Bondagers - Maggie Janet Dye, Sara Ann Scott-Jones, Tottie
Irene Allan, Jenny Jo Freer and Liza Beth Marshall.
© Peter Adamson September 2001
Bondagers
- tour
Playwright - Sue Glover
Director - Ken Alexander and Rita Henderson
Designer - Karen Tennent
Lighting Designer - Peter Hargreaves
Company - Co-production between the Byre Theatre, St Andrews and
Perth Theatre.
Venue - Byre Theatre, then touring throughout Scotland
Dates - 13 Sept to 24 Nov, tour details at end of review
Reviewer - Thelma Good
At the start they look upward, the bondagers of the play, their faces
framed in their distinctive wide brimmed bonnets, gazing at the sky,
the frequent ceiling to their lives. From it come most of their trials,
one way or another. They're the lowest form of female labour, hired
on an annual basis by hinds (male farmhands) in turn hired by tenant
farmers. From the Hiring Fair in coldest February to the Flittin' in
May, through the long summer days towards the harvest, we see them work,
and sometimes dance and sing their way through the seasons.
This new production captures the closeness of their lives as they reap
and sow for others and are a crop themselves. On the first night the
production is already fertile with the beauty, richness, comedy and
cadences of the script, the atmospheric lighting showing the changing
seasons in the colours of the sky and the finely tuned rhythms of the
direction. This production will grow even more as it tours in Scotland
for the first time.
Young Tottie, Irene Allan, hovers on the edge of a womanhood
she is too simple to fulfill. Allan gives her a vivid reckless
innocence, later tinged with desperate confusion as Tottie dimly realises
she can't ever be like the others. Her mother Sara could have gone to
Canada with Patie the man she was handfasted to, until she realised
that she was really hefted to the fields she was born among. Ann
Scott-Jones is moving as Sara, wise in her understanding that to
let a love go is sometimes all you can do, to try to hold on will kill
it. When she speaks of Patie you know her love is still alive, still
feeding her. As Maggie, Janet Dye is a magnificently thrawn farmworker's
wife, trachled with many bairns, preferring the daytime to her nightly
struggles. She keeps a wary eye on young Liza, Beth Marshall,
her man Andra's new bondager fresh to the work, keen to be out in the
fields - she can't thole her domestic chores.
Jenny, Jo Freer, slightly older than Liza, knowing more of the
ways of the life, tries to encourage Liza to learn the skills which
will get her into the farmhouse. Ellen, Fiona Steele, is an ex-bondager
now married to their tenant farmer who supports ideas to improve the
lives they lead. Steele captures Ellen's lively spiritedness,
straddling the divide she has bridged, she shines with the uncertainty
and excitement of one recently arrived in the big hoose, learning a
completely new way of living. In their performances all the actors bring
vividly to life the lost intricacies of this wholly dependant way of
life, even the unseen Landowner is vulnerable if they fail to bring
full fertility from the land they labour on.
Bondagers Ellen - Fiona Steele © Peter Adamson September 2001
Bondagers is set in the 1860s, when male farm workers in the Borders
were required to provide a women to work with them at half the going
rate. This system went on in some parts of lowland Scotland until the
last war, by which time mechanisation and regulation of wages had taken
over. But the challenges of the womens' lives are with us today - whether
to stay or move away, why get married, even sexual harrassment are dealt
with, and also how we handle the frailer people in our midst. The Scots
language is well sown by Glover in the text so that you learn the meanings
as they flourish in the womens' speech. If you need it, which I doubt,
the programme gives useful background and a glossary.
This fine professional production, less stylised than the 1995 Traverse
Fringe one, will take this now much translated and loved play out to
its heartland. It will surely nourish a new generation of audiences
who didn't see its original productions in Glasgow and Edinburgh as
well as those who loved it then and will find this a sucessful reinterpretation.
© Thelma Good 14 September 2001
Tour Details-
13
- 15 Sept 8pm Byre Theatre St Andrews 01334 475000
17 - 18 Sept 7.30pm Howden Park Centre Livingston 01506
433634
19 - 20 Sept 7.30pm Palace Theatre Kilmarnock 01563 523590
21 - 22 Sept at 8pm Byre Theatre of St Andrews 01334 475000
24 - 25 Sept 7.30pm Adam Smith Theatre Kirkcaldy 01592
412929
27 - 29 Sept 8.00pm Sat mat 2.30pm Eden Court Theatre Inverness
01463 234234
1 Oct 7.30pm Theatre Royal Dumfries 01387 247780
2 Oct 7.30pm Old Well Theatre Moffat (Tickets Art Gallery
High St Moffat)
3 Oct 7.30pm Greenock Arts Guild Theatre 01475 723038
4 - 6 Oct 7.45pm Cumbernauld Theatre 01236 732887
12 - 27 Oct not Sun. Eves 7.30pm Sat mat 2.30pm Perth Theatre
01738 621031
29 Oct 7.30pm Woodend Barn Banchory 01330 825431
30 Oct 7.30pm Elgin Town Hall 01343 562600
31 Oct 7.30pm Haddo House Hall 01224 641122 / 01651 851770
2 Nov 7.30pm Corran Halls Oban 01631 567333
5 - 6 Nov 7.30pm Village Theatre East Kilbride 01355 248669
7 - 10 Nov 7.30pm Brunton Theatre Musselburgh 0131 665
2240
13 - 24 Nov 8pm matinee 17 & 24 at 2.30pm Byre Theatre of St
Andrews 01334 475000