When Sue Glover's play was first performed in 1991, it gave us a rare glimpse of hidden histories: the lives of women who worked as bondagers on farms in the Scottish Borders. Every 19th-century male agricultural worker was required to provide a female farm labourer who would be paid half-rate for lighter work in the fields. A decade on, and Glover's play retains its considerable emotional power. Though it leans towards a rose-tinted view of the hardships of the past - suffering is mitigated by a strong sense of community between the women - it does reveal the gulf between the bondagers' dreams and the bleak reality of their lives.
The women fantasise about a life with no leaking roofs, only kind men around them and summers that last all year long. They cling to the idea of emigrating to Canada, though none of them know anything about the place. The reality is one of brutal hardship, the dread of winter and unwanted sexual advances from men. The women sleep with the children to protect themselves, and Tottie, a girl who is "not all there", is sexually used and then disregarded by one of the male labourers. "I'm married," she squeals, blood on her skirt and underclothes. "He stole her," says her mother, broken by it too.
This is a deeply sympathetic production, glistening with engaging performances, especially from Irene Allen as Tottie and Ann Scott-Jones as her mother, Sara. Like the life portrayed, this is a group effort, and one deftly directed to bring out the precious moments of joy in these women's lives as sharply as the more regular moments of pain.
It's a poetic and symbolic production - there is much digging with invisible hoes - rather than the stuff of kitchen-sink reality, and it could do with more bite, more analysis. To make Tottie the one character who really suffers is too easy: she would struggle even now, despite supposed equality in the labour force. There's no savagery in the play, no questioning of the fond nostalgia expressed by real-life bondagers in the historical background provided in the programme notes. Instead, the play is brimful of life-affirming moments imbued with something infinitely more substantial than girl power: a female spirit that is in bondage, but not broken.
At the Palace Theatre, Kilmarnock, tonight and tomorrow, then touring across Scotland. (Details: 01334 475000.)
