Céline Savatier-Lahondès & Danièle Berton-Charrière, POURPRE, IHRIM-CLERMONT, UMR 5317, CNRS.
Covid-19 imposed the lockdown on theatres, and paradoxically, through their enthusiasm and hard work, the professionals of the domain enlarged their horizon thanks to radio and online shows, allowing actors and their audiences to virtually escape their own lockdown. The scope of opportunities for live readings and performances was paradoxically larger than usual with live streaming performances from home. Technology made it possible despite the challenges involved.
During the lockdown, two new Scottish plays were available to audiences; David Greig’s Adventures with the Painted People a BBC Radio ‘romance’ (Drama on 3), and George Gunn’s The Fallen Angels of the Moine, a ZOOM rehearsed reading followed by a live chat in which people could give their opinions and exchange ideas and comments.
As a whole, the two Celtic-based plays share many cultural and traditional motifs and sources deriving from Scottish History, ballads and folklore whereas the choices made for the linguistic mode of expression were utterly different. They are stories of spells, of human beings encountering and discovering the otherworld and correlated Celtic-based Scottish culture.
Presentation of the play
Like Neil Marshall’s film Centurion (2010), the play recalls the times when, in their relentless conquest of northern Britain, the Romans had to fight the native Picts, allegedly savage naked warriors painted blue with a dye from the plant called isatis tinctoria (woad).
Whether sole survivor of a Pictish raid on a Roman frontier fort which actually inspired the playwright, or forgotten and lost soldier in the territory of a Pictish ‘witch’, the gist of the tale is the encounter between a man and a woman from different cultures, customs and creeds (‘love and culture on the river Tay’).
David Greig’s latest play, Adventures with the Painted People was initially scheduled in the programme of the Pitlochry Festival Theatre in Scotland in July 2020. Due to the Covid 19 pandemic and the ongoing sanitary regulations, the stage performance was eventually cancelled and a radio performance was presented on BBC Radio 3, on 7th June 2020, as part of the BBC Arts programme entitled Culture in Quarantine. The associated partners were BBC radio 3, Naked Productions, Pitlochry Festival Theatre and the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh.
The premiere onstage performance of the play is now scheduled in Pitlochry on July 22nd- October 1st 2021.
The play involves two main characters, Eithne (played by Kirsty Stuart), a Pictish “witch” in charge of looking after Lucius (Olivier Huband), a Roman officer abducted by the Picts. Other parts (people’s voices heard in the background) were played by members of the Pitlochry Festival Ensemble Theatre.
The production team was composed of Elizabeth Newman (director, artistic director of the Pilochry Festival Theatre), Amy Liptrott (assistant director), Polly Thomas (executive producer), Benjamin Occhipinti (composer and sound designer) and Eloise Whitmore (sound designer).
Radio format, a solution in time of lockdown
BBC Radio 3 Adventures with the Painted People is a relatively short (1h 34mn) but qualitative radio adaptation. David Greig did not have to rewrite the play for the radio since the text had not been written beforehand. The project was well advanced, in close collaboration with director Elizabeth Newman and the play was already scheduled in Pitlochry Festival programme but nothing was written so far, as Greig declared in an interview given on 4th June 2020.[1] Newman wanted to celebrate River Tay as a theme for the anniversary of the Festival and the play actually integrates the river in its plot. When, due to the pandemic, Greig was asked to create a radio play in three weeks, he accepted the challenge and wrote directly for the radio. In the same interview, Greig adds that he kept the play as he had initially conceived it, a two-hander set in AD85. He says he did not make it test the limits of radio by including fantastical elements, as he usually does when he writes for this medium. Furthermore, the blind, audio only format even relieved the playwright of the concern of verisimilitude as far as staging, set and costumes in particular are concerned:
At the same time, I do think it was quite fun and easy to make it work for the medium. One of the difficulties of staging a play set in the past is ensuring a person looks AD85 enough, for example. There’s always a little suspension of disbelief. On the radio, it’s in your head, so it’s even better than film. You can really conjure AD85 and it feels real. I hope we get some benefit, although at its heart I feel it is still a stage play.[2]
Although the author advocates the ease of writing for the radio medium, because, in his own words, it is “utterly free and unlimited”,[3] the above quote also makes it clear that in its essence, “at its heart”, the play is destined to be performed onstage. The word “heart” used by Greig focuses on emotion and emphasizes the constraint imposed by the virus, of not being able to actually perform in front of an audience. Metaphorically and by extension, the heart of the play is also the heart of the playwright, of the actors, of the director and all the production team, and to a greater extent, the heart of the public. Thus, the polysemic word “heart” refers to the essence of the play, and part of this essence also metaphorically designates emotions and feelings, experienced both in the theatre and out of it, in this time of pandemic.
