Skip to main content

Stornoway, Quebec

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Four stars

 

When badass bounty hunter Màiri MacNeill moseys into the half empty hotel of a one-horse town in 1888 Quebec, it looks like the end of the trail for her former partner in crime, Donald Morrison. For the Gaelic speaking Scots settlers who live there, it looks like the history about to be made will put them on the map forever after. 

 

Having left Màiri in the lurch in Texas seven years earlier, Donald is a wanted man several times over. The Pinkerton Detective Agency is on his trail, and it looks like they might save everything, including Jean Baptiste and Uilleamina’s hotel, where the  local bigwig known as the Major still rules the roost. The storm that’s brewing sees everyone holed up in the hotel bar, alas, where a new set of myths are about to be whipped up. 

 

This is the merry dance that ensues in Calum L.MacLeòid’s new play for Glasgow based Gaelic theatre company, Theatre Gu Leòr. Performed in an easy mix of English, Scottish Gaelic and Québécoise, Muireann Kelly’s production is a slow burning affair, played out Becky Minto’s wood-lined saloon bar set, with cracked folk music underscoring the action.

 

Elspeth Turner leaps into the role of Màiri as a wronged woman who takes a walk on the wild side and winds up as much of an outlaw as her quarry. As Donald, Dòl Eoin McKinnon invests his character with similar swagger. There is moving interplay between Sam Smith as Jean Baptiste and MJ Deans as Uilleamina, while Daibhidh Walker’s Major sets a template for corrupt officialdom to come.
 

Confined to the saloon, and with a focus on storytelling, there are moments MacLeòid’s play recalls the poetic flourishes of Irish drama, only broken up by 

choreographed fight scenes.Produced in association with An Lanntair arts centre in Stornoway, MacLeòid and Theatre Gu Leòr are here exploring the frontiers of a generation of migrants in search of new narratives to define themselves.This is how legends are born. 


The Herald, April 10th 2023

 

ends

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
Post a Comment
Read more

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) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds
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