Skip to main content

Scotties

Tron Theatre, Glasgow

Four stars

 When ten young Irish lads from Achill were burnt to death in Kirkintilloch in 1937 in the bothy they were staying in while working as potato pickers, while the boys were honoured in their homeland, in Scotland the tragedy is barely known. Muireann Kelly and Frances Poet’s new play for Theatre Gu Leor unearths the story in a way that puts flesh and blood on its bare bones for a modern telling that resonates for a younger generation.

This is done through the figure of Michael, a latter-day Glasgow teenager the same age as the Achill boys and the offspring of Gaelic-speaking parents. Through a school history project, Michael dreams his way into a timeslip where he walks among the migrant workers, but is only seen by Molly, a young Irish woman who is closer to him than he knows. Through bearing witness in this way, Michael becomes alive to his own heritage, laying some old ghosts to rest along the way.

Kelly’s production is a brooding hybrid of theatrical forms played out on Charlotte Lane’s multi-dimensional and at times spectral-looking set. Performed in Irish and Scots Gaelic as well as English by Kelly’s cast of eight, it mixes text with song, dance and Laoise Kelly’s live bagpipe score played by Alana MacInnes, and which moves between ceilidh and lament as it illustrates latter-day prejudices against migrant workers.  

As Michael, Ryan Hunter is a dynamic presence, whose teenage truculence is enlightened by the presence of Molly, brought movingly to life by Faoileann Cunningham.

At the play’s heart is something that is part excavation of hidden history, part elegy to long-harboured secrets. For Michael, especially, the pilgrimage he ends up embarking on is also a rites of passage that causes him to find himself in a way he never imagined, but which was deep within him all along. 

The Herald, September 17th 2018
Ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more