Script Notes: Scottish identity

"Sunset Song" is an unrepentant and unsentimental celebration of Scottish identity, and a confident deployment of Scottish idioms and icons. Grassic Gibbon brilliantly turns Scottish forms of speech into a uniquely direct but highly flexible choric narrative. He has a persuasive "insiders" accuracy when describing landscape, weather, society and individuals. He identifies the virtues of self-sufficiency, hard work, independence, generosity, neighbourliness, respect for education, lack of pretension; but he is clear-sighted about the vices of narrow-mindedness, meanness of spirit, callousness, ignorance, salaciousness, and hypocrisy. He is also honest enough to see that vice and virtue can co-exist: Long Rob sometimes beats his horses in uncontrollable rage; and the unpleasant Mistress Mutch sings with simple beauty at Chris’s wedding.