Sunset Song (NHB Modern Plays) E-Book

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 139

Beschreibung

A classic of Scots literature, brilliantly adapted for the stage. Sunset Song is the first novel in Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Scots Quair trilogy, a rich evocation of growing up on a farm in Scotland in the early-20th century, of being in love and in lust, of getting by as a young mother on your own and of losing your lover in war. The distinguishing feature of the books - and of this dramatisation - is the use of the rhythms and vocabulary of Scots to tell the story. This stage version of Sunset Song by Alastair Cording was first performed at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, in 1991. 'Succeeds marvellously... puts Scotland's own history onto the stage with vigour, precision and skill... a pure piece of theatre' - Guardian 'Does full justice to Grassic Gibbon... a joy and a wrench to watch its blithe unfolding of tragedy and hope' - Scotland on Sunday

Leseprobe

Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s

SUNSET SONG

dramatised by

ALASTAIR CORDING

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

CONTENTS

Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Sunset Song

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

The Mearns

Speech

Truth to Life

Literary Value

Selected Bibliography

Adapting Sunset Song for the stage

The Process of Adaptation

Major Themes and Issues of the Novel

Community; Religion; Impact of the Outside World; Response to Change and the Notion of Progress; Symbolism; Education; Language; Music; Gender; Sexuality; The Two Chrises; Scottish Identity

Directing Sunset Song for the stage

Director’s Note

Collaboration and Adaptation

Ensemble Playing

Work and Community

Design and Setting

Language

Music and Song

Further Resource

Plot of the Stage Adaptation of Sunset Song

Original Casts

SUNSET SONG

LEWIS GRASSIC GIBBON AND SUNSET SONG

Notes by Ian Campbell

Department of English Literature, University of Edinburgh

Lewis Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell, 1901-35) was born in Auchterless in Aberdeenshire, but spent his childhood largely in the area of Arbuthnott in the Mearns, where his father rented a croft (Bloomfield) and where he and his brothers attended the local school. A shy and fastidious boy, Mitchell loathed farm work and preferred reading and amateur history and archaeology. Encouraged by his schoolmaster, he developed an early talent for writing, but after a disastrous year of secondary education in Stonehaven (he expelled himself), Mitchell left home for journalism in Aberdeen, then Glasgow, then spent a number of years in the armed forces, which sustained him during the Depression. While he found life in the services unpleasant he was able to travel (to the Middle East) and to write, which he did with relish – short stories, fiction, articles – until finally he was accepted, published, and was able to leave the forces, marry his childhood sweetheart, Rebecca (Ray) Middleton from Arbuthnott, and settle in London, then in Welwyn Garden City in the Home Counties, as a professional writer. A period of intense productivity gave rise to 16 books and a mass of articles, but the price was ill-health, which culminated in Mitchell’s sudden death in 1935 of peritonitis. His widow buried him in Scotland but brought up his son and daughter in Welwyn, where belatedly attention is being paid to the writer who produced in those leafy southern streets the wonderfully nostalgic trilogy of novels, A Scots Quair (1932-34), for which he is most remembered today. His grave is in Arbuthnott, where there is also a thriving Grassic Gibbon Centre (Arbuthnott, Laurencekirk AB30 1PB; tel. [phone]). His books – for decades all but impossible to buy – are steadily coming back into print from Polygon, Birlinn Books and Canongate in Edinburgh.

The Mearns

From Montrose to Aberdeen lies a fertile plain, cut off from the sea in the south by low hills, but tapering to a point near Stonehaven where it meets the sea. Here the Highland Line marks the beginning of more rugged territory, but there are hills enough round Arbuthnott, many of them marked with remains of Roman and pre-Roman times which fascinated Mitchell. Sunset Song (1932) is set on such a hill, near the real-life Bloomfield, the Pictish Standing Stones on its summit one of the links to that far-off past which absorbed the author, before modern civilisation (which produced the Great War as well as the Depression) marked the country, before officialdom stripped the hillsides of their forests for the war effort, before the march of ‘progress’ emptied the small farms and bothies, and horses gave way to tractors and mechanised farming. Growing up in Arbuthnott, Mitchell felt the shifting tide of history during the war, and the sunset of a way of life which he captures brilliantly in the decline of Kinraddie, the fictional name he gives to Arbuthnott in Sunset Song. This eponymous song celebrates what was beautiful and neighbourly and Scottish, but is also a sad admission that the sunset marked the end of that old Scotland and that the country now had to move forward. The sequels, Cloud Howe (1933) and Grey Granite (1934), complete the story of Scotland’s transformation in Mitchell’s lifetime, through small town to city life, the eclipse not only of a centuries-old farming tradition but of the influence of the Kirk (Cloud Howe) and the countryside itself, elbowed aside by the urban squalor of Duncairn in Grey Granite, an unlovely jumble festering in the Depression. Mitchell did not flinch from the Depression and the troubles it brought to Scotland even though the picture makes the second half of A Scots Quair less attractive than Sunset Song, and much less read for that matter. But the author believed passionately that Scotland was for living in here and now, not for preserving in the past. As a committed socialist and Marxist, and a committed enemy of that civilisation he saw rotting around him, he writes in Grey Granite (and several of his other novels) about the need for revolution to sweep away the grim past and bring back something living and free and anarchistic to Scotland – without snobbery, without class distinction, without Scottish/English rivalries, without dogma or Church. He died before his vision could be resolved one way or another; he did not live to see the rise of Hitler, or everything that followed.

