Have you ever seen a seagull by a cliff fly against a high wind? That image came to mind as I watched this adaptation of the 2006 novel by Tormod Caimbeul (Norman Campbell). Characters’ language soars, swoops, plummets and flutters through shifting registers as scenes tumble and swirl - gritty banter in a seedy Edinburgh bar; poetic litanies of names on a mountain slope climb (real or imagined?) to a destiny never reached; ballsy rock’n’roll battered on a guitar in a bedsit, folk songs sung softly in a hospital ward.
The effect is exhilarating, vertiginous - at times, bewildering. I have no Gaelic and follow the dialogue via titles splattered on to blurred images scudding across a screen at the back of the often-darkened stage. Leaving the theatre, I accost a fellow audience member. “The translation was good,” she tells me (it’s by Màiri Sìne Chaimbeul, widow of Tormod). “It missed out some words – the bad ones.” Stars are brighter and mud claggier in Gaelic, it seems.
The title, Shrapnel, throws up another image – fragments flying through the air after an explosion, threatening injury and destruction. Each scene here is a shard shattered from a single moment (replayed in flashbacks through the action). A stabbing in a bar-room brawl unleashes the fury of the near-murdered, maniacal, supposedly retired detective. Victims of his brutal past bear grudges. An innocent who carries a guilty secret is pursued. The cast of six flash through multiple roles, from two-dimensionally drawn detective (taut-jawed Iain Macrae) to psychologically intricate victim (bewildered Iain Beggs).
Tormod worked on this adaptation with his daughter, Catriona Lexy Chaimbeul (who also performs in the production). After his death last year, she completed it alone. Both lived on Lewis and in Edinburgh. Iain Craig’s animations project urban cutting-edges, sea mists and cloud-capped mountains; Matt Padden’s sound design layers train-brake screeches and soughing winds. The search for identity fragmented by culture-collisions shadows the play’s thriller format. Its full potential is just beyond the reach of the new, young Theatre Gu Leòr but, under Muireann Kelly’s astute, sensitive direction, something of Shrapnel slices into the soul and lodges.