If the radio form somehow naturally keeps the audience away from some of the emotions perceivable when the public is physically gathered in a same room, the result of the BBC Radio 3 adaptation is an intimate piece, wonderfully served by the exceptional work in sound composition. Since it is a new play, the listeners discover its content live, which is a very different experience from listening to the adaptation of a theatre classic where characters and plot are known in advance. In this case, voices and sounds create a landscape which, little by little, illuminates the darkness of the listeners’ imagination and takes them back to AD85 Scotland, to the Pictish territory by the river Tay. Through progressive touches, as if a painter applied colours and light onto a black canvas, the hut where Lucius is kept prisoner appears, and so do the central pillar to which he is attached, the food he is given … The characters also come to life in the listeners’ free, unguided minds – Ethne, the Pictish woman who ‘wants to be Roman’ in order to negotiate the liberty of her people with the general of the Roman fort further down the River Tay, and Lucius, the Roman officer who somehow stands apart from the others. And the two characters, a man and a woman from two different cultures and languages engage in a dialogue.
Language
The play is entirely written in English, although in the interplay with Lucius, Ethne indirectly puts forwards the art of poetry-making, so present in Celtic culture in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, from ancient times to today. She explains how she was courted by a man who used to recite the most beautiful poems for her, in front of the whole tribe. The poem is so well described and praised by Greig that one would have wished to actually hear its sounds and words. The missing Celtic language appears as a regrettable void in the playtext. It leaves the recreation of imaginary sounds up to the audience’s minds while it would have been a treasure to actually hear them live. Although the Celtic Pictish language is now lost, it would be a challenge to recreate it for the play, to hear its ‘music’, or else, Gaelic would enable the Celtic poetic dimension to bloom in the show. This is an appeal to David Greig who often works with specialists in various domains for his writings.
The issue of understanding the words is today solved by using surtitles, as, for example, in Arthur Nauziciel’s Julius Caesar in 2009 or Thomas Ostermeier’s Richard III in 2017 for their French tours. Since neither English nor German are sufficiently mastered by most of the public in France, surtitles allow access to the original version language without losing too much meaning. Furthermore, a large amount of people is now used to hearing Gaelic, as the series Outlander has recently shown. In this American adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s novels, the language appears as exotic and its music is charmingly associated with beautiful landscapes, music and characters. Thus, the general public is now ready for the Celtic tongue, which would be most welcome in a play dealing with culture. In its present state, concerning the question of language, Adventures with the Painted People appears as a sketch, quickly and easily drawn by an author who left further precision in the representation of his own culture for a later stage. The love story does work and the play is pleasant to listen, but it would gain more strength from more verisimilitude in the use of language, as it has from the efficient plot.
