When Stornoway, Quebec rides into Aberdeen and Inverness, playwright Calum L MacLeod hopes audiences will never have seen anything like this “riot of a Western” before.
“Maybe that’s a high bar, because I know there are so many Gaelic, Quebecois Westerns out there, so I might be setting myself up to fail,” he said. “But I do hope people will say ‘I wasn’t expecting that’.”
Calum has a point. Stornoway, Quebec – at the Lemon Tree on Thursday April 6 and Eden Court on Tuesday April 11 – is a unique concept.
It’s a rollicking Western, featuring a Gaelic outlaw, sheltered by his close-knit community of Gaelic migrants from Lewis in the wilds of Canada’s Quebec as a Barra-born female bounty hunter is hot on his trail.
Stornoway, Quebec is based on a real-life outlaw born on Lewis
The play is set for a climactic showdown as five people are trapped by a snowstorm in a remote saloon. One of them is the man on the run, Donald Morrison, while another is Mairi MacNeill, the whisky-fuelled, sharp-shooting badass bounty hunter with a score to settle.
For all the high drama involved, the story is actually based on the real-life character of Morrison and historic events of people and a place that are little remembered today.
“It is inspired by a true story. There was a sizeable Gaelic-speaking community in Quebec in the 19th Century into the 20th Century. In the 1880s, one member of that community, Donald Morrison, was involved in a dispute over land and mortgages and a house was burned down and he was blamed for it,” said Callum.
“They hired a bounty hunter to go after him and he killed the bounty hunter and it turned into this huge manhunt. He had the biggest bounty put on his head in Canadian history until recently.
A different story of Gaels cleared to Canada
“For about 10 months he was on the run and the Gaelic community and some friends in the Quebecoise community in the eastern townships of Quebec protected and helped him, keeping him hidden.”
Calum first heard of Morrison – played by Dol Eoin MacKinnon – while he was living and working in Montreal and thought it would make a great story, while also shedding light on the Gaels in Quebec.
“A lot of the time when we think about the Gaels and Scots in Canada, we think about Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, which is fascinating and really interesting. But I wanted to tell a story about them in another setting,” he said.
“But I also wanted it to be fun, lively and violent – not just people sitting around talking about identity and nostalgia. They do that, but there are also guns and fights and more of what you would expect in the standard fare of a Western.”
Female bounty hunter is compelling character
While Morrison is based on a historic character, hard-bitten bounty hunter Mairi – played by Elspeth Turner – is a creation of Calum’s rich imagination.
“I think Mairi is a compelling character and has a lot to say about our world today. I’m not saying there was a woman from Barra who ended up in Texas and becoming a bounty hunter before going to Quebec.
“But I am saying there were women from Barra who were cleared and moved to the New World and didn’t all just settle down to become wives and mothers.”
That diverse cultural aspect of this fascinating period of history is reflected in the rich variety of languages used in Stornoway, Quebec, with Gaelic, English and the Quebecois French known as joual, as well as British Sign Language.
“That world, like our world, is a real mixing point and there are different languages going on. People are switching back and forth between English and Gaelic all the time. It’s not this isolated place where everyone is a monolingual Gaelic speaker,” said Calum, adding each performance has surtitles.
How to get tickets for Stornoway, Quebec in Aberdeen and Inverness
“They have really rich Gaelic but also have really rich Joual and also they use English. If people go and see the play they’ll see there’s a fair amount about how you choose to reveal what languages you do speak and don’t.”
But despite all the context and back story, Calum hopes audiences take away a superb night of entertainment from the show, which had its world premiere at An Lanntair arts centre in Stornoway in a co-production between the venue and Theatre Gu Leor.
“I wanted to write an absolute riot of a Western. It’s a raw, wild ride through an unforgiving Quebec winter.”
Stornoway, Quebec is currently touring Scotland. For information and tickets at The Lemon Tree visit aberdeenperformingarts.com. For its Eden Court run, visit eden-court.co.uk
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