Sunset Song

Perth Concert Hall

NEIL COOPER

AS with many women of her generation, there is something tragic about Chris Guthrie, the heroine of Lewis Grassic Gibbons’s A Scots Quair novels.

Or at least that seems to be the case in this new touring co-production by the enterprising Sell A Door Theatre Company and Greenock’s Beacon Arts Centre of Alastair Cording’s evergreen stage adaptation of the trilogy’s first part.

Here, book-loving free-spirit Chris, living off the land with her bullying father John (ferociously played by Alan McHugh) and eternally pregnant mother Jean, is forced to put aside her windswept ideals and grow up too soon as she finds herself shunted by circumstance from one patriarchy to another.

Even the emancipation her inheritance provides can’t save her from the brutalising effects of little boys’ games, although by the end, she finally seems to have found salvation of sorts.

The corrugated iron skyline of Jan Bee Brown’s set lends an overridingly grim air to Julie Ellen’s production, which looks to future conflicts as much as the one it occupies as a cast of nine adopt an out-front approach resembling an exercise in communal storytelling.

As local stud Ewan Tavendale, Craig Anthony-Ralston demonstrates a wounded machismo, and there is strong musical direction from Morna Young, who plays a live folk-based score with other members of the cast.

It is Rebecca Elise’s vibrant Chris that shines through the mire here, however.

Yet even as she finds some kind of emancipation, one longs for a sharper contrast between the brighteyed idyll she yearns for at the start of the play and what happens when reality bites beyond it.