Surrounded by projections of seascapes with bobbing Stornoway fishing boats we are brought to a place – a dwelling place.
It’s an abandoned cottage in the Outer Hebrides, discovered by Jamie and Lewis Wardop with its contents largely intact. As the projections change we visit the house and delve into what it tells us about the island, its people and its history.
Around the space there are columns housing tv monitors and bearing maps, a suitcase half-packed, half detritus. Translucent screens allow projections on a number of layers and a hanging sculpture of a four-armed shirt apes those left hanging on a door.
Our hosts introduce a story of a crofting community “delicate as a spider’s web”, torn apart by earlier land clearances and whose very nature was under threat. Into the picture steps Lord Leverhulme with his plans for an island utopia with large scale industry; strategies which took no account of the locals’ needs. Seeing crofting as a millstone and not understanding the desire to increase their contact with the land, he fails, hardly creating a single job. After his death the Chairman of Lever brothers commented “The best thing you can do with your islands is to sink them in the Atlantic for four hours, and then pull them back up again”.
And with that the video projections change and pan over maps of the far flung islands before settling on the abandoned house, its crumbling shell still protecting a bewildering array of objects – furniture, clothes, a Polaroid camera. Cassette tapes and discarded books spark recorded music and readings. Nostalgia of course, as in Lady Nairn’s song “The Auld Hoose”.
With performed fiddle music the nature of the ceilidh is explained – once celebratory, now a remembering; a piper playing in a graveyard. Images trigger a poem by Iain Crichton-Smith with the words “they built a barometer of history”. We draw near a fireside ghost story collected from the Gaelic in Alastair Alpin MacGregor’s Peat-Fire Flame.
And throughout the ever changing images move and swirl from the cottage to hallucinogenic tartan tourism and techno fishing industry, conjured up by our hosts who, unlike the Wizard of Oz, are not hidden behind a curtain.
The delivery could be more confident and charismatic; the spoken word sounding too portentous and lines like “the cracked paint of the ceiling of my mind”, bordering on pretentious. The invitation to wander is only partly achievable as the narrative drives the action. The extension of this into a promenade piece with more of the chaos of the cottage would make it more meditative and immersive.
That said, this is a carefully constructed and meticulously researched piece that shows immense skill in weaving all this together.
Show Times: 3 – 19 (not 4, 15) August 2016 at 4pm and 7pm.
Tickets: £12 (£8) £36 (family).
Suitability: 14+