FOR THE ISLANDS I SING. To 16 August.
Edinburgh - Fringe
FOR THE ISLANDS I SING
by George Mackay Brown
Splinters Productions at the Netherbow Theatre To 16 August 2003
Mon-Sat 7pm
Rund 1hr 50min One (5 min) interval
TICKETS: 0131 556 9579
Review: Timothy Ramsden 5 August
Lyrical stories, full of humanity, emotion and humour, beautifully performed.Writing as strong as this - lyrical, lithe, supple - you probably have to be more than just a supremely good writer. It's something likely to come with a sense of place. The sense of a place.
For if there's any basis in life for the late George Mackay Brown's Orkney stories, he does for the islands what Thomas Hardy did fictionally for Wessex, and Laurie Lee or John Moore in their different ways for Tewkesbury. Humanity's revealed in what's apparently a remote, particular society. Specifics illuminate the general.
When, in a beautifully tragic tale, he tells of a pregnant young woman leaving the parents who reject her to go out in the snow - the first white flakes of winter - the language isn't 'fine writing' but draws aptly on experience of an assertive climate, and a literary tradition going back into the anonymity of kennings, runes and riddles.
The fate of this tragic character zooms in on all three time zones. Her body falls in earth patterns as old as the world's first springs, present-tense immediacy shines in her golden hair spread across the ground, with a flight into the future as World War II troops stationed in the Orkneys come across her preserved remains.
There's an increasing clarity that much of the suffering is caused through people's inability to cope with human tragedy. From the opening story of a philanderer made to stand in sackcloth before the assembled church community, rejection and punishment are born through austere, fearful minds chilled by severity of climate.
So, too, with the grimly comic story, with its iron payoff line, of the way an old curmudgeon repays a kindness through his will - but not to the person most would think deserves it.
The story's too good to spoil. This cast tells, and shows, the material - moving and, yes, occasionally comic - with beautiful precision in physicality and voice. They've already toured parts of Scotland. Still a few chances to catch their magical material at the Netherbow. After that - well, if they don't tire of telling these magnificent tales, surely there'll continue to be those willing and eager to hear them.
Performers:
Anna Hepburn, Finlay McLean, John Shedden
Designer: Marjorie Fearn
Literary Director: Donald Smith
2003-08-05 22:19:54