An eventful trip

I've just returned from visiting the Horse + Bamboo touring company - Mark, Jonny, Mel and Jordanna - on Deeside; partly to see the company and partly to film the show.

Banchory - Woodend Barn

First stop was at a really beautiful and well run art centre, Woodend Barn, at Banchory – close to Aberdeen. Here we had a great turn out, the 120 seater almost full and a very, very enthusiastic reception.

Some of the comments:

“Wow! Lost for words...moved to tears. Thank you”

“Exquisite theatre + art + music. Thank you for a stunning piece of art and a real tribute to the human spirit.”

“One of the most interesting theatrical performances I have ever seen”.

Braemar Village Hall

Then, after a drive to Inverness to the opening of the Scottish Mental Health Art and Film Festival at Eden Court I drove back through the Cairngorms to Braemar and the tiny but characterful village hall. Here we were welcomed by a small and mysterious group of very talented musicians greeting the audience as they arrived by playing in the foyer. Again, there was a great reception for the show:

“You took me on a journey into the life of Angus. An amazing story, brilliantly told, evocative, emotional, educational – a tear was shed, a wonderful performance – thank you – a visual picnic and feast.”

“Magical. Brilliantly conceived and performed. Very moving – thanks.”

The road to Glenshee

Then through Glenshee to Perth and the Weaver of Grass exhibition in the Museum and Art Gallery. One of the things this year is how much is happening related to Angus MacPhee. In Inverness there are guided walks of the places he worked (on Wednesday 9^th October at 1pm and 6pm, with Karrie Marshall at the site of Craig Dunain, the mental hospital where Angus lived for 50 years); a reading of poetry by Chrys Salt and a talk by Roger Hutchinson, author of 'The Silent Weaver'. Saturday 12^th October is 'Angus McPhee day' – a celebration of creativity, and alongside these activities our friend Joanne B Kaar will be running a grass weaving workshop, and our show will be playing at Eden Court Theatre at 7pm.

From the exhibition in Perth Art Gallery and Museum

The Perth exhibition is very impressive, and it also features the film of Joanne demonstrating how Angus made his weavings. The gallery includes great examples of Angus' work collected by Joyce Laing, including several that I hadn't seen before. It's overwhelming and very pleasing to see so much interest now in Angus and his work. Posters and flyers of the exhibitions, our show, and these various Angus-related events and activities are to be found all over the country. How much has changed in just one year. 

The home straight

I arrived back from a short but refreshing break in France and Portugal to find an opened package on my desk. Joanne B Kaar had sent me the grass boots she has made for our show. These are to be worn by Angus at the same time as the swallow-tail coat and sunburst hat (see previous blogs); more on this here. 

Alison, helped by Vanessa Card and Christina Eddowes, had been busy all week. Down in our theatre space the cloth-work for the set is beginning to take shape. Alison told me it was all taking her longer than she expected, and she still has a few days work to complete the job. However, she has prepared the cloth surfaces on the wheeled flats and so I've been able to start painting these. They are mobile flat screens that can be turned to create the garden of Craig Dunain, and this will allow a sudden transition from the pale colours of the island scenes to the colourful garden in which Angus started his weaving project.

No word from Daniella Orsini, our animator, or Loz Kaye, the Musical Director, who should be beginning to start their parts of the Angus jigsaw, and I'll need to follow these up. In fact there's any number of things that urgently need to be got underway - the Gaelic voiceovers, and the translations, for starters. 

Finally, I had a helpful email from Roger Hutchinson, who tells me (see the previous post) that there are photographs of Neil, Angus's father. Fortunately my mask isn't too different from the photograph Roger showed me, although my mask has a moustache, whereas Neil, in the photo, is clean-shaven. However the prominent moustache is an excellent way to identify Neil as he moves from being represented by a foot-high puppet to a masked performer so I'm inclined to keep it in, strict accuracy notwithstanding!

The Joys of Rethinking

One of the joys of having time to rework a script is the moment of awareness when one recognises that an idea was, in fact, bound by a previously unrecognised convention. 

Until the past week it never occurred to me that in imagining Angus's work I had somehow slipped into thinking of it almost wholly in terms of the pieces rescued by Joyce Laing; those pieces I had seen in her collection in Pittenweem. 

Then, in discussion with Alison, we realised that both Joyce herself, and Roger Hutchinson in 'The Silent Weaver' describe some of the exotic costumes that were reported to them by the staff at Craig Dunain. Weavings long lost, but extravagant pieces that sound as if the larger pieces still owned by Joyce (above) were simply sketches for bigger ideas. 

