Perusing the excellent Ian Jack column in the Guardian on Saturday, I was reminded that Nicola Sturgeon names Sunset Song as her favourite book. If you’re reading in Scotland, you’ll certainly know that fact and very likely have read the novel. In England, if my rudimentary and entirely anecdotal research is anything to go by, you may well draw a complete blank. I certainly hadn’t heard of it until I started spending chunks of time in Glasgow, where it began to be recommended to me with almost freakish regularity and passionate advocacy.
The novel is set in a village in the Mearns, near a road “as old as Calgacus, him that chased the Romans all to hell at the battle of Mons Graupius” (a splendid piece of sly authorial deception, since the Caledonian hero Calgacus actually lost the AD83 battle). The book’s heroine is Chris Guthrie: she is tough, independent, sensitive, passionately sexual, clever, a survivor – for Sturgeon, or indeed any of us, a thrilling prospect.
It is a wonderful book, and should be read in all parts of the UK. The language is rich; Sassenachs do benefit from a glossary. One of the pleasures is to learn words such as slummock (a lumpish slattern); clamjamfry (to plaster with mud); and limmer(a sharp-tongued woman). Lewis Grassic Gibbon wrote it in the early 1930s in Welwyn Garden City, so if one was feeling mischievous one could probably claim it as a British, rather than particularly Scottish, literary production.
Locally transported
I confess that I live in Islington, which makes me the ultimate Guardian cliche. Sorry about that. It’s nice for me, though, that my local theatre is the Almeida, in remarkable form under Rupert Goold, its artistic director. I’ve started to go to everything there, and on every trip not only has the auditorium been transformed by some incredible piece of design, but even – if this isn’t too pompous a thing to say – my idea of theatre itself.
I’ve sat in a booth watching actors enact a sort of live shooting videogame (Mike Bartlett’s Game); I’ve felt I’ve huddled in a post-apocalyptic shelter watching Anne Washburn’s remarkable play, Mr Burns; and in the current show, Simon Stephens’ new Carmen Disruption, the Almeida has been transformed again to suggest a grand and faded old opera house.
The play is a meditation on the isolation of modern lives in a decaying Europe, via a remarkable excavation of Bizet’s opera. All the violence, sadness and passion that runs through that opera is exposed afresh. Just great.
A ticket’s just the ticket
I popped down to visit David Jubb, the artistic director of the Battersea Arts Centre the other day, to have a gossip and to see how they were all faring after the fire that raged through the building in March.
Amazingly, you’d just never know when you walk in, since the damage was all to the back of the venue: the bar and foyer are as busy and full of life as ever. (Though it’s going to be a long haul: the grand hall, the part most severely damaged, will probably take a couple of years to bring back to workable life.)
One consequence of the fire is that ticket sales have dropped – perhaps because folk understandably assume that the whole place is a heap of ashes. Happily, this is far from true. For example, the venue’s year-long exploration of the state of the nation’s theatre – with companies from all parts of the country visiting – is well under way. A simple way to support BAC at the moment is to buy a ticket and see a show.
