Sometimes, a playwright writes a character who is bigger than the play she inhabits. Without Rachel Chiesley, real-life wife of James Erskine, the 18th-century Lord Grange, Sue Glover’s 1988 drama The Straw Chair would be a historically interesting but theatrically unexceptional evocation of life on St Kilda.
We’d see Aneas Seaton, a standard-issue minister clutching his Bible and taking offence at the islanders’ godless ways. We’d see his new wife, Isabel, who, for all her youth and naivety, has a keener instinct for injustice than her bookish husband. And we’d see Oona, the salt-of-the-earth local, more uncomplicatedly good than any of them, despite her pagan superstitions.
All this would give us a sense of a hardy existence, spartan and extreme, fuelled by a diet of eggs and fish. In its depiction of Isabel’s sexual awakening, The Straw Chair could put us in mind of David Greig’s 2002 play Outlying Islands, and its similar clash of civilisation and nature. But in Glover’s play, the tone would be more conversational than dramatic. It would be too easy for the energy to dip and the actors to retreat to a mutter, as can be the case in this Borderline revival directed by Liz Carruthers.
But with the remarkable Lady Grange on stage, it’s a different story. She was the woman whose estranged husband had her kidnapped in 1732 and exiled to the Outer Hebrides with only her upper-class sense of entitlement to protect her from the elements. Selina Boyack plays her as the missing link between Miss Havisham and King Lear. As wild as anything nature can throw at her, she is impulsive, irritable and brash, eyes darting, hair unkempt and a voice that returns to haughty grandeur however low she sinks. It’s a great performance of a great character, even if it makes everything around it more ordinary.
• 1 April. Box office: 01471-844 207. Venue: Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Isle of Skye. Then touring.