In The Silent Weaver, the farm manager at the hospital farm, Jock MacKay, is quoted "He (Angus) made a cap, you know, like a captain on a ship, and he made a coat, a swallow-tail coat..." Robert Poulson, a gardener at Craig Dunain, remembers "He wore his own hats most of the time...sometimes a straw fore-and-aft..." and Joyce herself quotes a nurse saying that once he made an 'opera coat'.

So I rewrote a scene where Angus appears in such a get-up; representing a climax of his time weaving at the hospital, and showing Angus almost as if he were appearing in a theatre production of his own devising, whereas in the earlier script the weavings themselves had been relegated to the role of mere props in his workshop garden. 

I sent off an email to Joanne B Kaar, outlining the idea, and worried that it might be a step too far for her - as so far she has, heroically, taken on the enormous job of replicating works by Angus that we can see today. Would this prove to be too much of a challenge - to re-imagine some of his most inventive pieces? Not at all, Joanne replied immediately - "Exciting, yes! Swallow-tail and sun-burst hat are now whirling around my head."

Craig Dunain

On my way back from visiting Joanne I passed through Inverness and thought it only natural to visit Craig Dunain, the psychiatric hospital where Angus MacPhee has passed 50 years, and where he had made his woven garments. I knew, as Esther and Helen had visited just over  a year ago (see the blog for October 2010), that the place was in a state of development but I still wasn't quite prepared for what I found. 

The gardens were fenced off - all part of the hard hat zone - so I couldn't really see much of the place where Angus had worked. But incredible to think how short a time has passed since this was the main mental hospital for the whole of the Highland Region. Now it's well on the way to being swanky housing - apartments and penthouses for the successful people of Inverness. There's already a smart reception unit for prospective purchasers. 

Yet, in 1961 there were 1,051 people in Craig Dunain Hospital, almost 0.4% of the Highland population. Angus entered Craig Dunain on the 31st December 1946, and left there early in 1996. This statistic and much more about Angus MacPhee and the circumstances that surround his life are to be found in Roger Hutchinson's new book - The Silent Weaver, now published and in your local bookshop (or in Amazon. of course). Much to be recommended at £8.99 and published by Birlinn. 

Developments - and crunch time

As I get back into things after the holiday break I'm discovering that developments around Angus MacPhee's story are coming thick and fast.

First, tucked among my emails were several from Joanne B. Kaar. One was her discovery in a paper from the University of Auckland of native Australian stitching and basketry techniques of a diagram of the characteristic stitch used by Angus. Her partner Joe had sketched this identical technique when they were working with Joyce Laing in Pittenweem recently, attempting to figure out exactly how Angus made his woven pieces. Photographs of his work, even in close up, don't provide sufficient information to see how the components of the weave have been formed. Through persistent research and analysis it has finally turned up elsewhere - the other side of the world.

Then Joanne excitedly copied me into a photograph from the excavations of the native American site at Mesa Verde in Colorado, USA, where a grass slipper or sock, woven from yucca twine, has been uncovered which could easily have been one of Angus's creations.

At Horse + Bamboo we're rapidly approaching crunch time for putting together a bid for financial support of a tour of 'Angus' throughout the Islands, Highlands, and Scotland generally, in the summer of 2012. Because of the changes in arts funding for our programme of work this will have to be an entirely self-supporting tour, meaning that none of our grant from the Arts Council of England can be used towards the work or the tour, even if it subsequently tours in England. This, of course, makes life very difficult for us - and Esther and Helen are planning a visit to Uist to meet key people in order to help us put together such a bid. It's going to be a hard job - so cross your fingers and wish them well.

Finally Roger Hutchinson's new book 'The Silent Weaver' has reached that stage in its journey that it can be pre-ordered on Amazon. I've read it - it's a fine book, well up to his high standards of story-telling, and providing a very full background to the circumstances of Angus's life. Strongly recommended to anyone interested in this amazing story. 

The Silent Weaver

Within the past hour I've finished reading the proof copy of The Silent Weaver that the author Roger Hutchinson very kindly allowed me to read before its forthcoming publication in September. This is a detailed story of Angus McPhee's life - in fact its full title is 'The Silent Weaver: The Extraordinary Life and Work of Angus MacPhee'. 

The information for my own play about Angus has so far been derived almost entirely from the short book Weaver of Grass, by Joyce Laing, and it was through Joyce that I heard about Roger's book. I've read Calum's Road - Roger Hutchinson's previous and very successful book about a crofter from Raasay, and it occurred to me, as I began reading The Silent Weaver, that his new book had the potential to upset all the notions and ideas that came together to form the raw material for my production with Horse + Bamboo Theatre (as yet untitled, but we currently refer to it as, simply, 'Angus'). 

