Theatre
Sunset Song
Dundee Rep
Five stars
The landscape is everywhere in Morna Young’s new version of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic novel. Conceived for Dundee Rep with director Finn Den Hertog, the production sets out its expansive and impressionistic store by way of rows of soil that fill designer Emma Bailey’s stage. This is accompanied by the pulsating drone of composer Finn Anderson’s score.
As the show’s eight actors step out from the banks of musical instruments lined up either side of the stage and into the fields, it is as if they are sizing up the place to see if it has any future. Once they come together for a haunting vocal chorale that seems to draw its strength from the earth under their feet, they can rest assured about that in what slowly evolves into a mighty telling of Grassic Gibbon’s story that puts the fearlessly independent figure of Chris Guthrie at its heart.
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Danielle Jam plays Chris with a sense of defiant pride in the face of assorted adversities that include death, sexual abuse, and the fallout of World War 1. If education really is dirt, as her brutalising father, played with brooding menace by Ali Craig, insists, Chris’s assorted gettings of wisdom become all the more radical in her quest for enlightenment.
With a giant projection of a wheat field covering the back of the stage, all this is delivered in a well drilled fusion of music and movement - the latter overseen by Vicki Manderson - that looks like and sounds like an umbilical extension of Young’s poetic text. As performed by the cast, the cracked folk stylings of Anderson’s score is hauntingly insistent.
The result of all this is a deliriously ambitious display of total theatre and folk culture that Young, Den Hertog and co make their own. Its epic rendering not only points to Chris’s uncertain future, but also to the rich and fertile theatrical harvest that has here been brought so magnificently to life.
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