Digging under the gritty surface of true life tales
Perth Film Society is proud to screen a movie next week (May 16) to help spread awareness of the syndrome widely known as ME – a cause close to the heart of Milnathort-resident Sheena Hewitt.
Aged just 11, Perthshire born and bred Sheena fell ill with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome.
She struggled increasingly to lead a normal child’s life but eventually, after a year, she was still so ill that she had to leave school, never able to return to mainstream education.
And it was to be 15 years before Sheena could even go on a family holiday.
Thirty years after first becoming ill, she’s asked PFS to screen the Oscar shortlisted film documentary, ‘Unrest’ on Wednesday in the Joan Knight Studio Theatre, as an event to mark ME Awareness Week, May 11-17.
Entry at 7.30pm is free but ticketed as numbers are limited, and tickets are available from the Horsecross box offices.
“Unrest” is a first-person story of 28 year-old PhD student Jennifer’s resilience in the face of life-altering loss.
It explores how confronting the fragility of life teaches us its value. How do you make interviews about farming into a piece of vivid theatre?
The PA’s was curious to ask playwright Kieran Hurley about creating the script for Perth Theatre’s ‘A Six Inch Layer of Topsoil and the Fact it Rains’, which is currently touring Perthshire.
If there were less sheep and more porkers in Perthshire, I could be excused for using the expression “making a silk purse out of a pig’s ear”.
But on the Big County’s hill farms it’s white woolly blobs that sprinkle the landscape. Lamb rules here as sheep can make the most windswept spot as home.
For the new work ‘Topsoil’ playwright Kieran had the difficult job of going out into the sticks and spinning raw interviews into the silken thread of a meaningful audience experience.
He explained how it was done: “We had hours upon hours of interview recordings and the first job was to get all of it transcribed.
“Mostly the conversations and interviews were done by director Lu Kemp and myself together, so we went about having conversations about particular themes that were emerging or points of connection between different conversations.
“But the real job of work of carving the script out of these discussions couldn’t really happen until it was all written up in black and white.
“After that it’s a case of picking a kind of structure – a through-line to the conversation the play is having – and identifying key voices that we’ll return to throughout,” Kieran explained.
“Mostly it’s all extracts of verbatim transcripts from the conversations we had, though in some cases some identifiable voices in the play are kind of composites of two or more real people.
“There’s been the occasional bit of poetic licence of this sort in the interests of clarity, I suppose.”
It seemed sensible to ask Kieran if he’d tackled farming life in any previous theatre writing work. His answer was: “Never!” He added: “I think part of the joy of the process was it centred around me and Lu meeting people and having them explain their work and the issues that effect them to us as total laypeople. “It’s been very informative.” So what was the feeling he got from the stories he and Lu heard?
Is Perthshire’s countryside a good place to work and live in these times?
Kieran explained: “We heard such a diverse range of voices that it would be impossible to characterise that simply.
“Some people are struggling very
One woman’s ME battle is told in the film ‘Unrest’ much, others are doing very well indeed.
“And as we spoke to people about the challenges facing food production and agriculture, inevitably we started talking about really big things like Brexit and climate change.
“When the play touches on these issues, Perthshire becomes a kind of stand-in for somewhere much bigger. Scotland, maybe. The UK, possibly even the ‘western world.’
“But we met a lot of lovely people, many of whom have a huge affection for this part of the world. And I’m pretty sure that comes over in the show.
Strathearn Artspace tonight (Friday 11); Blair Atholl Village Hall (Wednesday 16); Alyth Town Hall (Thursday 17); Blairgowrie Town Hall (Friday 18) and Loch Leven Community Campus, (Saturday 19).
All shows begin at 7.30pm,