Trial collar for our production of
'Angus' by Joanne B Kaar

Roger Hutchinson's book is beautifully written and clearly very well researched - not only the particular details of Angus McPhee's life, but also with regard to those things that helped shape it - grass weaving in the crofting community; the soldiering of the Lovat Scouts; the Art Brut movement; the treatment of mental illness in the Highlands during the Twentieth Century, for example. 

Despite this I've put the book down feeling pleased and perhaps a little surprised that the only real modification I'll need to make to our piece is an acknowledgement that Angus was actually born near Glasgow, rather than in South Uist as I had assumed. What is more, in The Silent Weaver, Roger Hutchinson continually places Angus's work in the context of Celtic art and traditions, which is something I decided to make a part of our own 'Angus' from its inception. 

  
Within a few yards of where I'm staying there are two rocks on the shore with mysterious cup marks (above); slightly higher up the hill is Cladh Maolruibhe, an ancient burial ground and later a 6th century chapel; within a 100m is A'Clach Mor, a standing Stone and from there walking back to the house is Leac an Righ (The Flat Stone of the King), believed to be the inauguration stone of the Lord of the Isles. None of this is signposted or marked in any way; they just exist in the landscape, just as they always have.

Angus's weavings, it has been noted, have an ancient, archaeological, look - a feeling that they could have been made at any time during the period that human beings have lived on the earth. The Silent Weaver notes this too, and celebrates the fact that Angus McPhee, trapped in the institution of Craig Dunain, was able to reach deep down into the ancient well of his culture and somehow manage to twist the strands together in a way that protected his individuality with work of great inventiveness, distinction and even wit. 

Muirineach

Back now on Uist, and staying once more on Berneray. The beaches along the west coast of the Outer Islands are famed for their beauty and the long, long empty stretches of pure white sand. Above is the west beach on Berneray, which we visited today, looking north with the mountains of Harris in the background.

The beach is backed by dunes, which are held together and stabilised by the marram grass, or muirineach in Scottish Gaelic, which flourishes in these dunes. 

This grass was equally abundant in the part of Uist where Angus grew up as a boy. On the east of Uist marram or muirineach was rarer, so rope was made by plaiting heather, but on the west coast rope was made from marram, which was so abundant that  it was also used for thatching the roofs of the blackhouses, such as the one in which Angus lived.

Seeing the muirineach grass today reminded me of the long section in Roger Hutchinson's soon-to-be-published book 'The Silent Weaver' about the importance of the grass to the Iochdar crofting economy; he also writes about the irony in Angus McPhee finding that grass weaving helped him to rediscover his identity after the period of a profound mental breakdown, just at the time when its importance in the community he had been removed from was in rapid decline.

In a few generations the traditional skills and the craft involved in the making of grass and heather rope were lost as cheap, commercially produced, strings and ropes became available to the islanders. New houses were tiled rather than thatched, and the horse, which had been so central to the island crofting economy, was rapidly replaced by the tractor, along with the woven grass harness that was an essential part of horse-powered croft and farm work. Yet during the same period as this rapid decline and loss, Angus was weaving away in the grounds of Craig Dunain Psychiatric Hospital in a long and heroic effort to retrieve his lost life. 

Both nam Faileas - and new information too

Rainbow over the Hut of Shadows or Both nam Faileas

I'm preparing to return to Berneray at the weekend; hoping the gales keep away. In the meantime I'm beginning to read the manuscript for 'The Silent Weaver', the new book by Roger Hutchinson (author of 'Calum's Way') which is due for publication this autumn.

It's a lovely book, telling Angus's story but giving a lot of detail about the background circumstances to his life and times. Detail about the life of a crofter on South Uist in the early years on the twentieth century (that had hardly changed for 100 years); detail about the Lovat Scouts - the regiment that Angus and other young island men of his generation signed up for, and so on. 

For me this is not only fascinating but also has in impact on the story we're telling in our production.  Although our piece is almost entirely non-verbal, telling the story with images and music, it's very important that it's bedded into a factual base. Joyce Laing's 'Weaver of Grass' provides some of this material but her story is essentially about the Angus Mcphee she met at Craig Dunain psychiatric hospital, and the background she gives is necessarily quite basic when compared to Rogers. 

Already (I'm half-way through the book) I've discovered that Angus wasn't born on South Uist, but near Glasgow. His father had left the island, looking for work as a hired hand, and he married and had his 4 children during this period. Eventually he returned, by a twist of fate, when Angus was around 7 years old. This knowledge subtly affects the opening of our piece as I had written it, and accordingly it will need to be changed. 