Speech

At the time Mitchell wrote, there was fierce debate about whether Scottish literature should be in standard English, or in the Scottish languages – Scots and Gaelic – still spoken in declining numbers both in Scotland and, to a surprising degree, overseas among emigrant communities. Some Scottish writers, like Hugh MacDiarmid, fiercely pushed the cause of writing in Scots to stimulate an interest in the language and stem the advance of standard English from radio and film. Mitchell, realising that the difficulty of reading a page of Scots would put many off, hit on a subtler strategy of writing his Scottish novels in a unique style which looks like English, but in fact uses Scottish words, spelling them as if they were the nearest English-sounding one. The word ‘quean’ for ‘girl’ will be spelt ‘queen’; the word ‘braw’ for ‘fine’ will be spelt ‘brave’, and so forth. The word order will be unfamiliar, and a clear attempt to re-order speech the way Scots might speak it, and the vocabulary will be disguised by the spelling. There is no need for glosses (Mitchell resented it keenly when publishers asked for one) for the unfamiliarity very soon disappears, and readers fall into the rhythm and intonation of Scots and feel more closely the sense of being there. Significantly, the style of the Scots Quair becomes less Scottish, and more English, as the trilogy enters the 1930s and city life: Mitchell knew from experience that the country was where Scottish traditions and speech lasted longest. Mitchell’s English fiction is very characteristic too: a lot of little stylistic quirks mark him out as an experimental writer, and he is fond of putting into the mouths of his characters pidgin English in the case of his Middle East figures, or Cockney in London. Most readers find the Scottish fiction the easiest, but the science fiction in particular is grippingly well told, and he has a talent for the occasional action scene which sustains the reader through the frequent brutality – alas, all too true to life – of his magnificent historical novel, Spartacus.

Truth to Life

During his lifetime, Mitchell published a great deal – he even assumed his pen-name (his mother was Lilias Grassic Gibbon before marriage) to help disguise the quantity he was writing. Like other Scottish authors, he drew heavily from experience, and like other Scottish authors he was not always popular as a result. Arbuthnott is very clearly the source of Kinraddie, and there are even endpapers to the early editions of the trilogy which show the layout of the real-life Mearns – with details cunningly altered here and there to protect the author should anyone go so far as to sue him for libel. In fact no one did, but a lot of people (including his own family) resented the accuracy with which he incorporated real-life people and incidents – often very unflatteringly, sometimes cruelly. His mother complained he had made them ‘the Speak of the Mearns’ – which he had. But not in the way they wanted. People found themselves caricatured, and old scandals dredged up, and they resented it keenly. Some found the love scenes, the childbirth scenes and the politics of the novel distasteful and many tried to have it banned from public view. Incredibly, the Aberdeen City Libraries had it in a reserved case until quite lately, available only on special request.

In The Speak of the Mearns, a posthumous collection, an unfinished novel is published for the first time in which he draws heavily on recollections of the next parish – Kinneff – plainly showing he had plenty of material still to hand for further fiction, had he lived to complete it. The Speak of the Mearns also contains his magnificent short stories (some of which, like parts of the Quair, have been televised) and splendid essays on his childhood, on his writing, and on his views of history and Scottish culture, past and present. The essay on Aberdeen, where he lived, is an acerbic gem. Glasgow, which he remembered in the stinking days of the Depression, makes for a darker essay, but a powerful indictment of a society which lets its poorer members starve.

Literary Value

Few would dispute the stature now of the Gibbon novels, and with republication, the Mitchell stories are also steadily gaining in critical recognition. What did he achieve in that hectic brief writing career?

The Scottish Fiction    In the Quair, in his other autobiographical pieces (notably Stained Radiance) and in the splendid short stories set in Arbuthnott and its area, Mitchell fixed a period in time when the old country was disappearing and the new one was slowly emerging and yet to find its character. Vanishing people, customs, speech were incorporated in thoroughly well-told stories. The Scottish style, which was not obviously or threateningly Scottish, drew in those who had no first-hand knowledge (he was published and popular in the USA in his lifetime, and has been translated since into several languages), and Sunset Song, in particular, is now recognised as a classic of 1930s fiction by critics of British literature, not merely Scottish fiction. Closest to his own childhood in recollection, and coloured by the disappearance of a town he had loved even while he longed to get away to a wider world, Sunset Song has as its central character his best creation, Chris Guthrie, a farmer’s daughter who becomes a farmer’s wife, and survives her husband Ewan’s death in the Great War to see his Scotland, her Scotland, their farm all but obliterated. Chris and her son Ewan move through Cloud Howe and Grey Granite to form the backbone of the trilogy, and Ewan at the end follows his creator south, to London, to political involvement, while Chris returns to the Aberdeenshire where Mitchell was born in real life. Nostalgia in these Scottish books is beautifully captured, but not wallowed in. A sunset of a past age is there to usher in a new dawn, and the politically active Mitchell wanted Scotland to wake up to the 1930s, not take refuge in the 1900s. Now, with the whole Scots Quair available and in print, people can see the message as a whole, and even though the author’s Marxist and revolutionary politics may have few supporters, the passion with which he lambasts the sick and tired Scottish institutions of his time still wins him many admirers.

