Showing @ The Brunton, Musselburgh until Fri 09 May @ 19:30 (on tour)
This touring production connects us with the world of Victorian seafaring communities, through the eyes of a trio of East Coast fishwives, not the cussing hard women of myth but very real human beings. Tough and tearful, their hardscrabble lives are dependent on the catch and while their men-folk risk everything on the boats, the women on the harbour salt, gut and pack the silver darlings.
Ann Coburn‘s play with music is essentially a three-hander. It’s Eyemouth in the 1880s and Jean (Barbara Marten) is the stern, neurotic matriarch who has lost her family to cholera and would rather scrub floors than live life. Her teenage daughter Molly (Samantha Foley) wants to expand her horizons if that only means joining the itinerant fish girls who follow the fleet from Wick to Yarmouth. Naturally mam says no. And there’s Janet (Sian Mannifield) the good-humoured, saucy neighbour and peacemaker. Then disaster strikes, 20 boats are lost at sea and no family is spared.
Director Fiona MacPherson gives a real sense of the inner life of the characters although there’s not much on the backbreaking (and filthy) labour, unimaginable today; the title refers to the way the women would bandage their hands against cuts and cold. The production is touring former fishing communities and locals supply the chorus; a large choir of fisher women sing a cappella, a poetic score by Karen Wimhurst, that’s haunting but unsentimental. The three excellent actors bring the action to vivid life though in places the accents are little wobbly but that’s a minor sin in this exhilarating and thoughtful production. The women – stoic, tearful, raging – deal with the grief in this story of affirmation and empowerment in a world of hardship and loss. This is a truly heartfelt production that sidesteps the maudlin and the mawkish.