It can afford to fund
a space programme. But
it is still worthy of our aid
Young Scotland
Katie Cunningham
and
Chloe Thomson
The Arab spring
is with us. But is
winter far behind?
John Cameron
It’s a gas
The football manager who
had ‘no comment’ to make
– even about the weather
Joyce Gunn Cairns
A portrait of A L Kennedy
Rear Window
12 May 2000
I get a letter from a lady who writes about having ‘minister trouble’ in her small town. Ministers, I write back, are no more saintly or sane than doctors, lawyers or plumbers; indeed since their task of mending broken hearts is more elusive than that of mending broken cisterns they are probably less sane than plumbers.
I then give examples of weird ministers I have known, such as the one who was known locally as Hitler. As provost, he bestrode Fraserburgh like a Colussus, swaggering mercilessly down the street, his corpulent top half swaying like a fishing boat in a gale, his bottom half strutting like a Nazi storm-trooper.
Well, they’ll all be in the Assembly Hall in a week: the Hitlers, the Hampdens, the Bravehearts, the cheeky chappies, the demure or dominating females, the evangelical cyborgs, the intellectual domes, the haggard overworked saints who keep the whole thing going and ask for no reward other than an occasional intervention to pay a bill.
Will they look like hens unceremoniously removed from their perches? Will the traditional psalm still majestically growl from a thousand throats?
If the new moderator Andy McLellan, Bishop of Jenners and the George Hotel, does any one thing as good as moderator Cairns did in speaking out against anti-gay prejudice, then he’ll get my vote as the first Archbishop of all Stockbridge.
Ian Mackenzie
From SR summer 2000
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SR is publishing a selection of portraits by Joyce Gunn Cairns
Today: Edith MacArthur
A story about
power, about conflict,
about peace
Angus Skinner at the theatre
Seek Dunsinane and you will find it; it is a real place and this is a real play, yet it is global and timeless. This is not history.
It is a story told compellingly by a troupe of actors on a cleverly designed set with fabulous music and song as profound back-notes to a drama that ends breathlessly present. This is not a re-writing of its prequel – the Scottish Play – though it is in part; nor is it a sequel or follow-through, though it is in part. It is a story about power, about conflict and about peace. It is about nations and about men and women and about girls and boys. It is, in short, epic.
The play poses, very directly at points, the question as to whether peace or conflict is a natural state. Pax Romana never extended to Scotland and at the time in which this play is set the origins of Pax Americana were not even glints in the eyes of those Scots the product of whose glints would play crucial parts in forming America. Set in its time this play is about Pax England across the British Isles. Brutal indeed but its story is about much more than that.
Does this play have contemporary relevance? I went with American and British friends. At first question my American friend said he spent most of the play thinking Iraq, Afghanistan, war lords, power, conflict. He desires peace and in his loving way seeks it.
I had spent much of the first half trying to remember what I thought I knew about the history. Waste of time – listen to the music, hear the song.
Sound, said Barenboim, is the first sense in the womb and therefore that is the sense by which we trust: we trust on the basis of someone’s voice much more than from their face, picture or even action. That is well played in the plot, script, action, characterisation and sheer drama of this play. Siobhan Redmond and her women are awesome. As is the hen-girl. The men and boys don’t do half badly either; without the boys’ well-played comedy and courage I doubt I could have stood the intensity of this play. In the end there was, for me at least, a sense of the male rising to his misery.
Strong challenges in this play.
England benign, well-meaning, warm – at peace with itself. Scotland fractious, self-preoccupied and so often cold. It is not hard to find parallels (this play is no allegory) across Europe, the western world and beyond. Gruach as Cleopatra? Well, not quite.
Yet a play, performed with great commitment, that addresses our future, in Scotland but essentially all futures across the world. At what cost endeavours of hope? However righteous they seem.
It must be extraordinarily difficult for actors with such intensity and commitment not to have a curtain to end the play. The point I presume is that the play is not exhibition but reflection and in some part engagement. Which leaves us not just to ponder on the past. Nor just to ponder on the huge questions this play asks. Don’t know for you but I was left convinced we could find better ways forward, and with an urge to seek them.
The National Theatre of Scotland presents the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of ‘Dunsinane’ in association with the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh. It is at the Royal Lyceum until 4 June, at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow from 7 to 11 June and at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon, from 15 June to 2 July.
Angus Skinner is a former chief social work inspector for Scotland