Findhorn Bay Festival
The Buke of the Howlat
Brodie Castle, Moray
Keith Bruce
four stars
CROSSING the Mossat Burn to my rendezvous point to travel to the grounds of Brodie Castle for the Findhorn Festival’s flagship theatre piece this week, I spent a moment watching a very large heron on home patch. Come the show itself, the heron was played by the oldest member of the cast, an 82-year-old dead ringer for Ivor Cutler. The cockerel was a young strutting Jagger of a rooster, and the swan was clearly channelling Bjork in that much-remarked frock.
The community performers in Morna Young’s adaptation of Robert Holland’s early Scottish text were an essential part of Ben Harrison’s production, which was a brave response to a challenging brief from festival director and producer Kresanna Aigner. The script gives the four professional actors - Annie Grace, Angela Hardie, Andy Clark and Garry Collins - a tough brief as both the players in the story (with Hardie the highly ambiguous owl of the title) and the narrators as blackbird, thrush, nightingale and lark respectively. There are a lot of fowl for the audience to keep track of as they promenade through the grounds of Brodie Castle.
That Young keeps faith with much of the content and political intent of Holland’s text, and supplies a deal of its historical context as well, via the four feathered friends, is undeniable, but it does not make for a pacey show. With Quee MacArthur’s music score often quite downbeat, if evocative, and the non-professional cast, accomplished tumblers, jugglers and choristers among them, making their entrances from far off in the wooded glade, the story does not exactly leap along to combat its complexity.
So the fact that The Buke of the Howlat does not lose its audience can be counted an achievement of which the performers, amateur and especially professional, can be proud. It is still a grand adventure with enough of a story to sweep its viewers and listeners along, even if they are glad they are not asked too many hard questions at the end.
Festival accommodation courtesy of The Touring Network (Highlands & Highlands).
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