Joyce Mcmillan on telling stories
This year’s Scottish Storytelling Festival may not be at its regular home, but the yarns are as meaningful as ever, writes Joyce Mcmillan
Sunday night, and I settle down to watch not a recorded performance, but something taking place in real time; an Open Hearth evening at this year’s Scottish International Storytelling Festival, broadcast from their own homes and workspaces by storytellers from England and Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Netherlands. I’m not sure what to expect; at first there’s a stab of disappointment at not seeing the storytellers gathered on the familiar stage of the Scottish Storytelling Centre at the Netherbow, in the Royal Mile.
What’s clear within seconds, though, is that storytelling is such an essential art- form, and so fundamental to the human condition, that it leaps effortlessly from platform to platform, and can seize the attention of an audience whether the medium is live performance, film, television, or a simple storybook.
Scottish storyteller and host Janis Mackay opens the evening – which circles around themes of forgiveness and redemption – with a profoundly feminist tale of Arthurian times, and of a confrontation between Arthur and a mighty Black Knight who says he will spare the king’s life, if he answers the riddle of what women want. The story is set in Edinburgh, where Arthur wanders the High Street until a hideous hag in a red dress, sitting at the Mercat Cross, whispers to him what is clearly the right answer; in return, though, one of the unmarried knights of the Round Table must marry the hag. The young, handsome and everhonourable Sir Gawain volunteers for this life of marital misery; yet all is not as it seems…
And so it goes, winding irresistibly to the conclusion that what women really want is the power to make their own choices, and determine their own fate; and this tale was only the first of eight stories and ballads, told in less than two hours, that eventually touched on almost all the bitter struggles, and failures of human wisdom, that haunt our world today.
So Peter Chand, from England with a Punjabi heritage, tells the powerful story of a beautiful young prince cursed into becoming a leper, and of how he is saved and restored, partly through the love of a princess forced to marry him by her punitive King Lear of a father. Liz Weir, from Northern Ireland, tells the tale of a travelling carpenter who, when asked to build a terrible high fence between the lands of two warring brothers, instead builds a bridge. And Raphael Rodan, from the Netherlands, tells unsettling stories of his own life – of his childhood in Israel, his youthful attempts to flee from his Jewish heritage and his grandmother’s Holocaust stories, and his eventual recognition that there is no escape from that history, even in Amsterdam.
And that was just one Open Hearth evening of seven scheduled to take place over two weeks, as one strand in a Festival that also includes Global Lab workshops, page after page of events across Scotland, an exhibition at the Netherbow, a programme of family events and a series of prerecorded storytelling sessions, mostly from the stage of the SSC, around the Scottish Government’s Year of Coasts and Waters, which gives the 2020 Festival its overall title – In The Flow – and also provides the title Voyage: A Nation Shaped By The Sea, for the recorded sessions.
So over the first week of the Festival – in sessions which become available to watch anytime, immediately after their Festival premieres – we have voyaged to Norway to fetch the doomed wee Margaret, Queen of Scotland, in Andy Cannon’s beautiful Tale of A Grandson: The Maid of Norway, full of wisdom about how any child’s play can become a gateway to history, if there are adults around with stories to tell. We have accompanied the wonderful historical writer Mandy Haggith to the mighty broch near Lochinver that inspired her historical novels about the journey of the Greek voyager Pythias, who sailed around the coast of Scotland in 320BC; we have heard her read her own words of wisdom about greed, and the possibility of a more sustainable society, to the sound of the waves there.
We have strolled on the beaches of Iona with Samuel Johnson and his loyal Boswell, in a new work- inprogress version of their famous journey to the Western Isles devised by Donald Smith, the man who founded the Storytelling Festival and the Scottish Storytelling Centre itself. And we have heard Mara Menzies and Appiah Campbell tell a mighty story of slavery, of that terrible journey across the Atlantic, and of the legendary woman leader Nanny Of The Maroons, whose magical powers protected her against all the violence of slave owners, and the troops who enforced their rule.
And all this, again, is only a small part of the recorded work, in a Storytelling Festival that is riding the choppy waters of the pandemic with some style. The simplicity of the format helps, of course; and some storytellers are always stronger performers than others, with a more driving and charismatic sense of purpose. Yet overall, the experience of the Storytelling Festival has a life- affirming quality that is almost overwhelming, in its sense that wherever human beings are, and however rough their voyages, this is something that we can always do for and with one another; to lift us from dullness or despair, to transform our perspective for a while, and to know, in the end, that we are not alone.
The Scottish International Storytelling Festival 2020 runs online until 31 October. Programme and tickets at www. sisf. org. uk