Anne
Downie had never heard of The Yellow on the Broom when she was approached with
a view to adapting the first part of Betsy Whyte’s memoirs of growing up in a Scottish
Traveller community in the 1920s and 1930s for the stage. The idea had come
from playwright Tom McGrath, who was then Associate Literary Director for
Scotland, who suggesting to John Carnegie, the then head of Winged Horse theatre
company that Whyte’s captivating story, which she first started writing in the
1970s, might make a good play.
“It
toured everywhere,” says Downie on the eve of a revival of the play at Dundee
Rep almost thirty years after it first appeared. “It opened in Skye, and went
all over Scotland. It was on at the Tron in Glasgow, and a woman came up to me
from what I think was then Strathclyde Region, and she wondered if there might
be any possibility of it going on in the camps, because while the women from
the camps would come and see it, the men wouldn’t go into theatres. It never
happened, which is a pity, but they did a production in Arbroath, and Betsy’s
husband and family came.”
Downie
met Whyte with a view to collaborating closely on the project. Whyte, alas,
died before it could come to fruition.
“I
met her once,” says Downie, “but she was found dead in her caravan at a folk
festival, so we didn’t really get a chance to collaborate at all. The one thing
she did do was give the play its opening. I kept wondering how I was going to
begin the play, because it’s all a series of her memories, and I said to her at
that meeting, how do you feel now living in a house, because her husband had a
bad back, and they had to live in a house in Montrose. She said, there’s many a
night I count the tiles from the cooker to the window, and I’m out there in the
open air. As soon as she said that I had my beginning.”
Downie
had her eyes opened to such cultural differences from the start.
“I
thought Betsy’s book was an insight into a world that I knew nothing about, and
that most people knew nothing about,” she says. “That was the interesting bit
for me. The fact that they had certain beliefs about doctors that went right
back to body-snatching days, and ideas about cleanliness, that dirt comes out
the ground not dirty, these were totally different beliefs to anything most
people know about. I think people get confused now because of things like My
Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, but there’s the fact that Travelling people have been in
Scotland for hundreds of years. There was an article I read recently that said
there were references to Travellers dating back to 1102.”
Downie
discovered all this while she and Carnegie delved through the archives of the
School
of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
“There
was a lot of Betsy’s stories and songs there,” says Downie, “and we got a lot
of information from that, because I wanted to be true to her and not impose my
own ideas on it. I
wanted to find out where Travellers came from, and one of the things I found
out from the School of Scottish Studies was that a lot of people joined the
Travelling community after the Jacobite Rebellion, so there seems to have been
a travelling community for hundreds of years, but I think now, you don’t have
the freedom to roam, so there’s a way of life that’s being lost.”
Downie
also integrated ideas from Whyte’s sequel to The Yellow on the Broom, Red
Rowans and Wild Honey into her adaptation, which she has revisited for Dundee
Rep’s production, shortening it slightly, as well as adding new material.
“I
was re-reading Red Rowans and Wild Honey recently,” says Downie, “and I took
this idea from the book that not only is a way of life is being lost, but the
fact that the countryside isn’t what it was. In those days there was no
pollution, and you could drink from any mountain stream, but now that land’s
polluted. That’s so true, so in a way The Yellow on the Broom isn’t just an
elegy for the travelling community, but for the countryside as well.”
The
Yellow on the Broom, Dundee Rep, August 28-September 22. Macrobert Arts Centre,
Stirling, September 26-29.
www.macrobertartscentre.org
The Herald, August 28th 2018
ends
Comments