Theatre reviews: Scotties and Twelfth Night

One has to admire the technical ambition of Scotties, the latest play by Scottish Gaelic company Theatre Gu Leor, with the support of the National Theatre of Scotland and Ireland’s national drama company the Abbey Theatre. The piece is performed in four languages; namely Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Scots (courtesy of Liz Lochhead) and English. In a number of performances, the wonderfully integrated interpreter Catherine King also provides British Sign Language. 

   Co-written by its director Muireann Kelly and Frances Poet, the play finds Michael, the son of a Scottish Gaelic-speaking mother, engaged in a school history project. He is learning about the titular “Scotties”, Irish farm labourers (in this case from the island of Achill, County Mayo; where this tour of the play ends) who make their living in an often hostile Scotland in the 1930s. As he does so, he finds that he is taken, as if in a dream, into the heart of a catastrophe by one of the Irish workers, a young woman called Molly.

   Kelly and Poet have fashioned a script that moves dexterously between its four languages. No surtitles are used for audience members who don’t speak the Celtic languages. Rather, what has been said in a non-English language is cleverly revealed in English conversation.

   If this technical, linguistic aspect of the play impresses, the dramatic structure of the piece is less effective. The shifting back-and-forth in time often seems like an awkward collision between a soap opera and an historical drama; a weakness which is compounded by a certain predictability and lack of subtlety in the narrative.

   Nevertheless, this is an emotive and reverberating story that demands to be told. Here it is conveyed, on the black earth of designer Charlotte Lane’s ethereal tattie field set, by way of some nice acting and fine, live music and song.  

Tour details: theatreguleor.com

Twelfth Night

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until October 6, FIVE STARS

“If music be the food of love, play on” says the blue-blooded Orsino, famously, in Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night. And so they do in this extraordinary production for Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum and the Bristol Old Vic, which elevates the musical strand in the Bard’s play to fabulous new heights.

   Director Wils Wilson has relocated the drama to a large house in the 1960s, where a group of young friends, who are in the midst of a drug-induced, hallucinogenic haze, hit on the idea of performing Twelfth Night. All the better for composer Meilyr Jones to let rip with a brilliantly performed live musical score, which ranges from rock ‘n’ roll to decidedly Asian influences.

   Wilson’s psychedelic space cadets create an improbably superb rendering of Shakespeare’s tale of mistaken gender identity, bacchanalian excess and cruel injustice. Indeed, they stretch the theme of fluid identity in fascinating new directions.

   For instance, the separated twins Viola (who masquerades as the male servant Cesario) and Sebastian are not only both played by women, but also by one black actor (Jade Ogugua) and one white (Joanne Thomson). While the aristocratic Olivia (Lisa Dwyer Hogg) falls in love with Cesario, Lady Tobi (Dawn Sievewright’s fabulously explosive, feminised Sir Toby Belch) and her fellow reprobates overcook the humiliation of the pompous steward Malvolio (a spectacularly hilarious, yet moving, performance by Christopher Green).

   The production boasts a universally marvellous cast, tremendously exaggerated design (by Ana Ines Jabares-Pita) and some lovely set pieces. Green’s speech in the famous letter scene (in which Malvolio is conned into believing his boss, Olivia, is in love with him) is a thing of extravagant, comic beauty. Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s wonderfully daft love song, performed with side-splitting earnestness by Guy Hughes at the beginning of the second half, is an absolute joy.

   All this and the unforgettable, outrageously amusing appearance of Aly Macrae as a hippy priest. What’s not to love? Play on, indeed!