardy, before audiences in Inverness, Dingwall and Ullapool.  It was my privilege to provide the lyrics and so meet the composers.

Of these seven William Gilmour, with his long pedigree and associations in the classical field, seemed the most likely candidate.  At this time the project was still no more than a glint in the librettists eye but Willie liked the idea and took it on, making a more or less immediate start.  In fact he had a year and a half of solid writing ahead of him.

Quite soon another path happily crossed that of the Oratorio.  You’ll see by the way I write that, by now, it had taken on a life of its own.

After a performance of Centring in Ullapool’s Ceilidh Place, the Highland Festivals Arts in the Community Enabler for Ross-shire, Iain Campbell, asked quite casually if we had any other plans.

Hearing about Dunbeath Water he wandered off with a smile playing on his lips.  A few months later the phone rang in my flat.  It was Iain asking how the project was going.  At that time I had to tell him it was going back to sleep, the likelihood of its ever being performed being what it was.

But they had been discussing it in the Festival office, he told me.  Director Alastair McDonald liked the idea and wanted to commission it.  A few days later the three of us, Iain, Willie and myself, sat around the table in my flat and agreed we would aim for the festival in 2003, then just under two years hence.  There were side issues but none that would get in the way.  The Festivals community requirements in particular fitted Willies personal ethos and constitution.  Sadly, health difficulties forced Iain to drop out shortly after; we liased directly with Alastair from that point on.

It would be impossible to overestimate the contribution made by William Gilmour to the successful conclusion of the project.  Not only has he scored the work to produce a composition that meets the spirit and sense of the libretto, he challenges and rewards a 21st Century audience with 21st Century music.

We met many times over the course of writing, discussing the ideas and ambitions inherent in the all-important text.  One or two others found themselves in the communication loop and soon word was going round that something special was happening.  Singers and musicians began to present themselves as willing performers and between them, and the many pupils he teaches, Willie created the Dunbeath Water Choir and Orchestra.  This group, we hope, will be the foundation of a more permanent orchestra to be based in Highland and specialising in the performance of contemporary classical music.

So we went on to rehearsal, in the Gilmour house, in Beaulys Phipps Hall, and at Culloden Academy, Mrs Chris Gilmour making the sandwiches, the librettist making the tea and being generally humbled by the talent and commitment invested by the performers.

Agreeing that an extended version of the text was necessary for full audience understanding, the Festival commissioned the book of Dunbeath Water containing Prelude, Libretto, listings and biographies.  To add still more value to the project, and expression to the idea, we also commissioned Brora-based artist Wendy Sutherland to visit the real Dunbeath Water after considering the text, to produce an image for the book.  In this way the whole project, in its long journey through creation, rehearsal and performance, was re-grounded in the actuality of the landscape.

Then – eventually, miraculously – it happened!  On June 12th, to a packed Crown Church in Inverness, we played the World Premiere as one of the highlights of the 2003 Highland Festival.  Liz MacLardy, as Isabella, Emma Forbes as Young Kenn, Robin Stewart as the adult Kenn and Iain Gordon as his/their father, along with the rest of the performers, took a standing ovation.  Two days later, at a most beautiful and moving event, we repeated the performance in Dornoch Cathedral.  At both venues audience reaction was overwhelmingly positive.

Now, to complete our Highland Festival tour, the Oratorio is set to close the first Light In The North, a new festival celebrating Neil Gunns life and work, in Dunbeath itself.  Centred on Neils birthday, November 8th, Light In The North will feature readings, talks, conversations with such as Prof Maria Vega, Spanish translator of The Silver Darlings, Gunns biographer John Pick, and poet and playwright George Gunn.  There will also be a showing of the only remaining copy of the film The Silver Darlings.

The Dunbeath Water performance will take place on the afternoon of Sunday 9 November 2003, in the local, still living, parish church, in sight and sound of the river itself.

Recently I dedicated a series of poems based on meditations of Mozart to William Gilmour.  Although in heavy disguise, the first is about the making of the Oratorio.  I hope the performers will not mind being described as ‘the small moving parts.  In the context of its idea system we are all small, and it is certainly vital that we move.

The ‘others includes not only the audiences who shared our first performances but our colleagues at the Highland Festival, the projects sponsors, Chevron Texaco, and future audiences as well as the janitors, drivers, ticket sellers and sweepers-up who all played their part:

‘Adagio for a Glass Harmonica in C Major, K356

Word by word and note by note we built it,
Talking always, but each working alone.
Scale was of our own choosing, so we thought.
Nature imposed proportions of Her own.
Lines, chords, both kinds of phrasing, ideas,
We gave them wide chambers, vast airy halls.
In all we did we sought out harmony.
Colour came from light pouring through the walls.
All that we made had to be transparent,
joints had to be tight and invisible.
Finally we placed the small moving parts
In the only positions possible.
When it was built we called in the others.
Together we blew it into the world.

Robert Davidson is the Managing Editor of Northwords.

The images used to illustrate this article are taken from the Dunbeath Heritage Centre.  The Heritage Centre website contains a section devoted to an interpretation of the Dunbeath landscape via Gunn’s Highland River, and juxtaposes excerpts from ‘Highland River’ with images from ‘Sea to Source’.