There's a hauntingly beautiful moment in this short play by Iain Finlay Macleod when the music changes from run-of-the-mill rock to the soundtrack of a Gaelic song, performed (I think) by the late and wonderful Ishbel MackAskill. The beauty of a disappearing language and of the culture it represents is the theme of the play, originally staged at the Traverse in Edinburgh in 2011 and now running at the Finborough. Though the theme naturally resonates less with a London audience, I find it personally compelling; for many years I believed my Scottish ancestors were Hebridean crofters from Lewis, though my family history researches have so far failed to substantiate this.
Unfortunately, I left the theatre feeling let down by the playwright's inability to translate his ideas into dramatic action; there are flashes of poetic imagination, but the theme never comes to life. It's telling that the subject of the decline of Gaelic seems to hang in the background until the final ten minutes, when the actors appear on stage out of costume and out of character to talk about why the language is disappearing. It's an inadequate device which underlines the failure to bring intangible ideas to life through vivid characters in the way that Jez Butterworth did in Jerusalem.
James, a successful videogames entrepreneur, is a man with lots of money, a Cambridge degree, a wife and a best friend who is his drinking companion. But when his life in London falls apart into bankruptcy, his wife runs off with his best friend and his possessions are claimed by a dessicated accountant, he becomes obsessed by the need to return to his Isle of Lewis birthplace and his father, a weaver who is dying of cancer. Words -- particularly Gaelic words -- have a value that is beyond price, and we lose them at our peril.
The play is well acted and crisply directed by Russell Bolam (responsible for Southwark Playhouse's excellent recent production of The Seagull), but the opening scenes are clumsy and fragmented. The play acquires some emotional power when James' father appears, and the two men start talking in Gaelic. But the final impression after 70 minutes is of a first draft, not a finished play. Vicky Featherstone and the National Theatre of Scotland would have done the writer a good turn by developing this deeply personal script more intensively before bringing it to the stage.
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