Wildcard Entry Calculation Allows Terrorism a Foothold at Division

SCDA Northern Division Orkney District Preliminary Festival

It can be baffling trying to work out which entries from the Northern Division District Festivals get the chance to be one of the 9 teams to progress to the Divisional Festival.

The first hurdle to overcome is to have a District Festival in the first place! I cannot remember if the minimum requirement is 2 or 3 plays, but there must be an entry from at least 2 clubs before there is officially any District Festival to progress from! For two districts in the Northern Division (Gordon and Kincardine & Deeside) this has been impossible to achieve for some years, and these districts are fast becoming a memory (along with an "in abeyance" note on the SCDA website). In a normal year (like this one), each of the other 4 Districts usually has a festival of between half a dozen and 15 one-act plays in a normal year. The active Districts are:

• Aberdeen (and Shetland)
• Angus
• Orkney
• Perthshire

The basic rule is that the 2 teams with the highest marks from each District Festival get the chance to progress to the next round. However, several factors complicate this fairly simple starting point:

• only one team from a single club is permitted to progress beyond the District festival. So, if one club has 2 or more entries, and they are the highest and second-highest marked plays, then only one of them will go through (along with the next-highest-marked play not from the same club).
  
• the ninth Divisional Festival place allows a third team to progress from only one of the Districts (along with the normal 2 highest marked entries). The District entitled to send this extra representative is decided by looking at the number of clubs entering plays into each District festival, combined with the total number of plays entered; some formula is then used which gives more credit for the first play from each club than for second and subsequent plays from each club [This is too confusing. Ed.] It is important to remember that it is the plays actually performed at the District Festival that is used in the calculation, not the number entered, which is why it is usually late on the Saturday night after the Orkney District Festival is over that it becomes clear if 2 or 3 plays from Orkney will progress (because there is always a technical possibility that a play will fail to be performed on the last night of one of the other District Festivals). [That's enough rubbish about formulae. Ed.]
  

In Orkney this year, one club - I forget now which one [It's Birsay, you fool. Congratulations to Birsay Drama Group!! Ed.] - entered the highest and second-highest marked plays, which is why third-placed Ad Hoc Players will be the second play from Orkney to travel to ..erm.. Orkney. As you may have guessed, I am not sure of the precise current formula used to calculate which district the ninth entry will come from; all I am sure of is that this year, Orkney had the highest score. For this reason, we now know that the play awarded the fourth-highest marks overall, and also progressing to the next round is:

Deerness Drama Group: Terrorism
by the Presnyakov Brothers, translated by Sasha Dugdale, and directed by Gill Smee and Chris Giles.

Because this play was performed on the last night, I have said little about it so far, and I suggested in a previous post that I would say more. (I suggested in the same post that I would say a bit more about Stromness Drama Club's entry as well, but on reflection I think I may already have said enough!) I am very pleased that we will have a chance to see Terrorism again, as it is a complex piece with interlocking sub-plots, and some very dark themes. I am also pleased to have had a bit more time to mull over the details of what I saw before trying to present my thoughts. (I'm also pleased to have had a brief conversation with one of the directors, when clearing the theatre this afternoon; since my opinion has no effect on the marks, that is one advantage I am allowed, compared with the conditions the adjudicator has to put up with!)

The "terrorism" depicted in the play is not confined to "normal" religious or political outrages: it is conceived as having seeped into the personal and sexual relationships between the characters. Each member of the company portrayed numerous characters, and everyone listed in the programme in whatever capacity also appeared on stage, as both foreground and background characters at different times). There were 6 very different scenes (an airport, a bedroom in a flat, an office, the yard outside the block of flats, a security police locker room, and onboard a passenger plane) and each was portrayed using effective minimalist. There was a door, which had a very different role in each scene, there were plain grey boxes used to suggest all sorts of things, from aircraft seats to office chairs. Actors were dressed all in black, with characters delineated with the help of brightly coloured accessories (office-workers' shoes, cabin crew neck scarf, fur coats for older women, and so on). There was little or no music, which added to the menacing tone. Much of the action was played straight out to the audience, with some deliberate ambiguity as to whether the characters were talking to each other, to the audience, or to themselves.

The interactions between the characters were (as the script demanded) aggressive, violent and sometimes brutal. I was sitting in the front row, and from where I was sitting the mood was unsettling and unpleasant (in a good way, I suppose, as that is what the directors were aiming at!). Ronnie Mackie, the adjudicator, (safely seated in the back row of the stalls) suggested that there should have been more brutality and even more violence and agression. On reflection afterwards, it was a reasonable suggestion, although it may be that the details of the various characters in each scene led the company in a different direction. Possible exceptions were perhaps the bedroom scene (it was very entertaining, and by no means the most wholesome sex scene depicted on the Orkney Arts Theatre stage over the years, but perhaps it could have been a notch or 2 more intensely horrible), and the yard scene (where it might have been possible to have a bit more nastiness between the 2 women on stage). The adjudicator had read the play in advance and I had not, so perhaps he is right! All I will say for sure is that from where I was sitting it was not a something that was at the forefront of my thinking at the time! I was particularly affected by the intesity of the hatred and barely-suppressed violence of one of the security police (played by Gareth Williams) in the locker-room scene.

I like to see this sort of play at a festival, in amongst more straightforwardly entertaining productions (I would struggle with more than about one in 3 plays being as dark as this one!), and I love it when we see various different teams tackle something like this every now and again. My favourite clubs (in Orkney and elsewhere) are those which make wild, reckless choices of play most years, and perform each of them because they are in some way passionate about them. I have no problem at all with a club picking a play I dislike, or sometimes picking what others might think of as a "safe" nice-little-Festival play, but the productions that stand out in the memory are those the director and cast chose because they really wanted to do them, and for me that is what it is all about, this community theatre thing! It is good for us all (audience, actors, directors and festival committees) to be come out of our comfort zone, and to confront (or be confronted with) a piece of theatre that is challenging and thought-provoking, and for me Deerness provided a good example of that sort of play.

Here are the very last good luck wishes (I mean it this time!) on this blog before the Divisional Festivals in Arbroath and Orkney: as you join the other 8 productions at the Divisional Festival, assertively take this horrible violent play back to the Orkney Arts Theatre on 25, 26 or 27 March, and (as Armstrong and Miller might say) "Keeeeeellllll theeemmmmmm!!!!!!".