Shay Mace
Gateway Festival returns to Edinburgh’s Studio Theatre this week, with six original plays from emerging creatives in the Scottish Theatre Industry. Their ambition is to build community, foster development and provide a platform for new writing – with plays from the writers seeing their fledgling debuts across the week before continuing their creative advancement into new forms in the future. It’s an aspiring and venerable showcase offering, put together by Dracume Theatre and facilitated by the city’s stalwart Capital Theatres venue operator alongside Queen Margaret University.
Across three nights, one act plays are performed back-to-back, with vague groupings of theme and identity providing a tether for each evening. Of the first night’s productions, In A Big Country and The Tide, there were obvious connections between the power of nature, the Scottish outdoors, and tensions surrounding our relationship to the natural world in the face of climate collapse, intensifying political division, and increasing precarity for those living in rural and coastal communities. Both plays following couples at each end of their lives offer much insight and clarity into the big ideas they put onto the stage, though in their continued development, they are likely to find a greater depth of focus on what they’d like the audience to walk away thinking and feeling.
Gateway Festival continues tonight, Tuesday 3rd November, and tomorrow, Wednesday 4th November, at the Studio Theatre in Edinburgh from 7:30pm (2hrs 15min, inc. interval). Tickets are available through the Capital Theatres Online Box Office.
In A Big Country – Unsettling Right to Roam Drama with Verve and Vitality
To Ben Ramsay’s In A Big Country, then, which sees a struggling young couple set out on their first ‘staycation’ in the distant forests of a large rural Highland estate. Frederik Bang plays the boisterous James, who cannot yet afford to take his down-to-earth girlfriend Maisie, performed by Rachael Campbell, for a Sicilian sojourn. Instead the two find themselves trying to reignite their faltering romance by the campfire while fighting off midges, before an unexpected and unsettling visitor arrives in the form of Jamie Cowan’s Richard. Their quiet getaway soon turns into a rampant exploration of solitude, radicalisation, dishonesty and fervour, as Richard pulls the puppet strings on their relationship with disarming mirth.
Bang and Campbell provide a plentiful balance of humour and turmoil, with rock solid chemistry that is as believable as it is disaffecting. Cowan’s intervention as the sinister and ghoul-like Richard is genuinely eerie and ominous, and the play carries itself with verve and unsettling charm into its denouement. At its most flavourful, the piece sees an interaction between James and Richard in which the former is swept up by the latter’s fanaticising and violent attitudes, in a character unravelling that Ramsay’s script could have delved much further into. Jamie’s nonchalant attitudes about immigration, and disaffection with how his life has turned out offer an insightful window into how readily radicalised vulnerable young men can be, which feels especially pungent against the backdrop of today’s backdrop of Reform UK and Andrew Tate.
Ramsay’s script proves him a convincing storyteller, able to catapult big concepts into the minutia of James and Maisie’s capitulating relationship. It is within the character of Richard, however, that it feels there should be a bigger pay-off, and a more rounded discussion of precisely what divides the two classes on stage over the Right to Roam, land ownership, ambition and aspiration. As something of a revenge piece, Maisie eventually comes into a moment of strength against James’ tiring cowardice, and here the piece’s quite slender direction could be better utilised to provide a more powerful vision of the misogyny, belittlement and disempowerment she has to overcome.
Recommended Drink: Pair this with a bottle of Buckfast by the campfire, or a sip of a very expensive French red wine from Richard’s cellar, if you dare.
The Tide – Powerful Wind-Swept Two-Hander Sees a Couple on the Precipice
The sea has come to reclaim what is hers – and Kirsten Maguire’s Helen is not ready to let go of the son she has lost, and Paul Wilson’s Grant is unwilling to leave their seafront property that their child may well return to. After a storm rips away their garden decking and their son’s precious wind chime, the couple are faced with evacuation to a modern hilltop development. But the walls of their house have heard many secrets, and as the cracks begin to appear both literally and figuratively, Helen and Grant’s marriage and the worlds they inhabit find a crossroads that may be enough to pull them apart.
Sophie Good’s intimate and involving script gives plenty for the two actors to chew on across a tribulating story of grief, loss, nostalgia and penance. While Maguire’s presentation of Helen feels more rounded and enrapturing than Wilson’s Grant, the two carry the narrative with soulful performances that are injected with sorrow and adversity. Maguire is given the opportunity to perform a magnificently emotive monologue ahead of the piece’s climax, which is genuinely mesmerising in its delivery and in how Good’s words capture the broken woman she has become. Good never treats either character as living in a silo of their own, instead, the strained relationship between the two is foregrounded, against big themes exploring the impacts of coastal erosion, the invasion of big tech into our lives, and how to find solace in moving past trauma and unanswered questions in our lives.
I can’t help but feel that the piece deserves both a greater ambiguity and consequence to its big finish – as the storm hits and we are taken into candlelit surrounds, the plot struggles to find its way to a natural close which might have left the audience with broader questions about both characters and their future. While the script skilfully weaves in the central question of evacuation in the face of rising sea levels, it sometimes lacks the same integration in its exploration of the lives of missing people, and what they leave behind. There is a more fervent version of this story laying beneath, that is begging to be explored, especially given its finesse and introspection in unpacking Helen and Grant’s relationship.
Recommended Drink: When the lights go out and the kettle won’t turn on, that calls for a dram of Whisky.
Gateway Festival continues tonight, Tuesday 3rd November, and tomorrow, Wednesday 4th November, at the Studio Theatre in Edinburgh from 7:30pm (2hrs 15min, inc. interval). Tickets are available through the Capital Theatres Online Box Office.
Isadora
