A daring new piece of theatre aims to breathe new life into old language... but, finds Neil Cooper, some things remain impossible to translate.

When Cathy Ann MacPhee takes the stage on Thursday in TAG's production of There's No V in Gaelic, it will be the first time she's acted on a stage in Scotland's central belt for 18 years. The internationally renowned Gaelic singer's last such appearance followed stints with the Gaelic company Tosg and the late John McGrath's original 7:84, and was with the late Jimmy Logan in a production of Whisky Galore at Glasgow's Mitchell Theatre.

And for Gaelic writer Seonag Monk, also a veteran of Tosg, There's No V in Gaelic will be her first stage play to appear for more than a decade. Given the pedigrees of MacPhee and Monk, it seems a curious state of affairs - but this is Gaelic theatre, which, at least in terms of a written archive, appears to be undocumented cultural heritage. Given that the tradition itself is rooted in an oral culture, this perhaps shouldn't comes as too much of a surprise, but the lack of records of previous work is a problem for a younger generation of Gaelic speakers. This is particularly the case in Glasgow, which has the fastest rising population of native speakers in the country.

There's No V in Gaelic, however, aims to open things out in a thoroughly modern manner. "This is a bit of a first for Gaelic theatre," says Monk, "because, although we're quite expressive in our language, we're also quite reserved. I think we're becoming a tad more confident, and a bit more free. The language here will be more earthy."

What this means is a compendium performed by MacPhee and fellow veterans Kathleen MacInnes and Margaret Bennett alongside a group of young Gaelic-speaking performers, exploring what it means to be a woman today. The performance has been uncomfortably marketed as a Gaelic version of The Vagina Monologues, and the title itself gives the game away in terms of the linguistic leap the play must make to be considered racy. Yet it is an interesting return to the stage for MacPhee, who is now based in Canada.

It is generally agreed that contemporary Gaelic theatre began with the Fir Chlis (Northern Lights) company and a flowering of writing in the 1970s - but only when Tosg was formed in the 1980s was any kind of funding pumped in. While Tosg has survived, the creating of any kind of theatrical infrastructure has been at best sporadic, with little or no training or opportunities to showcase new Gaelic work.

"I was there from the start to the finish," MacPhee says of her early days in Fir Chlis, "and it was like a family. Being able to take theatre to your own folk was unbelievable - but, being based on Harris, the cost of getting from A to B proved increasingly prohibitive. So it was never going to last, but it was three and a half remarkable years."

According to the playwright Iain Finlay Macleod, whose Gaelic work has toured the Highlands and central belt in productions by Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, this could be put down to television. "Some people say that the growth of Gaelic television was paradoxically detrimental to theatre," he explains, "as young people coming into the industry went straight into TV without spending time in the theatre first."

The new attempt to give Gaelic theatre a profile was initiated by Rona MacDonald, Gaelic arts officer for An Lochran (Lantern), the Glasgow-based organisation behind There's No V In Gaelic, along with TAG's Guy Hollands. "Glasgow has a lot of opt-in Gaelic speakers," says MacDonald, "with people coming here for education or employment. Up until now, a lot of Gaelic drama has been historical, but people have other concerns than their own history. Just look at the Polish and Asian communities here."

"There was a clear dearth of Gaelic drama," says Hollands, who first worked with Monk at Tosg a decade ago, "but it's an important area of the arts that needs to be tapped into.

"The bulk of the play will be in Gaelic, which in itself is important. If we're prepared to accept something if it's done in Russian, there's no reason why it can't be the same with Gaelic."

This raises the question of a Gaelic theatre as opposed to a specifically Gaelic-language one - something which, Macleod observes, "a number of people have in the past tried to create."

He adds: "Taking the structure of a traditional ceilidh has in fact been detrimental to Gaelic- language theatre. Instead of proper plays, we are too often presented with extended sketch shows, with story-telling rather than dramatic intervention between characters."

There's No V in Gaelic aims to change that, but there are still stumbling-blocks. "It's funny," Monk observes, "no matter how much you would want to translate something that's really rude in English, when you say it in Gaelic it's not. When you try to say a bad word in Gaelic it doesn't come across as being a bad word. There's not anything really you can be coarse with. But you can try - and that's really good fun."

There's No V In Gaelic is at the Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, from Thursday to Saturday.