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Otter Pie

Published Wednesday 12 November 2008 at 11:45 by Thom Dibdin

Deconstructing Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song to destruction and beyond, the Glasgow-based Fish & Game theatre company use Scotland’s favourite novel to examine Scottish identity in the 21st century. It is an audacious project which succeeds, largely, in its contrasting of the cutting negativity of the Calvinist perspective found in north-east Scotland with the lack of ambition in the me-generation.

The deconstruction comes as the company create differing accounts of the same basic text - from the perspective of hedonistic youngsters attempting to stage the play, as a ceilidh, and in the moves of the disco floor circa 1976. With Thom Scullion adding sound effects as the narrator and Eilidh MacAskill earnest as Chris Guthrie - “literary metaphor of the Scottish nation”, they repeatedly try to get through the novel, explaining and arguing about its central metaphors and meanings, but always founder before the end.

The destruction comes from the addition of a passage from Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything, in which he contemplates the collision with the earth of a large meteorite. It is Jodie Wilkinson, dropping out of character as Will Guthrie, who freezes at the thought of such a collision. What is the point in continuing if we could be atomised at any moment?

This is supremely confident stuff, set against Claire Halleran’s deliciously tartan design, just to emphasise the tourist nature of Scotland’s attitude to her past. It demands much of director Robert Walton to keep the production’s quest for answers moving forward, but he succeeds with a challenging and must-see piece of surrealism.

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