The Scottish Play

by Alexander Stevenson, 1 Jul 2009

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent a month on Eigg in September 2008, talking to Eiggach and recording several interviews as part of preliminary research.

Catching the very end of the tourist season, the pier café shut up shop and only a handful of visitors could be seen in the hills. Thankfully, the Eigg ceilidhs took on a life of their own with a triple birthday; bringing hundreds of young people over to the island, including a band that came to play that I remembered from my teenage years- ‘King Creosote’.

Beside ‘stripping-the-willow’, I was spending many of my days beach combing, and I had offered to clear a great deal of the old nets and plastic strips strewn along the north-western shore line in return for my lodgings. Almost intuitively I began separating what I found into colours- like some early 80’s Tony Cragg sculpture. I bagged this and brought it back to my lodgings.

As I was writing the play during this time: the coloured strips of plastic and netting, and the odd rubber glove or chemical bottle seemed to be the natural props and costume materials that would further contextualise the play. Many of the crates that washed up had Chinese or Thai writing on them, the rest were largely from America, both North and South. Rather optimistically, I thought- using these items would link the play to the sea and the to lives of other people and cultures from far and wide. This seemed significant for a play that was supposed to tackle the inconsistencies of the contemporary and historical landscape, whilst allowing for a play that would slowly come to assimilate more and more of it’s surroundings. In many ways the play (and it’s future re-enactment) was about the ‘assimilation of culture’, or perhaps of ‘cultural appropriation’, in order to transcend time periods and place.

So I spent several more days beach combing for coloured strips of plastic, which I wove into costumes. I used the bottles and polyester bedding that found to use as props or make hats, and I used the black bin liners, rope and bed sheets I found in the house to create outfits.

One incredibly misty morning, when I could not see the fields beyond the dry stone walling of the path, I worked my way around the vast pitch stone mountain of An Sgurr (invisible in the sea mist), to the ghost town of Grulin on the windy south of the island. Here the inhabitants had been driven from the land by the sheep farmers in the 16-18th centuries, and with ten metre visibility I performed a curious Galloshing/Mumming style play for the long-absent inhabitants of Grulin. I wanted to begin creating connections between the contemporary and historical island and performing for the dead seemed like the best place to start. My play attempted to reference a whole host of folk play traditions, mixed in with a range of Eigg’s historical characters and symbols. The main theme of the most common mumming play, is the death and revival of one or both of the two main characters, cured by a doctor and observed and narrated by a long-nosed fool. I had four costumes and a camera on a tripod. I performed my play in four acts and a week later I left the island, having said nothing of the play to any living soul.