Janet of Carterhaugh

Day 2 of the 28 Plays Later challenge (write 28 plays in 28 days) and script #2 was submitted about an hour ago. This was our brief:

So let’s look at myths and folklore today. Try to pick a random culture, find an interesting character in their mythology or an awesome folklore story and write about that.

I forgot about selecting a "random culture" and stuck with Scotland. I hummed and hawed for a bit between re-telling The Great Selkie of Sule Skerrie and The Ballad of Tam Lin. In the end I chose the latter, and not simply because it's one of Spike's favourites (although that did influence my decision).  

So I've re-told 'Tam Lin' in eleven pages, including music and dance. Me? Putting in music and dance. There's a first. And I've called it Janet of Carterhaugh because the more and more I thought about the tale, the clearer it became to me. It's Janet's story. The important point is that it's in. If it's a tenth as good as the rendition above of the ballad I shall be a happy man.

Lessons in Australian Drama

Much to my shame (if that's not too strong a condemnation) I know almost nothing about the history of Australian theatre but all that will change soon. I shall be taking a unit in Modern Australian Drama next semester at the ANU:

"The course aims to provide students with an introduction to some of the major developments in Australian drama and theatre in the twentieth century. Works by key playwrights, for example Seymour, Lawler, White, Kenna, Hewett, Buzo, Nowra, Williamson, Romeril, Hibberd, Gow and Davis will be studied both theoretically and practically. The plays chosen represent the wide range of subject matter and theatrical form that is evident in the modern Australian dramatic repertoire. In order to contextualise the plays studied, some examination will be given to more important elements of the stage history of Australia covering the last 50 years.

This course is designed to provide students with the opportunity to study theory through its practical application."

I'm looking forward to my late-starter introduction; particularly that last part. It seems we shall be learning by doing to some extent.

Dorothy Hewett: 1923 - 2002

We studied Dorothy Hewett's play, The Chapel Perilous, from the 1970s, as part of our 'Story to Screen' creative writing unit last semester. Although I knew nothing about the playwright (now I do) I was not surprised to learn of her Communist background (it takes one to know one, as we used to accuse one other, of all kinds of deviancy, when we were children.) Nor had I heard of the play, far less read it (although now I have, enjoyed it and secured a decent grade for my essay on the text - to my great relief). 

The play felt familiar nevertheless. It is, as some might say, 'of its age' but that 'age' - the 1970s - was my coming of age; emotionally, intellectually, politically as much as physically or chronologically. That was the decade I was exposed meaningfully to theatre for the first time; outside of the school curriculum, beyond the mainstream stage, in a Scotland that was re-inventing its theatrical tradition. It was a place and period of radical, iconoclastic, typically left-leaning drama that could be, at its best, electrifying and challenging in both its form and content. But it was also, very often, brilliant, engaging, and blissfully alive; full of fun, laughter, and music as well as piercing observation, searing critique and sometimes anger. Plays like The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil (1973) by 7:84 - a touchstone for anyone of my time; The Slab Boys by John Byrne performed at the impeccable Traverse in 1978; the hugely talented Russell Hunter as Jock, a one-man play for BBC Scotland; much later there were fantastic works like Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off by Liz Lochhead, anything by the Communicado Theatre Group really, or the Trav's adaptation of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. Those earlier plays, however, shared much of the Brechtian, destabilising verve of The Chapel Perilous.

So ... I was pleased to stumble over an article with the (somewhat unwieldy) title, The great Australian plays: The Torrents, the Doll and the critical mass of Australian drama in The Conversation online. Helpful pre-semester reading. It should assist my exploration of a largely unknown (to me) dramatic tradition. We shall see where that leads.

Poetry - a living, breathing art

Poet Jackie Kay recites her first commission as Scots Makar at the Opening Ceremony of Scotland's Parliament. (I was at university with Jackie and worked alongside her father, John, in the 1980s. Lucky me.)

Three priceless points

PTFC makes it two in a row against St. Johnstone

Who would have thought something as ordinary as football could matter? But I was very pleased indeed to read this morning that my team had won away from home in the Scottish Premier League. We rise to seventh place and despite the hard games ahead (against numbers one, two and three in the League - Celtic, Aberdeen and Hearts) our future in the top division looks secure for another year. Phew.

It seems one can take the boy away from the football but the game remains within the boy. The beautiful game indeed.

To the Ring of Brodgar

Ring of Brodgar

We spent weeks in December/January trying to figure out how we could get me and my wheelchair from Glasgow to Stornoway in the Western Isles when we visit Scotland in June. I was beginning to give up hope but said to Spike this morning I would get back on to finding solutions this week coming. Spike said, 'ok but we could try Orkney too'. 

