Stage Door News
Stage Door News
When 10-year-old Andrew Laidlaw was taken to Edinburgh Castle in the early 19th century, his father, James, identified the strip of land across the blue water as America. Actually it was Fife, but that didn’t stop patriarch James bundling up his family some years later and taking them on the hazardous journey to Canada, where they were to settle.
The Laidlaws were just some of the estimated one million people who, during the 19th century, tried to escape the grinding poverty of their lives in their native Scotland by sailing across the water to make a life in the new world. Part of a river of people – like the river currently flowing from north Africa to Europe – they were what we’d now call economic migrants, whose drive and determination helped build the prosperity of America and Canada.
The fact that we know so much more about the Laidlaws than many of those families is that, despite their lowly status, they left a paper trail behind them, and that trail has been pieced together by the Canadian writer Alice Munro, who has then added a dollop of imagination to her stories about the lives of her ancestors.
This adaptation by Linda McLean, staged by Marilyn Imrie for the company Stellar Quines, honours the graceful economy of Munro’s prose as it follows the Laidlaws in what James calls “a leaky sepulchre” on their journey across the sea. When a baby – represented by a bundled sheet – dies, it is unrolled like a shroud as it is thrown overboard. Imrie’s staging constantly emphasises both the crowded conditions of the boat but also the vast emotional gulfs between the Laidlaws, a family all at sea when it comes to expressing their feelings.
This is not showy theatre. It takes its cue – both visual and aural, the latter including choral music – from the plain grace of the venue. Yet the restraint mines deep feelings, and in particular the interior lives of the women: prickly but loyal and heavily pregnant Agnes, who is married to Andrew and knows he is a good man, but longs for a tender touch; Andrew’s sister, Mary, the runt of the Laidlaw litter, who acts as an unpaid nursemaid and adores her nephew. What we get are the thrilling interior dramas of insignificant people, made all the more interesting because the vivid representation of these women’s lives are threaded through with stories from Laidlaw family mythology in which only men figure.
A fine ensemble of five actors brings this story vividly alive in a quietly moving show rooted in real lives, which reminds us of the journeys our own families have made to get to where we are now, and the deeply felt losses that occur along the way.
A View from Castle Rock
At St Mark’s artSpace, Edinburgh, until 29 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.
By Lyn Gardner for www.theguardian.com.
2016-08-14
Edinburgh: Scottish company Stellar Quines adapts Alice Munro stories for the stage