Morna Young is the writer with the enviable but responsibility filled job of bringing Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic Scottish novel Sunset Song to life onstage.
She said: “When you start working on a play, you often ask yourself, why me and why now?
“I’m from the north-east, I’m a Doric speaker, I’m from a wee village, I write a lot about relationships and families and trauma – the ‘why me?’ made sense, it was the ‘why now?’
“The story has been told and retold over the years. There’s the book, the 1960s telly series, there have been countless theatre adaptations, there was the recent film.
“The idea of adapting it isn’t new, so why do we need another one? For me it was knowing there’s never been a female lens on Chris Guthrie, and that felt really exciting. What can I as a female writer bring to the story? Already, that’s going to do something different.”
Tackling adapting Sunset Song for the stage
Young is indeed the first female writer to have adapted Gibbon’s 1932 novel, a Scots literary classic which tells the story of Chris, a young woman growing up in a Mearns farming community in the 1910s.
She weathers the generational abuse of an era in which women were treated as second-class citizens by their menfolk, and the effects of the First World War upon even this isolated community.
Chris’s independence and freedom of spirit still attracts readers, who recognise her connection to the land and tradition alongside her desire for broader horizons through education. She feels torn between ‘Scots Chris’ and ‘English Chris’, right down to the way she uses language.
Produced by Dundee Rep Theatre, Young – who grew up in the Moray fishing village of Burghead – and director Finn Den Hertog have produced a play which powerfully evokes all of these themes, while impressively recreating the very landscape of the Mearns onstage and sticking close to the human stories at the novel’s heart.
Danielle Jam takes on iconic role of Chris
It’s an outstanding ensemble piece filled with actors who play accompanying music live, and the central performance of rising star Aberdonian actor Danielle Jam gives the play added north-eastern authenticity.
“I’m a city girl, so I don’t have much of a connection to the farming experience,” says Jam.
“The image of those big stretches of beautiful landscape and hills and trees you see on the train into and out of Aberdeen is something that was part of growing up, though.”
“The area between Stonehaven and Laurencekirk is where our fictional Kinraddie is set, and when you see that land, you think about the history in the soil. The characters are fictional, but they go through what real people would have gone through in the 1910s. From this tiny place in the north-east of Scotland, it makes you think about where we’ve come from as a country and what our history is.”
Jam’s Chris is driven and inquisitive. “One of her main questions is, does she have to choose between education or the land?” she says. “One day she wants to learn, another she wants to run in the fields, and choosing between the two is like choosing half a life.
Portraying ‘Scotland’s favourite novel’
“She sees clearly what she wants for herself, though, and nothing’s going to get in her way. That’s something I admire about her so much. She draws a lot of strength from the earth she’s literally standing on, because she senses she’s connected to it and she deserves to be there.”
Both Young and Den Hertog had Jam in mind for the part before they’d even discussed casting – before Young had even written a word. The play which has emerged is very much in keeping with Young’s previous major works Lost at Sea, which was about the effect of a lost fishing boat on the community and drawn from her own experience, and Eden Court’s Runrig musical The Stamping Ground.
“I was terrified about this notion of what Sunset Song means to people,” says Young. “So many people have read it, it comes with that title of ‘Scotland’s favourite novel’ – there’s a huge amount of pressure there. At some point I had to step back and go, actually, I can’t make a version that will suit everyone. What I have to do is be true to myself and to what interests me.
“I wanted to look at trauma as a central theme within that, and how each life experience Chris has shapes the next chapter. I often think people forget the darker elements of Sunset Song, the violence and abuse, because they read it in school and they’ve soft-focused it. The word ‘romance’ comes up a lot, but she’s in an abusive relationship.”
Where can I watch Sunset Song?
Young’s responsibility as a writer, she says, is to not shy away from any of this.
“There are definitely themes to all of my work, about where you belong and about identity,” she says. “I’ve written very different plays, but these are questions I keep coming back to and probably always will.”
Sunset Song is at His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, from Wednesday, May 8 until Saturday, May 11, and Eden Court, Inverness, from Thursday, May 16 until Saturday, May 18. See aberdeenperformingarts.com and eden-court.co.uk for more information.
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