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The Yellow on the Broom

Dundee Rep
Four stars

 Like the seasons, Anne Downie’s adaptation of Betsy Whyte’s autobiographical novel about a young female traveller growing up in and around Scotland in the decades leading up to World War Two comes around as part of a slow but steady cycle of quietly poetic contributions to Scotland’s dramatic canon. First seen in 1989, Downie’s play, rendered here in a vivid production for Dundee Rep’s Ensemble company by Andrew Panton, is revealed as something of an evergreen.

The story revolves around Whyte’s alter ego, Bessie Townsley, the spirited and smart-as-a-whip daughter of a family of permanent transients, whose life on the road is a hand-to-mouth existence forced to square up to everyday prejudice and suspicion. This comes from police, land-owners and Bessie’s jealous school-mates alike as Bessie discovers her powers of self-expression.

Unlike previous productions, here the role of Bessie is split, with Ann Louise Ross’s older incarnation acting as narrator, watching her memories made flesh from the side-lines, or else shadowing her younger self, played with exuberance and vim by Chiara Sparkes. This device refreshes Downie’s play with another layer, which gets back to the roots of oral story-telling.

Accompanied by a live score of traditional music and new compositions by John Kielty and played and sung by a nine-strong cast on Kenneth Macleod’s panoramic set, Panton’s revival of Downie’s play strikes a timely chord, arriving as it does just as ethnic minorities are being demonised in ways which a few years ago would have been unthinkable. As public spaces are being increasingly co-opted by corporate interests, loss of the right to roam, not just for travellers, is presaged here too. The result of this is a deceptively gentle portrait of a hidden history and a way of life all but domesticated out of existence, but which lives on here in a moving elegy that’s still in bloom.

The Herald, September 3rd 2018

ends


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