Islay McLeod
Drymen Parish Church, Stirlingshire
The December Poem
Gerard Rochford
Drawing by David Ladmore
Essence
(for Rosie – aged 8)
Suddenly you stopped to feel a leaf.
It was Christmas, cold, but you stopped:
a casual sacrament, communion in the hand.
And as we stood the streetlight flickered and went out.
You looked up, frowned, still holding to the leaf.
Such unity of soul, leaf and hand,
reaches to the moment of Creation,
all within the keeping of the night.
Then we journeyed home,
like Magi from a birth.
© Gerard Rochford
Gerard Rochford is the Scottish Review’s makar and contributes a poem each month. His next publication is ‘Failing Light’ Embers Handpress, 2011.
Scary play
Angus Skinner
My partner Shelagh and I were surprised when we returned for the second half of ‘Men Should Weep’ at the National Theatre to find that the couple sitting next to us had left. I do not think that either I or Shelagh fit the description of Ian Jack’s theatrical experience (reported in SR, 25 November) of his companions for that first half of this production he seems not to have valued. Anyway the couple were American and we just thought that they struggled with some of the language even though that has been somewhat altered to fit a wider audience.
I am told that ‘midden’ – which recurs as a theme as also then a word – gives audience members not familiar with it most difficulty even though it is used widely enough and has no especial Scottish roots. In its Scandinavian origin it meant a dump for kitchen waste; that is why it recurs in this extraordinarily timely and rather scary play. Is this a glimpse of the future as well as of the past?
The set, by Bunny Christie, is superb; perhaps operatic as Ian says but none the worse for that: is not opera generally the retelling of timeless stories? Ian seems to have not taken to many of the cast with the exception of Anne Downie who he suggests is ‘particularly good’. The remarkable Anne Downie incidentally has just published her latest novel, ‘The Witches of Pollock’.
Reading Ian I was left wondering whether he does not, like me, find that many people seem far too young for the roles they are playing in real life let alone on stage; maybe it is just a feature of relative age. Yet there is considerable ambivalence in Ian’s piece. He wanted to like this. Otherwise, of course, he would not have gone, let alone taken his son; nor indeed analysed and discussed their decision to walk out over the pizza, nor written of it.
As David Lodge argues, continuing to read a novel or stopping reading it is the basic form of literary criticism; so too of theatre, especially in its earliest forms. It was not surely the attraction of the pizza that took them out of the Lyttelton; it was some push from the play, in part from other irritations.
This play, this production, is not Glasgow on holiday in London, as if it were some nostalgic ‘History of the Depression’. This is not about Glasgow and its tenements. The Glasgow Boys exhibition has nothing to do with it. This play is about poverty and its effects on individuals and relationships. There are strong clues in the title. Ian is quite right that the script ‘caught the cadences and rhythms of Glasgow speech brilliantly’. Ena Lamont Stewart did that mainly by swiftly writing down what she heard, phrases and crack.
Historically it is interesting not least because of its portrayal at times of council housing as the solution to many ails, which indeed for decades it proved. Yet I had no difficulty in re-setting this play in my imagination in the context of sub-prime mortgages and their aftermath – in Europe and in the US. I cannot now recall whether it is in the first or second half that husband and wife drool over a lovingly shared can of beans but there are households today in Europe and in the US where that same scene could be enacted. And the energetic adolescent boy desperate for the wireless? The threat of disease? All timeless. Perhaps Ian would have stayed had the play been set in trailer sites in Buffalo NY in 2010? Perhaps he would need Cindy Sherman (an artist who came from Buffalo) to star?
In the end this was, for me, a set of love stories played out in a context of adversity entirely relevant to our times. Its ending is part rainbow, part fear, part humiliation: life. Ena Lamont Stewart caught the cadences indeed but mainly she wrote of deep human matters, of dignity, purpose, despair and hope. These the cast reflect and play with conviction. Strong stuff really. And scary.
I agree to this extent with Ian: I no longer have the stomach for a whole pizza.
Angus Skinner is a former chief social work inspector for Scotland
Rear Window
Football correspondent Kevin McCarra (then with the Sunday Times, now with the Guardian) contributed the Christmas diary for SR in 1996. Today, the last of three short excerpts:
Monday 23 December
Walter Smith comes in for the Monday press conference wearing a towel. He is a punctual man who would rather be wet than late. There is conscientiousness too in his willingness to meet journalists perhaps half a dozen times in a busy week. As with any manager, though, the inclination to be obliging is at odds with a deeper need to be reticent. The comments are guarded, carefully weighed to limit the possibility of controversy.
These meetings are valuable, however, for the off-the-record passages when a manager will be candid about a player or an incident. On rare occasions there is also time for reminiscence. One recent day, the stress of being responsible for Rangers lifted when Smith began to chat about an eccentric team-mate he used to play with at Dundee United. Tommy Dunne was so gifted that he sometimes gave a mock TV commentary on his own performance while on the ball. ‘He’s past one man, he’s past two. He’s inside the area and they’re scared to tackle him. Oh, he’s down! It’s a penalty!’
Smith described this as one of Tommy’s greatest displays: ‘He was having a commentary game’.
Walter Smith retires as manager of Rangers at the end of the present season