Skara Brae

This evening I started searching the web for information about Orkney. I wrote 4 e.mails to not very promising-looking hotels. Within an hour three indicated they have rooms with easy access showers. Checked train times between Glasgow and Aberdeen. Checked ferry times between Aberdeen and Kirkwall. Began to find evidence of wheelchair accessible buses and taxis on the main island. Less than three hours after starting our search it looks as if we have a week on the Orkney Islands more or less established. I'm a very happy man and these are just a couple of the Neolithic sites we shall now visit.

Burns Night on Australia Day

Robert Burns - 1759 to 1796

There are eleven hours today - between Midnight and eleven o'clock this morning - when my past and present meet, where the miles between the land of my birth and the land I now call home vanish.  Time and space collapsed through the cultural connections I make.  They help shape my identity in ways I don't fully understand.

January 25th is the celebration of the birth and life of Scotland's national poet, Robert Burns.  He was born on the 25th January in 1759 in the village of Alloway, south of the town of Ayr.  Here in Australia today it's our national holiday commemorating - increasingly controversially - the arrival of the 'First Fleet' in the great southern land in 1788.  The vast continent would be claimed as territory for King George III by Captain Arthur Phillip when he and a dozen or so oarsmen and military personnel landed at Sydney Cove from HMS Supply. The other ships in the fleet were marooned in Botany Bay by a fierce storm.  Burns was 29 years old on that very day.

My blog draws its name from Burns who wrote a poem To A Louse: On Seeing One On A Lady's Bonnet, At Church (1786). I'm the louse that answered back.

My friend Stuart Hepburn (we met at university where we were political rivals in fiercely opposed left-wing camps) delivered an astonishing, awe-inspiring rendition of Burns's comic masterpiece Tam O'Shanter, written in 1790. I believe you'll not come across a finer interpretation of the poem anywhere than Stuart's rendition. Burns would be the first to raise a glass and cheer.

'Tam O Shanter' by Robert Burns, performed by Stuart Hepburn from Prancing Jack Productions on Vimeo.

Booked

Firs stop - Tokyo

Our itinerary is more or less sorted.  The flights are booked.  The day has been given over to the search for accommodation. Looking for wheelchair accessible showers is always a challenge but we've started.  One hotel booked for four nights.  3 nights sleeping on long haul flights.  That leaves 30 nights to resolve while the clock ticks down to departure. Excited.  Bit freaked out but we'll be fine.

Old habits die hard

Friday night  there, Saturday morning here and the day's first news: my football team back in Scotland progressed to the final 16 of the Scottish Football Cup.  Any ship in a storm Douglas.

Sixteen thousand, nine hundred and twelve kilometres

The distance between here & there ..

Today I start planning next May's big trip.  The parts between here and Lochboisdale on South Uist  are pretty straightforward and all can be completed by public transport.  But how do we get this C5/6 quadriplegic from the ferry terminal at the south of the Outer Hebrides to the 5,000 year old standing stones at Callanish on the island of Lewis?  

I don't know, to be honest.  But we'll see.

Don't panic, don't panic ... ok - let's panic

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear ...

So Partick Thistle lost (again) this time away from home to the not so very mighty Ross County.  Even this early the writing is on the wall ... my Facebook wall as far as these words are concerned;

I can no longer hide the truth from the world.

With eight games played, no wins, only two goals scored and with an uncomfortable gap opening up between our bottom of the league position and EVERYONE ELSE IN THE LEAGUE my unofficial Partick Thistle existential threat warning has been raised from "bit of a worry" to "moderately anxious".

And today's word is ...

DUMPLING

As in, I am one.

Clootie Dumpling ... from Texas, apparently

I submitted two poems as entries to the Fish Publishing poetry competition 2015.  The poems are Come Take The King's Shilling and Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre.  I've been working on the former - which started its life as Blackstrap Molasses - for months.  Throughout that period I have pondered the title as much as anything.

So you can imagine how silly I felt when I received the automatically generated e.mail telling me that my poem Come Take The King's Silling had been received by the organisers.  Silling?  It's not even a word!  Of course, one can't edit an entry after it has been paid for and submitted.  

Precision of language?  I can't even type properly.

Fool.

Late-season sun

It feels slightly strange today to be sitting here in our suburban garden in south Canberra. I have retreated to some shade to escape the fierce intensity of the late season sun of this Indian summer. But although it's uncharacteristically hot we seem to be languishing in a spell that's neither one season nor another. I shelter from the heat. Somewhere in the vicinity of our drowsing cat a cricket chirps forlornly, it seems, for there is no response from any other lonely cricket. Perhaps ours is the last cricket to sing this year. Elsewhere the signs are telling us that summer is over, the fall awaits.

