Director's Notes: Producing the play

These notes were written well before the 2001 production rehearsals started, and for me everything changes in rehearsal, usually the moment I hear the actors read the lines for the first time. That is what makes theatre different, as it is a collaboration between many people with different experience and understandings that they bring to the same text. The comments below apply as much to the 2002 revival as to the 2001 production, with the exception of the problems with touring to different size theatres.  Even so, the design of the show remains basically the same, and it was informed by the considerations I outline below.

• Collaboration and the adaptation
• Ensemble playing
• Work & Community
• Design and setting
• Language
• Music and song

Collaboration and the adaptation

Directing an adaptation of a novel is a strange business. The book may be the basis for the adaptation and the reason for doing the show, but you must leave it behind and focus on the play. There are always things from the novel left out of adaptations that cannot be accommodated - maybe because of the number of actors, the limitations of the stage or the time available. But members of the audience may not ever have read the book, so you can't assume they know anything other than what you present. It is necessary to concentrate on what you have in the playscript.

However the advantage of having the novel in the background is that it allows for collaboration between the various artists involved - the writer (adaptor), actors, designer, director and so on. All have equal access to the source material - the novel - so all can contribute to the creative process of transferring its meaning to the stage as fully as possible. During rehearsals I will refer everyone to the book from time to time so that we can all apply our imaginations to how to get across a particular feeling or a particular moment in a completely different medium. Lewis Grassic Gibbon had to use language to do it, as that is all he had to work with, but we have lighting, music, stage pictures, acting and words at our disposal. Already the adaptor has economically worked with words, so we have to fill them out with the other means to express more thoroughly the story and emotion of the book.

Ensemble playing

Sunset Song is scripted for an ensemble company. This means that a large number of characters are played by a small number of actors. Some characters appear very briefly, some throughout the play. This is partly a matter of economics - it would be costly to employ a different actor for every character - but also a matter of style that reflects some of the concerns of the piece (see Work & Community, below). The convention will therefore be set up in the production that an actor playing a character will briefly take on other roles before returning to the original major character.

Ensemble playing makes it easier for an actor to take on performing music, moving the furniture and other stage business without interfering with the theatrical reality of the show - the audience knows they are actors performing and accepts that they will step in and out of character regularly. Similarly there may be moments of non-naturalistic staging where actors are not playing particular characters but creating images of rural life or work.

Ensemble playing means we will have to find a way to give the audience the information they need to know who an actor is playing at any time. Repetitive costume changes can quickly become tedious. It may be a vocal or physical change that is necessary.

Work & Community

One aspect of Sunset Song that ensemble playing will help us present is the continuous work that goes on in Kinraddie. Chris Guthrie and her neighbours and family never stop working. The ensemble nature of the production should allow us to suggest this endless toil, with actors breaking off from work to create a scene and then continuing with their tasks once the scene has finished. This should also enhance the sense of a small and claustrophobic community, constantly overlooking each other's lives and work, breaking off a job to join in a conversation or comment on someone else's behaviour and then smoothly resuming their labour once the discussion has finished.

An important part of the book Sunset Song is the 'Speak', the continuous village gossip that passes word around, tells and embroiders stories. In the script the adaptor has used this to represent the community, its morality and its views. This is where the use of ensemble playing helps marry the form and the content of the play. No one actor is given the lines of the Speak, but they are shared amongst all the actors, thus representing the whole village. It is also unspecified whether particular lines of the Speak are taken by specific characters - whether the actor playing Chae Strachan, for example, delivers lines of the Speak as Chae, or as another un-named character. This will be determined in rehearsal.

Design and setting

The design of the production of Sunset Song was influenced by a number of factors. A basic was the ability to tour a set to fit into very different venues from medium sized theatres to small halls: it had to be flexible and able to create a complete look in spaces that might have a chequerboard floor or mustard yellow walls. The set also had to represent a wide variety of locations from the hills of the Mearns to the farm kitchen. It had to create a world where the fluid, ensemble playing could work easily, moving swiftly from one scene to another. The designer and I wanted the land to be a strong feature of the visuals, as it is such a strong concern of Chris Guthrie's. Change was another important aspect of the story that we hoped to express in the design. Very importantly, it had to look good: theatre is a visual artform and we wanted a design that was not just functional but also beautiful.

The resulting set is simple and clean. A wooden floor expresses the simplicity of the lives of the characters. A separate element represents the land as it changes through the seasons and through the passage of time. Nothing is too specific and so changes of location can be quickly effected by acting or the introduction of simple props.

Language

Lewis Grassic Gibbon wrote beautifully and the adaptation is generally faithful to the book, occasionally transposing passages to a new place in the story where they can be used to better effect. The novelist wrote at a time when Scottish words and dialect were seldom used in literature, but he wanted to portray a particular Scottish world. He ended up creating a semi-Scots, where few Scottish words are used but a strong sense of Scots speech - and more particularly the speech of the North East of Scotland - is given by the rhythms of the language and the use of the Speak. He was writing for a readership that might well not have understood North Eastern dialect.

Some of the same constraints apply to this production. The show will tour to the Western Isles, Ayrshire and the cities as well as the rural North East. To produce it in authentic Aberdeenshire accents would make it difficult for many audiences to understand and would alter the linguistic style of the book. We will need to create a theatrical equivalent of Grassic Gibbon's work, understandable by a wide audience. This also universalises the story the play tells. Much of Chris Guthrie's story could be replayed in many parts of rural Scotland where ruined cottages and war memorials tell the same story of crofting, death and change. One important consideration however is the need to retain the North Eastern quality of the language. Much Scottish theatre makes use of Glasgow and West Central Scotland accents. The recent history of those areas is generally urban and industrial and the use of that voice is quite alien to the story of Sunset Song.

Music and song

The 'song' in Sunset Song could be understood as the story, in the form of a ballad or a saga, as the language of the Speak, or as the music that the characters enjoy and use at moments of emotion. Certainly music plays an important part in the piece. At its heart is the lament 'The Flouers o' the Forest', which brings together the old and the new by connecting the dead of the First World War with the warriors of an older Scotland. But also central are the songs that Chris sings - about the pleasures of sexual love when she meets the tinker in the barn (and which is reprised as she prepares for her wedding) and about her father at the end of the first half of the play. It is interesting that both are about sexual and passionate matters. Music is a powerful way to present strong emotional ideas, ideas that perhaps can't quite be expressed by words alone.

During each song Chris develops: she stops being a girl and develops sexual feelings; and she grows to love and understand the passions of the father that previously were hateful to her. Because Chris grows up through the songs, they don't become static moments in the play, when the plot stops and a song begins, but they continue the action and development of the character and story. Similarly, when The Flouers o' the Forest is played at the end, it means something different to when Chris sang it at her wedding. Then she sang it easily, perhaps unaware of its meaning, but when she hears it at the end she understands all too clearly its power and story.

Part  1: Director's Notes
Part  2: Producing the play