Back home - via Pittenweem

So, a breezy crossing of the Little Minch enlivened by the company of dolphins leaping through the waves, and then on to the Art Extraordinary Gallery in Pittenweem, where Joyce Laing's collection of extraordinary art is based. The collection is the home of almost all of Angus McPhee's surviving work, where part of it is permanently on display.

Loz and Joyce Laing in front of work by Angus McPhee

Joyce welcomed us warmly and, after a cup of coffee and a discussion about how fragile the pieces by Angus now are, and our own exploits on Uist, we retired to her home and Loz recorded Joyce reading short passages from her book. These extracts we plan to incorporate into our theatre production; although the piece is essentially visual, with music, we will probably use short pieces of spoken text to link scenes and create an underpinning narrative.

Loz listens to a playback of a recording of Joyce reading from her book

Meanwhile I'm back at Horse + Bamboo, catching up on the news and describing our adventures in the Hebrides. Today Roger Hutchinson generously sent me a draft version of his soon to be published book on Angus, and having it in my hand I'm now very much looking forward to reading it. 

We've also had a look at Joanne B Kaar's version of events last week, and to see more photographs of the work we've been undertaking, have a look at Joanne's own blog here.

An important day

Today turned out to be an important day for us. Mairi MacInnes, the headteacher of Iochdar School and Chairperson of Ceolas, met us outside the school, and along with Mary Schmoller, took us on a tour of the area - taking in Angus McPhee's birthplace, school, the church where he was baptised, the machair and beach areas where Angus worked, the site of the old post office where he would have received his call-up papers and, finally, his last resting place. All the time the two kept up a conversation about the life of the crofting community at Iochdar; telling us all that they knew about Angus both before and after his life in Craig Dunain. They were also very interested in our intentions with the production about Angus, and we began to talk a little about the sensitivities of the subject for his family. 

Angus's school group, 1930. Angus is far left on the top row. His sisters are on
the next row down, on the far right. 

Angus's sister Peggie - Margaret MacPhee Cross - died in 2007, 10 years
after Angus, and was buried in Iochdar cemetery. We were told that Angus is
buried next to his sister, in a site without a headstone.

Mairi and Mary had also arranged for us to meet John Campbell, Angus's nephew. John received us warmly and kindly, but it quickly became apparent that he was also rather nervous about how we might portray his uncle who, he emphasised, was a gentle man. Following on from the earlier conversations as we drove around it was clear to us how odd it must be for the family, even the wider local community, to have a member all but disappear for 40 years; then reappear; and finally and suddenly become a figure of interest to the wider world. After all, Loz and I are total strangers; we're non-Gaelic speakers and can probably understand little of the world that Angus was born into; and then, suddenly, we're standing on the doorstep, asking personal questions about a close relative!

We did our best to reassure John. We explained that our theatre piece would be largely non-verbal,  that it in essence it wouldn't deal in facts or figures, but would be a poetic, visionary, response to the story of his uncle.  Throughout John remained very friendly, and I promised to keep him informed about our work. He had read Roger Hutchinson's book about Angus in draft and appreciated it's honesty and accuracy.  Finally I showed him the puppet of Angus as a young boy, and my mask of Angus as an old man. He said the mask was a great likeness, and things relaxed. Stories were told about Angus's home coming as an old man, and we began to laugh together at these. It turned out that when I worked up here in the 1980s I had met people that John also knew, and in some cases was related to; people like Fr. Colin Macinnes of Barra, who I (similarly in some ways) had to convince of the virtues of our show Seol that eventually toured the islands.

This period of research into our production is clearly so necessary. If I ever wondered if it would be something of a luxury for us, given our tight budget, today has convinced me that it has already proved to be absolutely essential. In order for us to get under the skin of this story - but also to test our ideas and our experience in the very place where its subject was born.  

The Silent Weaver

Above, the first masks of Angus McPhee (the green is the underpainting), and the rough cardboard screens being used experimentally as a way of representing the garden at Craig Dunain Hospital where Angus created his woven art works.

There will be a series of masks representing Angus at different stages in his life. I've started with the mask representing the old Angus (it's the best documented period by far in terms of finding photographs as source material). The next will be a slightly younger Angus; you can glimpse that mask on the left of the lower photograph, still in the course of having its papier-mache layers added.

This week I've also heard from the novelist Roger Hutchinson, author of the acclaimed 'Calum's Road'*, who tells me that his new novel is provisionally titled 'The Silent Weaver, The Extraordinary Life and Work of Angus MacPhee' and it will be published by Birlinn later this year.


* For more information on Roger Hutchinson and Calum's Road click this link.