MORAG MACINNES evaluates this year’s ambitious community play at St Magnus

THIS LAST offering from the St Magnus Festival fell just outside the official programme, and was the third performance of the piece, with a ‘preview’ just before the festival nominally began, and one ‘official’ performance within it.

There’s a long and much loved tradition of community theatre in Orkney, and some very skilled actors, directors, musicians, dancers, and set designers. The much lamented Alan Plater (his death was announced on Friday) adapted George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe, and created his own offering, Barriers, about the Italian Chapel and the prisoners who built it – making many friends in Orkney in the process. He’ll be missed.

It seems to me, after years of being on both sides of the community play experience, that the choice of script and method of working are crucial. This may seem obvious, but believe me it isn’t. Over the years, we’ve seen Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle here; some Shakespeare – the Dream, and Romeo and Juliet – Walcott’s Odyssey – Orkneyinga, which took the Cathedral and shook it about with stilt walkers and trapeze artists… not to mention the National Theatre of Scotland’s refreshing interventions.

You need space, to allow the vast casts room to breathe and have their individual moments. You need time to integrate music – often, as in this case, original – with movement and speech. You need unholy inventive capacity, to take the audience along on what is often a journey through history, or politics, or filmic scene shifts.

It’s good to have unexpected delights – dance, magic, audience promenades, outdoor forays. You need edginess, a touch of darkness – something for the audience to ponder about once they’re home. It is, after all, and was from the mummers onwards, a message from the community about their world.

But such community dramas require enormous energy, commitment, and – these days – expertise. Once upon a time in the seventies, there were community arts workshops, which trained folk in juggling skills, puppet making, set building and fight choreography.

Their workshops also introduced drama to groups of people who were often excluded from things – disabled folk, troubled folk, exiles. Sometimes there were writing workshops too. ‘Community’ tried to mean ‘everybody.’ Thatcherism (‘there’s no such thing as society’) stamped on that pretty hard.

Nowadays, in the new austerity, something will happen to drama – it always flourishes, in times of trouble. It goes underground, and emerges again. One thing for sure – there’ll be no money for community workshops, or for lavish bread and circuses either. For the moment though, theatre is in limbo, caught between Lloyd Webber reruns of Over a Rainbow and impecunious top heavy arts organisations presiding over collapsing touring companies.

This offering, Dylan Thomas’s The Doctor and the Devils, is a community play in the sense that it involves a huge amount of people. They put their heart and souls into it. It involved fiendish planning, clearly – a small stage had to deal with lots of pub scenes, jigs, smotherings, a trial, several locations. The lighting had to be – and was – atmospheric, a fine back drop of Auld Reekie, scary darks and gory reds. Props, costumes, all attentively done, wigs, tankards, penny whistles, skulls and corpse legs, nothing missed.

Except space. This felt like the excised version, a quick whip through Burke’s descent to degradation. We had no time to sense the macabre, to really be chilled by the inhumanities on show. I blame Dylan Thomas, to some extent. It’s a wordy play by a man who never really got the hang of live theatre – anybody who puts a screaming child on the stage should always stay in radio!

His scene shifts are rapid and demanding, his tone rather hectoring. His characters are sketched rather lazily – even Knox, the macabre, amoral body-buyer.

The intense pace of the production - which requires amateur actors to do, rather often, two of the hardest things in the acting canon – be drunk, and laugh uproariously – is taxing. I did want some stillness, fewer screams, less running up and down platforms. I wanted a different venue – not the Arts Theatre, which encloses and limits a large group. I wanted split levels, and unexpected corners. I wanted to be surprised and scared.

The play was adapted and directed by Vivia Leslie, with music by Alasdair Nicolson, who now takes over from Glenys Hughes as the festival’s Artistic Director. The music was fascinating, nervy, a film score or the seeds of an opera. But balance is crucial. It sometimes intruded. Sometimes it fought against the voices. Sometimes the voices worried about it. I think I’d like to have heard each without the other.

But this production made me think a lot. I respected it. I took exception to some of it, and found some of the interpretation too hammy, too busy, too over-emphasised, too rushed and fervent. But in the time, and the budget, and all the nightmares of evening and weekend work, holidays, rehearsals squeezed in betwixt and between, asking favours, depending on angels behind the scenes – well done, for the work, the colour, the energy.

I thought, in the end, you’re all very good – but be braver when you get to the staging! Question the texts you choose for modern relevance – then you’ll get the chill factor in spades. This was a play about moral expediency. It could have been a very political play – or an intense personal drama. A poor man is killing for gain! Another man is paying him, whilst also instructing the youth of the country in morality! Parallels do spring to mind.

The old community arts adage is a good one; the process is as important as the product. Have the composer, musicians, actors, movement folk all there from the start, adding bits, removing bits, so everybody owns the meaning of what they’re producing. Then you’ll get spectacle – which we certainly saw here – but it will have real depth too.

© Morag MacInnes, 2010

Links

• St Magnus Festival