Theatre reviews: Shades of Tay | Scenes for Survival

Alan Cumming is quite brilliant as a gay dad rejected by his partner in Out of the Woods

It’s not the River Tay that runs past Pitlochry Festival Theatre, where it sits on its wooded hillside west of the town. Yet the Tay’s catchment area spans most of Perthshire; and the Tummel, which does ripple its way through Pitlochry, rushes down to join the Tay just five miles to the south.

It’s the power and length of the Tay – from Ben Lui in the west to Dundee and beyond in the east – that partly attracted Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s artistic director, Elizabeth Newman, to launch a cross-art-form programme called Shades of Tay, which is set to commission literature, music and visual art as well as theatre from a huge range of artists over the next three years; and now that lockdown has intervened, work from the Shades of Tay project is being released online, with a new piece or pieces appearing every weekend until 21 November, and artists including Peter Arnott, Jo Clifford and Timberlake Wertenbaker lined up to contribute.

The centrepiece of the first group of three films is Douglas Maxwell’s superb 28 minute short story Beautiful Boy (*****), about a man clearing his mother’s old house in a Tayside valley, drinking himself into a solitary and blighted middle age, and pining for the love of his schooldays, who now lives with her wealthy ex-footballer husband in a big house on the other side of the river. The story of how this man’s life finally fades towards nothingness is intimately bound up with the surging movement of the river, sweeping forward into the future, tearing loose flotsam from its banks; and Pitlochry company member Richard Standing gives this powerful and haunted piece of writing a superb reading, with whole layers of meaning added by Russell Beard’s deep and beautiful images of the river in full flow, edited by Nick Trueman, and all brought together by director Elizabeth Newman.

Along with Beautiful Boy, Pitlochry has also launched a very short, gorgeous fragment by Linda McLean, called After Miss Georgina Ballantine (***) which is about the art of fish-guddling on the banks of the river. And finally, there’s This Is Not Schiehallion (****), a more fully dramatised piece by Ellie Stewart that lurches into sudden poignancy and joy, as a brother and sister separated by lockdown – beautifully played by Blythe Jandoo and Richard Colvin – do enough steps in their respective flats to take them to the top of Schiehallion, in memory of a lost loved one; although it’s the little burst of KT Tunstall’s Suddenly I See, at the end, as we shoot along the silvery waters of the Tay in a virtual speedboat, that truly raises the emotional stakes.

Meanwhile, while other online work multiplies around it, the National Theatre of Scotland keeps powering on with its outstanding Scenes For Survival series – co-produced with BBC Culture In Quarantine, Hopscotch Films, and the whole range of Scottish theatre companies – which will publish its 42nd film this weekend. The most recent group of 12 films features some major stars of Scottish stage and screen; and its has – apart from some joyful theatrical jokery in the Birds of Paradise company’s 123 Eyes On Me (****) – three huge lockdown themes. One is lockdown itself, exquisitely explored in Jemima Levick’s film The Longest Summer (****), which recalls this strange summer through the eyes of a child, and through an exquisite song by Noisemaker (Scott Gilmour and Claire McKenzie) powerfully sung by Outlander star Richard Rankin, in a performance that is already in huge demand as a music download.

The second theme has to do with family tensions and bereavements, many of them intensified by social isolation. In First Things (****) Elaine C Smith, directed by Maggie Kinloch in a short play by Val McDermid, plays a super-jolly radio host who dispenses comfort and joy to the nation during lockdown, but almost cracks when one listener asks how she is doing herself. This film is dedicated to the tens of thousands who have died of Covid-19, and to their loved ones who never had a chance to say goodbye; and although it’s simple, it’s so beautifully put together that it fairly breaks the heart.

There’s also bereavement in Stewart Ennis’s Soup Song (***), which features a gorgeous solo performance by Ann Louise Ross; and in Janey Godley’s Alone 2 (****) which together with the first instalment of the same story, is enjoying a viral success on the BBC website. In this two-parter, Godley plays a woman whose bullying husband has succumbed to Covid, leaving her free to restore her relationship with her gay son, perfectly played in this episode by Jack Lowden.

There’s regret for the fleeting innocence of childhood in Janice Galloway’s How We Roll (****), in which Isabella Jarrett plays a middle-aged mother remembering the moment when her daughter lost her childish joy in games of make-believe. And there is the mother of all family crises in Out Of The Woods (****), a three-parter for actor and wearable mobile device, written by mighty panto king Johnny McKnight and directed by Andrew Panton of Dundee Rep, in which Alan Cumming is quite brilliant as a gay dad rejected by his partner, conspiring with his equally deranged mother to prowl through the woods to the ex-partner’s cabin, kidnap their little daughter, and wield a large hunting-knife on the ex and his new boyfriend.

Then finally, there are what might be called the apocalypse tapes, the ones in which lockdown figures only as a premonition of a much more final breakdown of society. In Happy Ark Day (****) by Andy Edwards, mother-and-daughter team Liz and Jasmine Ewing star as a 21st century suburban Mrs Noah and her daughter, caught in a never-ending rainstorm that will soon flood their world, and debating whether to wait for the boat the absentee man of the house says he is building, or to get out and try to save their own lives. And in his own solo piece Naeb’dy (*****), Greg McHugh is simply superb as a working-class Edinburgh lad who, after the fourth or fifth wave of Covid 19, finds himself apparently the only human left alive. There’s a terrible sadness, and a well-founded apprehension about the future, in these films, that somehow seems also to lie behind many of the other lockdown tapes; but a joy, too, in the artistry with which this strange moment in history is captured, in a Scenes For Survival series that is now a remarkable, and stunningly vivid, body of work. ■

Shades of Tay and Scenes For Survival are available to watch free of charge, at www.pitlochryfestivaltheatre.com/whats-on-digital/shades-of-tay and www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/events/scenes-for-survival

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this story on our website. While I have your attention, I also have an important request to make of you.

The dramatic events of 2020 are having a major impact on many of our advertisers - and consequently the revenue we receive. We are now more reliant than ever on you taking out a digital subscription to support our journalism.

To subscribe to scotsman.com and enjoy unlimited access to Scottish news and information online and on our app, visit https://www.scotsman.com/subscriptions

Joy Yates

Editorial Director