Showing @ King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 11 Oct @ 19.30
Torture or touchstone: many a Scottish high schooler knows this text about family turmoil amid the Aberdeenshire machar. For others it’s the quintessential (and once considered outrageously frank) Scottish novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Full of heart-stopping poetry and grit, the story, faithfully adapted for the stage by Alastair Cording, tells of Chris Guthrie, a fearless farmer’s daughter growing up at the start of the 20th century, who forsakes randy ploughboys for book learning. She is an early feminist icon of Scottish literature. Someone asks her, ‘Have you no shame?’ and she says joyfully, ‘No, none!’ Strong-willed Chris, desperate to be her own woman, has a furious passion for life but is utterly out of step with the times. And the times are a-changing.
Mechanisation is making wringing a living from the land with bare hands a thing of the past. She does battle on all sides – her dour, glowering father and his incestuous attentions; her mother and twin brothers’ shocking deaths; her thwarted university education; and her young husband’s war trauma – and still comes out fighting.
This is a popular play, often revived, and the heroine is a fantastically meaty role played here with ferocious intensity by Rebecca Elise. The part of her husband Ewan is sensitively done by Craig Anthony-Ralston and Alan McHugh captures the vicious, troubled father in all his lumbering cruelty.
Transferring the incident-prone story to the stage is a challenge and when it works well, as here, it’s easy to see why audiences love it. Gibbon’s book, with its great sweep of a story, has huge potential for theatre, although sometimes an awful lot of unrelieved exposition has to be done by the cast. The celebrated Terence Davies is currently making the movie.
Julie Ellen’s production brings a real reek of the byre and foregrounds Chris’ ambivalence about her farming roots, all the time neatly sidestepping kailyard corniness. The economic set design may seem a tad meagre but the evening is saved by lively storytelling that retains much of the earthy poetry of the book with the added spice of original, live music.