Theatre review: An Island between Earth and Sky

Published on Sunday 13 June 2010 20:42

AN ISLAND BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY *** SOUTH LEITH PARISH CHURCH HALL, LEITH, EDINBURGH

LIKE all the best community festivals, Leith's annual celebration – in full swing until next weekend – always includes its share of shows about the history of the port itself. This year, though, the Leith Festival drama programme tackles an increasingly wide range of themes; notably in this opening production, which features a new play by local writer Alistair Rutherford about the early days of the Iona Community, in the years just before the Second World War.

Set in a completely conventional style on the platform stage at South Leith Parish Church Hall, the show lacks stagecraft to an almost baffling extent – it really is difficult to believe that any professional or semi-professional group staging a piece of theatre in the year 2010 can have so little idea of how to move a story on from scene to scene without constant blackouts and pauses.

What's striking, though, is how the sheer power and timeliness of the Iona story helps the company to overcome this technical weakness, and opens up space for one or two striking performances, notably from Adam Tomkins as George Macleod, the Community's complex and charismatic leader, and from Lorraine McCann as Dinah Fallon, the project's dedicated housekeeper.

For when Macleod talks about a society riven by vast differences of wealth and by the scourge of unemployment, and of the impulse that made him gather unemployed workers and trainee ministers on Iona to try to rebuild a sense of human community as well as the fabric of the ruined abbey, it's as if he's delivering a vital message to the Scotland of today, and of the next decade.

And so long as the Leith Festival keeps telling stories as moving and important as this one, its place on the Scottish theatre scene can only grow more secure and more significant.