Point of view
The plot informs us on the way in which assimilation to Roman culture may have taken place in Celto-Roman time in the British Isles. The point of view adopted in the play is very telling of the actual historical conception undertaken by the British people at large in its wide move towards the acceptation of the Roman culture. Eithne’s “I want to be Roman” corresponds to the ideology Dr Mike Ibeji titled “Striving to be Roman”[4] in his 2011 article for the BBC:
Yet, perhaps Rome’s most important legacy was not its roads, nor its agriculture, nor its cities, nor even its language, but the bald and simple fact that every generation of British inhabitant that followed them - be they Saxon, Norman, Renaissance English or Victorian - were striving to be Roman. Each was trying to regain the glory of that long-lost age when Britannia was part of a grand civilisation, which shaped the whole of Europe and was one unified island.[5]
Over time, the legacy Rome seems to have left is an almost unconscious idea of superiority triggering admiration for its own model of civilisation. In the meantime, generally speaking, Celtic cultures were both depreciated and conceived of a certain feeling of inferiority and self-deprecation which almost naturally led to the quasi disappearance of their languages, mythology and literature. Rome asserted itself as the dominant culture during the conquest, through a successful strategy of impregnation and assimilation, but also in the Renaissance and the 18th century, as the rediscovery of the Classics put forward Roman and Greek cultures as paragons to imitate. Later, in the 19th century, Celtic Studies took pains to impose themselves as valuable areas of research as they had to struggle their way to university courses and chairs.
In Greig’s play, Ethne’s plan is to negotiate her people’s freedom and independence, but her will to become Roman sides with the general historical trend of the British Isles. Her position illustrates Britannia’s ambivalent situation, attached to its native culture but also ready to be impregnated by the Roman imperial model in order to live in peace. One may note that the story is altogether different from that of Boudicca’s warlike episode of struggle against Rome. Greig chose romance over war and dialogue over confrontation in what was introduced as ‘love and culture on the river Tay’.
However, if this dialogue adopts interesting cultural features and motifs of the ancient Celtic culture, it also conveys long lasting misconceptions about Roman superiority, such as the idea that Celts had ‘paths’ while Romans built ‘roads’. This is what Lucius says to Ethne, an argument she does not counter. Actually, in Gaul as in Britain, the Romans applied their techniques of road buildings on already existing Celtic roads. When archaeologists talk of major trade routes in the Celtic world, they do not refer to mere paths. Furthermore, to attest to the presence of road building technologies prior to the Roman invasion, in Ireland and on the continent, timber ways were built over marshes that were of a considerably sophisticated technical level.[6] Were the Picts that different?
Conclusion:
David Greig’s Adventures with the Painted People provides a rare and pleasurable opportunity to dive into the ancient past of the British Isles. The intimate atmosphere of the play is brilliantly forwarded by a sumptuous sound mastering and composition, magnified by the radio format. The actors’ voices are calm, even and rather low, against the turbulence of the outside world, which creates the ideal conditions for a fruitful verbal exchange. The listeners’ imaginations wander, happily captured, like Lucius by Ethne eventually, and recreate the setting of this Pictish village by the River Tay, in AD85.
However, the tension between the two characters never rises beyond astonishment in front of peculiar customs (poem reciting) and a certain feeling of superiority (roads over paths) on the part of Lucius, and admiration for the Roman culture on the part of Ethne (writing system, behaviour, dress, hair style). Greig surfs over common preconceptions which lack the beauty of historical veracity and specific cultural traits like orality. This deprives the play of the character it could have by adding only a few more touches.
There is still time before the premiere for this unprecedented challenge.
[1] Interview with David Greig by Jonathan Marshall for broadwayworld.com on 4th June 2020, accessible at: https://www.broadwayworld.com/westend/article/BWW-Interview-David-Greig-Talks-ADVENTURES-WITH-THE-PAINTED-PEOPLE-20200604, accessed 30/07/20. [2]Ibid. [3]Ibid. [4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/questions_01.shtml, accessed 10/08/20. [5] Ibid. [6] One of the biggest timber road constructions of the Iron Age in Europe is situated in the bog of Corlea, County Longford, in the centre of Ireland. It was about two kilometers long and made of heavy oak planks up to four meters long, laid on longitudinal parallel supports. Each plank was fixed to the support beam using dowels hammered in mortises at each end. Dendrochronology enabled to date the road from 148 BC. In the north of Germany, one of the most massive timber roads was made of three to four-meter long oak planks, visibly designed to facilitate the passage of chariots (see Barry Raftery, in Les Celtes, dir. Sabatino Moscati, ed. Stock, Paris 1997, pp. 628-629, tr. CSL).