Brief Encounters on the West Highland Line coming soon to a railway station near you!
Moira (Rebecca Wilkie) and Kris (Curtis Randall) have just taken over the day-to-day running of your local station tearoom a’top the moor! As they find themselves in the middle of nowhere with only the occasional train coming through, can they keep their eyes on the job and off each other? Luckily, young local misfit Malcolm (Lewis MacRae) is on hand to keep their heads cool.
You’ll get to meet these characters in the new stageplay soon to be performed at a series of railway stations and other venues along the West Highland Line. The brand new play, Brief Encounters on the West Highland Line, is inspired by the classic film Brief Encounter by David Lean and was written by the Iron Road Collective, a West Highland based performing arts cooperative. Each performance is combined with a meal for the audience, and the actors will use each venue as it is, with the counter area as a performance space. The play brings together themes of fleeting relationships, seasonal employment and isolation in the West Highlands – all handled with a warm sense of humour.
The concept for the play came from the West Highland Community Rail Partnership, a volunteer-led organisation that aims to inspire railway appreciation in the communities along the line. They were successful in securing funding for a West Highland Line drama project from the National Lottery’s Awards for All and from ScotRail’s Cultural and Arts Fund, which is managed by Foundation Scotland. They then approached the Iron Road Collective and asked them to produce a railway-centred drama project that would celebrate our local stations. The partnership also asked the professional actors to involve one or more local amateurs with their production. After liaising with Lochaber High School’s drama department, the artists therefore sent an invite to Lewis MacRae from Glenfinnan to take on the role of young brainbox Malcolm. Lewis is currently taking his Advanced Highers in drama and enthusiastically embraced the opportunity – as long as it fitted in with is exam schedule.
The Brief Encounter film is based on Noel Coward’s stageplay Still Life, and to start with, the Iron Roads artists considered putting on the Coward play in various lineside venues. However, they felt that to do a 1930s period piece set in London in a remote West Highland location just didn’t seem right. So instead they wrote an homage to the famous film and set it in our present-day West Highlands, discussing themes and issues relevant to our location and time. Together, the rail partnership and the artists decided to approach real lineside cafes and restaurants and ask if they would consider taking on the role of performance venues. ‘The response has been fantastic,’ says director Paul Hernes Barnes, who himself graduated from Lochaber Highschool’s drama department some six years ago. ‘Co-operating with these local businesses has been great,’ he continues, ‘and performing in their informal, non-theatre spaces offers an exciting prospect for us. This will make each performance different, for us as well as the audience. Our aim is to keep things fresh.’
The Iron Road Collective is a group of young performing artists based in the Highlands. Their creative output is inspired by the Iron Road to the Isles, the railway that connects the remote West Highland communities with each other, and with the commercial and industrial centres of the south. A sense of place, locality and cultural heritage is always at the heart of their creative practice.
The West Highland Community Rail Partnership is a voluntary community organisation that works with the railway industry to make train travel a more attractive option for people along the West Highland Line.