The garden's earth is hard and unforgiving. It has been weeks since the last heavy rains soaked the ground to feed the plants, many of which look tired and in need of a good long drink. Some, it's clear, have already shut down for the year. We will not see their brightly coloured flowers, vibrant green leaves or new growth for months now. The lower branches of the majestic pin oak at the end of the garden also display the early signs of season's change. Here and there brown leaves disrupt the coat of green. Every now and then, when the breeze picks up, a leaf or two tumbles to the ground.

We are in between the seasons (we have them in Canberra, unlike most of the rest of Australia). But whatever name we might given to this liminal space it's neither summer nor autumn, neither one time nor the other.

Do I pick up on (read too much into) this not-season, these days of this as well as that, neither one nor the other because it fits my own sense of displacement? Sundays always heighten my feelings of being from somewhere else, not fully belonging either to this new home of mine (after more than fourteen years it still feels new) nor, self-evidently, to the home I left behind; the place and its people.

Why Sundays particularly? 

It's easy enough to see. First act here is to check the football scores back there because for reasons I cannot begin to explain it matters to me how well or (as is more likely) how badly the team I have followed since I was ten or eleven performed. Yesterday, against the odds, we won. Next, one of the great rituals of a Scottish - British - Sunday; a long, luxurious read of the Sunday papers accompanied by tea, toast, a breakfast one can browse through just like the stories. I am infinitely more interested in the news, the sport, the cultural life and - especially - the politics of my homeland than the petty circus here with its unappealing set of clowns and comic singers. I wonder how my friends back there spent their Saturday nights and what stories they will tell to one another over Sunday lunch in a favourite pub. But if or when they meet I will be absent as I've been for many years now. Emigrated but far from integrated. Neither here nor there but somewhere in between. Not one thing or another.  A bit like this unseasonable weather.

To A Mouse on Burns Night ... which arrives in Scotland 11 hours later

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
What makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell -
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me;
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects dreaer!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

You lost what ...?

I'm in the middle of writing a letter to my good friend Martin Currie in Edinburgh, whose birthday it is next Monday.  I hope the missive reaches him in time. I have a tendency to ramble.  

I don't propely know what prompted the recollection below but these things do happen when you're around Martin.  Except maybe he wasn't even there.  It's simply the sort of bizarre occurence that you stumble across in any city from time to time.  So I wrote this to my mate Martin who I love dearly and miss a great deal ...

South Clerk Street, Edinburgh

Here’s a thing about South Clerk Street while I’m on the subject.  Maybe you were with me when this happened because I can’t think of any other reason to go into a pub on South Clerk Street – it was across the road from where the ABC Cinema used to be or was it the Odeon?

There was time to kill because the movie wasn’t starting for a while.  Whoever it was, we went for a drink in the pub.  Shortly after we got settled at our tables a moderately anxious looking man entered the rather deserted pub and started hunting – not quite frantically – for something he had lost.  He checked every chair, table and down the back of the red PVC (I doubt it was leather) benches running along the walls.  He clearly had no success. Running out of options he approached our little group then spoke in a quiet, secretive voice; as if was looking to buy or sell Class A drugs.

"Sorry to bother you”, he said.  “You haven’t seen a snake anywhere, have you?”

One of us said “a snake?” feigning composure, as if it was the most natural question in the world.

Another asked, “What kind was it?”

I like to dwell on the underlying assumptions of that question; as if maybe we had indeed seen a snake wandering around the pub or enjoying half a pint and a cigarette quietly in a corner, disturbing no one and we wanted to be sure the guy searching for his lost snake was genuinely connected to and could correctly identify the particular snake with which we’d been discussing the weekend’s football not half an hour before.  Or maybe we thought there might have been more than one snake in the pub – different types - and we wanted to make sure we returned the correct species to its owner.

Anyway, he said it was a” wee python”.

I’m sure he said it was a python and that it must have slipped out the carrier bag he’d brought with him into the pub.  He held up the empty pollie bag to show us.  In his mind it may have been some kind of proof.  Then he said “it must be somewhere” before heading back out the door.  I think we looked nervously around the pub, sipped our drinks casually – maybe a wee bit too casually in case any one of us thought the others suspected we were more than mildly hesitant about sitting in a pub that might have pythons of any size slithering around the furniture – then we decided it was time to drink up and make our way – early or not - to the cinema.