SUNSET SONG. To 2 November.

Tour

SUNSET SONG
by Lewis Grassic Gibbon adapted by Alastair Cording

Prime Productions tour to 2 November 2002
Runs 2hr 30min One interval
Review Timothy Ramsden 13 October at Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh (to 19 October)

Storytelling physical theatre that does some justice to its source novel. The question is: how much?There's more than one British theatre called the Everyman. But, though Theatre may proclaim its universal human relevance, all plays are not for everybody, every time. Take Alastair Cording's efficient adaptation, given a well-enough acted Prime production, of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's story of a North East Scotland farming community before the First World War, and that War's impact on its way of life.

Working through struggles enough to show that - had they been around - social services, marriage guidance, not to mention a professional fire service, would have been fully occupied, it ends with a clarion call to the future.

And it's certainly hit resonances with Scottish audiences; this revival follows apparently sold-out previous productions. But will the novel's partisans find it a glowing reincarnation or a thinned-out traduction?How much does it mean to modern Scots, and young Scots especially? And, what is its place in modern theatre production?

Well, there's a first-time for everything, and anyone coming to its narrative method - actors describing events as well as speaking dialogue and creating scenes largely through their own physicality, rather than changing sets - for the first time could find the approach confusing or invigorating (it ought not to be much of the first, as the adaptation and production are clearly handled).

Yet within the framework of the best of this theatre-style there's something slightly perfunctory about some scenes: the sudden adoption of character and pose, a sometimes truncated development of some scenes, leading to a sense of structural void. Though there are ingenious moments - a blanket covering a woman giving birth sliding into the clothes wrapping the newborn - and some comic ones: swivelled headgear producing an immediate village idiot.

As the central character, Cora Bissett variously suffers and exults efficiently, but even with her - the most developed character - there is, at times, insufficient sense of how continuing experience erupts in the dramatic, dramatised moments.

Take her husband's return after military training. A row quickly erupts, and while Douglas Russell indicates the way army life has roughened him up, there's no room for his wife's understanding of, or blindness towards, this to develop.

And when news arrives he's been shot for cowardice at the front, the event goes for little - as does the development of her relationship with the morally strong, yet vilified local pacifist, or his surrender to -presumably - public pressure to enlist and die a brave war death.

Simliarly, early scenes leave uncertain the mix of natural brutality and religious fervour in her father's cruelty to his wife and children. If to understand all is to forgive all - and a necessary thing for a satisfying theatre experience - the limited room to grasp Gibbon's implications through the foreshortened action leaves us making uncertain, unsatisfying judgements.

This isn't to deny interest in a number of scenes, nor the power of Gibbon's language. Just as some operas shine in concert performances, there came a time when I wondered if there might not be a value in a 'concert' performance (not a reading) of the script.

It's a show, too, not at its best in the formal sophistication of the Lyceum, where the stage looks bare (the main set item - occupying a chunk of the rear stage - is a stepped hill, at first covered in harvest-crop, then in mown grass) and the acting seems remote. Yet this tour is visiting such formal spaces; it's a shame that - especially in the region where the action's set, there aren't large, equipped local halls to take it. Then it could surely sing out more.

Yet nothing can hide the powerful conclusion. The grass hill is covered with poppies, reminding of the war-dead, as the new clergyman delivers a sermon to dedicate the war memorial, speaking out the need for a new society to justify the sufferings of the conflict, both military and, by implication, within the group of characters whose lives, however tenuously at times, have passed before us.

Tour:
1-19 October Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh 0131 248 4848
21-23 October Pitlochry Festival Theatre 01796 484626
24-26 October MacRobert Theatre, Stirling 01786 466666
29 October-2 November Eden Court Theatre Inverness 01463 234234

Chris Guthrie: Cora Bissett
Ewan Tavendale: Douglas Russell
John Guthrie: Paul Morrow
Jean Guthrie: Estrid Barton
Will Guthrie:James Mackenzie
Chae Strachan: Alan McHugh
Long Rob Duncan: Matthew Zajac
The Speak: Sandy Grierson, Alexis Graham

Director: Benjamin Twist
Designer: Neil Warmington
Lighting: George Tarbuck
Movement: Jane Howie
musical Director: Dougal Lee

2002-10-13 19:42:38