‘Every light casts a shadow; every fire ends in dust’. So reads the programme note to Anything That Gives Off Light.
Possibly so, but the enigmatic epigram encapsulates by unconscious obfuscation the essence of this exploration of Scottish-American connections and some elements of the Scotch-Irish past.
To describe Anything That Gives Off Light as ‘quirky’ might be to be kind, as it rambles to the extent that some recognition from the Ramblers’ Association might not be out of place.
The piece opens in an anonymous bar, Brian (Brian Ferguson) encounters Red (Jessica Almasy) and the pair begin a journey across a selective Scots-American historical hinterland, accompanied by Brian’s pal Iain (Sandy Grierson).
However, collaborative working on the script appears to have resulted in a patchwork less satisfying than anything produced by a quilting bee, and despite the richness of the ‘Scotch Irish’ experience – these being Scots settlers from (mainly) the north of Ireland migrated to North America owing to religious persecution in the late seventeenth century and beyond – there is little opportunity to assess it here.
At one point, the 1745 Rising gets dragged in, along with a disconnected diatribe aimed at highlanders, despite some thirty per cent of Charles Stuart’s army being disgruntled lowland Episcopalians.
Adam Smith gets his ‘invisible hand’ flung in his face, although it’s clear that Smith’s frequently misinterpreted reference is to the propitious connections between Scots merchants in Holland, the Americas and his native Kirkcaldy.
In both instances one struggles to make a connection with whatever may be the intention of ‘Whatever Gives Off Light’, but there’s little time to do so before we are whisked away to witness the effects of contemporary mining in West Virginia.
As will be gathered, there is much to annoy in this offering, though not in the ways theatre is meant to carry out this function.
Much that might be pertinent is either mentioned in passing or passed over in silence; the impulses that took so many across the Atlantic, their visitation on the native population of violent death or fatal illness, the complicity of Scots skippers and merchants in the human trafficking of their own (Stevenson’s David Balfour was no isolated case, and luckier than most), and most of all perhaps the failure of Anything That Gives Off Light to so much as nod at the contradictions of a liberalism that prioritised property over liberty until progressive opinion turned humans (eventually including servants, slaves and women in this dispensation) into possessors of their individuality.
Smith warned against allowing commerce to dictate to government, a warning we have ignored, the consequences amply demonstrated in a climactic scene where human interference brings about natural destruction.
All too late, of course, although some twenty minutes could have been shorn from this meandering, overblown exercise that tentatively touches on its subject, but fails to grasp it.
Times: 18-25 August, 7.30pm, 20 and 24 August 2.30pm, 26th August 12.00pm
Tickets: £25 (discounts available)