Theatre reviews: Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed | Meme Girls

Ellie Zeegen and Richard Baron’s play recounting the struggles and successes of writer Nan Shepherd is both deeply absorbing and profoundly touching, writes Joyce McMillan

Nan Shepherd – Naked and Unashamed, Pitlochry Festival Theatre ★★★★

Meme Girls, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★

Since she first appeared on a Scottish £5 banknote in 2016, interest in the 20th-century Scottish writer Nan Shepherd has soared. Her restoration to national fame, almost 90 years after the success of her first novel The Quarry Wood, turned out to be timely, as readers began to rediscover both her passionate connection with a natural world now increasingly under threat, and the story of her life as a young woman in a male-dominated literary world.

Susan Coyle and Adam Buksh in Nan Shepherd Naked and Unashamed – Photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

It was therefore a fine moment, last year, for Firebrand Theatre and Pitlochry Festival Theatre to launch their studio show Nan Shepherd – Naked And Unashamed.

Co-written by Firebrand founders Ellie Zeegen and Richard Baron, the play features just two actors, and offers an 80-minute journey through Nan Shepherd’s life in flashback form. When it appeared at Pitlochry in 2024, it attracted such a strong positive response that it has now been revived, with a new cast, for another short studio run.

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So this year, actors Susan Coyle and Adam Buksh lead us through Nan’s story, settling briefly in 1981, the year of her death, before leading us through some key turning points in her life, including her early success as part of a radical literary generation that also included Neil Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

In a sense, the sheer popularity and emotional power of Baron and Zeegen’s play is difficult to analyse; the play sometimes seems almost more like a lecture than a piece of drama, as – in fairly traditional style – it packs in a tremendous amount of information about this remarkable woman, and the age of war and cultural radicalism through which she lived.

READ MORE: Book review: Into The Mountain: A Life Of Nan Shepherd, by Charlotte Peacock

Yet there’s something about the play’s insistent loving care for a neglected part of Scotland’s cultural history, and about the open, shining character of Nan herself, that makes this tale of her struggles and successes both deeply absorbing and profoundly touching, not least in its tender use of a now old-fashioned form of middle-class Scots.

And in this new staging, both Coyle as Nan, and Buksh as all the men who cross her path, deliver the story with impressive skill and passion; with Coyle’s Nan truly touching the heart, as a woman of sparkling wit and joy whose sense of humour endured to the last, and who now – in a final irony – finds herself immortalised on our banknotes in a “Nordic princess” pose she adopted for a laugh, using a discarded strip of film, during what she intended as a much more serious photo-shoot.

Meme Girls

Andy McGregor’s latest Play, Pie And Pint mini-musical also involves a generation of young Scottish women struggling for creative expression; but in Meme Girls, the time is now, and the play features two teenage heroines growing up in the Clyde coast town of Largs.

Jade is a doctor’s daughter with a real gift for songwriting, while bestie Clare has had a much tougher life; and together, they begin to navigate the world of online media, performing Jade’s songs, and trying to build up a following on YouTube.

Their work fails to go viral, though; and after a wild night at a party leads to Clare achieving an instant online fame that has nothing to do with music, their creative and personal relationship begins to fall apart.

This whole dramatic tale is told in just an hour, through sharp dialogue and some formidable songs, performed with terrific flair by performers Julie Murray as Jade and Yana Harris as Clare; and if the Meme Girls’ deep disconnection from the natural world, and assumption that life must be lived primarily through the internet, contrasts disturbingly with the story of Nan Shepherd, it’s still full of a huge and poignant human energy and wit, cheered to the echo by audiences at Oran Mor last week.​​​​​

READ MORE: Theatre reviews: The Mountaintop | Lear