The Non-Scottish Fiction    Mitchell’s interest in history and archaeology led him to write, with great speed and professionalism, studies of explorers (Nine against the Unknown, Hanno, a life of Mungo Park), the historical Spartacus, science-fiction alternative societies (Three Go Back set in the past, Gay Hunter in the far future), fiction of Cairo and the Middle East (The Calends of Cairo, The Lost Trumpet) and the superlative short stories in The Speak of the Mearns. His autobiographical novels, Stained Radiance and The Thirteenth Disciple, chart not only his Scottish roots but his early experiences in London (where he and his wife knew poverty, frustration and much ill-health) and in the army. His articles, many of them all but forgotten, are like his books: neat, tidy, well organised, produced at speed. A wonderful oddity is Scottish Scene, a collection of articles, poems, short stories and press cuttings produced in tandem with Hugh MacDiarmid and published in 1934, largely through Mitchell’s efforts. Neither man saw the other’s contribution, and the book is a glorious muddle.

The Legacy    The Grassic Gibbon Centre’s opening, and the celebrations in 2001 to mark the centenary of his birth, are some indication that the years of neglect are past. The fact that Penguin have A Scots Quair in print and in wide circulation, that Canongate have published the three parts of the trilogy separately and together (and have since republished more), and that Polygon and Birlinn plan to have all the work except the Quair in print, the fact he is taught very widely at every level of secondary and higher education, the fact he is known through television, radio and stage adaptations – all point to Mitchell’s enduring fame and legacy. Most of all, he needs to be read. More people need to come to this marvellous evocation of a Scottish past that has nothing sentimental or sticky, but that brings back to life for a while something which is definitely of the past – and challenges today’s audiences to respect that past. If Chris, in Sunset Song, found it hard to love her own country – she admitted she ‘loved and hated in a breath’ when she thought about it – people today can find it hard to think of what they mean by Scotland. They can hear the words spoken in the theatre, on TV, even though the legacy of spoken Scots of the kind Mitchell knew in the Mearns in the early years of the century may have thinned down a great deal. They can see the dramatic adaptation, and be drawn to the originals as many were by the televised version. Lewis Grassic Gibbon weaves his own spell on his readers. At last, his work is there to be read. Once read, it does not allow itself to be forgotten.

Selected Bibliography

WORKS PUBLISHED UNDER THE NAME OF JAMES LESLIE MITCHELL

Hanno, or The Future of Exploration (London, 1928)

Stained Radiance: A Fictionist’s Prelude (London, 1930)

The Thirteenth Disciple (London, 1931)

The Calends of Cairo (London, 1931)

Three Go Back (London, 1932)

Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights (London, 1932)

The Lost Trumpet (London, 1932)

Image and Superscription (London, 1933)

Spartacus (London, 1933)

Gay Hunter (London, 1934)

The Conquest of the Maya (London, 1934)

WORKS PUBLISHED UNDER THE NAME OF LEWIS GRASSIC GIBBON

Sunset Song (London, 1932)

Cloud Howe (London, 1933)

Grey Granite (London, 1934)

A Scots Quair (London, 1946)

Scottish Scene: or, The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Albyn (London, 1934)

Niger: The Life of Mungo Park (London, 1934)

A Scots Hairst: Essays and Short Stories, ed. Ian S. Munro (London, 1967)

Smeddum: Short Stories and Essays, ed. D. M. Budge (London, 1980)

The Speak of the Mearns, ed. Ian Campbell (Edinburgh, 1982; revised and enlarged, Edinburgh, 1994)

WORKS PUBLISHED UNDER THE NAME OF JLM AND LGG COMBINED

Nine Against The Unknown: A Record of Geographical Exploration (London, 1934)

ADAPTING SUNSET SONG FOR THE STAGE

Notes by Alastair Cording, adapter

The Process of Adaptation

At its most basic, I adapt novels in order to bring people to the theatre. The shared experience of seeing a novel compressed and retold in theatrical terms can be very powerful. I hope that those in the audience who don’t know the novel, will be sufficiently impressed by the story to read it for themselves. But above all, I aim to make a satisfying piece of theatre.

The first, very basic, consideration is time. A modern stage play for touring normally lasts no more than two-and-a-half hours – including a fifteen-minute interval. Cast sizes are limited: many small-scale touring companies cannot employ more than five actors.

With these constraints in mind, I work out the bare bones of the plot. I try to identify the main themes and concerns. Then I search for features that are specially suited to the stage. In Sunset Song