Theatre

Dr Johnson Goes to Scotland

Oran Mor, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

three stars

HE LIKED things to be well defined, did Dr Johnson – his own Dictionary of the English Language is abiding proof of that. However his curiosity about language subsequently extended beyond the origins and precise meanings of words. Could language itself define national identity? He’d given no heed to Wales, Ireland or Scotland when compiling his dictionary, allocating instead a supremacy to his own mother tongue.That belief was briskly upended when Dr Johnson came north to Scotland and there encountered not just the Gaelic but also sign language. Both feature in James Runcie’s merry take on those 1773 travels, the latter given eloquent expression on-stage by Ciaran Alexander Stewart as a pupil of Mr Braidwood’s Edinburgh school for the deaf.

For some three months Johnson and his Scots-born companion James Boswell headed for the distant hills of a land still afflicted by the aftermath of two failed Jacobite uprisings. Runcie’s play, directed at a lively lick by Marilyn Imrie, pinpoints episodes when Johnson’s scathing dismissal of Scotland as a dispiriting waste-land is negated by the natural grandeur of the Western Isles and the natural grit, resilience and hospitality of the people. It’s a gratifying picture of our 18th century antecedents, facing up to poverty and hard times with a flourish of national pride – hinting at a topical characteristic noted, and appreciated, by the audience.

There’s an almost unnerving likeness to Johnson in the be-wigged and frock-coated figure of Lewis Howden, who gives a real sense of the man’s self-confident bombast and pleasure in his own sharp wits and bon mots. Simon Donaldson’s Boswell is a ready defender of his native sod while Gerda Stevenson and Morna Young account for all manner of sonsy womankind as well as the hauntingly lovely Gaelic singing that adds to the pleasures of this piece.

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