At the end of the week, it was a Festival of 3 nights ....

[NOTE: This is an expanded version of the festival review in today's Orkney Today newspaper.]

All 3 Orkney entries received recognition at last week's Scottish Community Drama Association (SCDA) Northern Divisional One-Act Play Festival One-Act Play Festival, held at the Orkney Arts Theatre.

On the final night, adjudicator Tony Rushforth announced the prizewinners, giving highest marks (and the Alex Drummond Trophy) to Aberdeen's Amici for their Friday-night performance of Sonny Deree's Life Flashes Before His Eyes, by Bill Bozzone, directed by Tish Howard. This production (from the Friday night) was surely one of the most hilarious, most effective and least predictable pieces of theatre seen on the Arts Club stage for a long time. As adjudicators often say, choice of play does not really affect the marks a festival play receives, but this was an excellent piece for this company, giving them maximum opportunity to display their very considerable talents. Comic timing, characterisation, American accents, a showstopping mother-son duet (with banjo accompaniment, shortlisted for the Best Moment of Theatre award by the adjudicator), a practical chainsaw (used to destroy a chair), a bungling hitman, an ineffectual shyster and the mother from hell - this play really did have it all, and was a popular and well-deserved winner.


Performed on the final night, and placed second overall winning the Jess Milne Quaich, was Atholl Players' production of An Incident at the Border, by Keiran Lynn, directed by Derek Allan. The adjudicator expressed some reservations about this production, but was clearly decided to award them very high marks despite this. A relatively new play (it was first performed within the last couple of years at the Traverse theatre), this satirical political comedy starts with a couple sitting on a park bench in an idyllic setting, watching the ducks on the pond; they are separated suddenly by events, and the play ends with them risking everything, as they face both immovable beuarocracy (personified in the border guard dealing with their situation on behalf of the state) and an intractable dilema. The stage setting was very good, with a green carpet of grass laid out on the stage, and other very pleasing touches: I felt that the performances, although generally good, could have done with more contrast (between the guard and the couple), clearer development as the play went on (especially the guard), and (in the case of the couple) a bit more energy or "bite" towards the end; but it is clear that the adjudicator liked them very much (he had read the play, and I still have not!). It was great to see such an interesting and recently-written play in the festival. I thought that the performance was of a similar standard to several other productions in this festival: the fact that were other serious contenders for the second place at the Scottish Final just goes to show the overall quality of the festival as a whole (and how tricky are the decisions an adjudicator has to make in every festival!).

Ad Hoc Players, from Kirkwall, preformed Bird Calls (Act 1), by Leslie Glaister, directed by Vivia Leslie (on the Friday night). It depicts the predicament of 2 women who have lived together on a remote island for 50 years: one of them faces terminal illness; the other contemplates life alone, finding the prospect impossible to bear. Placed third at the Orkney District Festival in February, the company had clearly worked hard, improving the actors' projection without losing the intimacy of the piece, and making slicker some tricky scene changes. If Amici produced one the funniest performance of the week, then Ad Hoc produced the most emotionally restrained and effective. They were doubly rewarded: third place overall in the festival (with the award of the Stonehaven Salver), and also Best Moment of Theatre, for the emotional effect on the audience at the end of their performance. As the adjudicator said: "You could have heard a pin drop" as the curtain closed.

The award for Best Stage Presentation (along with the Kennedy Thomson Quaich) went to the Deerness Drama Group, for Terrorism, by the Presnyakov Brothers, translated by Sasha Dugdale and directed by Gill Smee. This production, which was placed fourth at the Orkney District Festival), had also been worked on: this time it was even more disturbing in suggesting the darkness and violence of various types of terrorism, and was an effective performance of a challenging surreal political farce. The adjudicator, in making the award, commented that the setting, lighting, costume and sound of the production were at one with the direction of the piece. Deerness were also shortlisted for the adjudicator's Best Moment of Theatre: a grimly amusing moment involving the aftermath of suicide in a bureaucratic workplace, a psychiatrist and a toy dog! Over the years, Deerness Drama Group has presented several very interesting festival entries (as well as numerous other shows in Deerness at other times of the year): it was great to see them take on this very challenging and thought-provoking play, and bringing it off very effectively indeed. For me this is what the festival is all about - presenting a piece of theatre that (at least some members of) a group really want to do, and turning it into an effective production despite the many constraints faced by an amateur theatre group. Add in a few community (or Edinburgh Fringe Festival) performances, and the effect of the SCDA One-Act Play festival on the number and range of opportunities to see live theatre (especially in the smaller places around Scotland) can be very considerable. At least in Orkney, audiences generally snap up every opportunity thus presented to them!

Winners of the Orkney District Festival, Birsay Drama Group, gave only the second festival performance of locally-written original comedy, The Wine Game, by Isobel Ross Moar, directed by Margaret Irvine and Greer Norquay. Did the adjudicator realise that one of the actors was also the author? It's hard to say, but he had lots of good things to say about the direction, acting and staging of what he described as a broad comedy. This year, Birsay Drama Group had 2 winning plays (they also came second in the Orkney District Festival, but the rules say that 2 teams from the same club cannot progress to the Divisional Final, so their production of Cinderella, by Michael Green was not repeated last week). If there were an award (perhaps at Scottish level) for the club that involves the biggest percentage of its community in its activities each year, then surely Birsay would have won it most years since they began entering the drama festival in 1983! Last week, as so often before, Birsay were duly and deservedly awarded the Bon Accord Cup for the Best Team Competing [in the Northern Division] from a Community of Less Than 500 Inhabitants. And inter-parish woman of mystery, Ms Moar, confirmed that several enquiries had been made from other teams about aquiring the rights to perform the play in the future. Let's hope they do so, and that they each make as good a job of it as the original company!

Aberfeldy Drama Club presented (on the Thursday night) what the adjudicator described as "a charming piece by your very own island poet, George Mackay Brown", or words to that effect - I do not have the shorthand to be sure those were his exact words [Get on with it! Ed.]! The piece referred to was Stormwatchers, a play (allegedly - although the consensus nowadays is that it is a play!) for 7 women which has been presented many times over the years in both Stromness and Kirkwall. Aberfeldy overcame many of the challenges of the piece (including substituting 2 cast members between District and Divisional Festivals - no mean feat considering that up to half of the dialogue is delivered in chorically by various combinations of cast members); the adudicator shortlisted the moment at the beginning where the 7 women are silhoutted against the sky, and find a single pulse to deliver the first choric line of the play, for the Best Moment of Theatre award. It is very difficult for a visiting cast to convince a largely Orkney-resident audience that they have got exactly the right tone and style for this piece (do companies visiting New York have the same issues with Woody Allen works, I wonder?). I agreed with the adjudicators analysis: there were some excellent features (including excellent choric delivery of the poetic sections of the script), but also some serious weaknesses - the most fundamental of which for me (and I have sometimes seen this problem even in local productions and readings of GMB's work) was an "over-reverential" delivery of the prose sections of the script.

Studio Theatre Group presented (on the Thursday night) Cliff's Edge, by Paul Beard, directed by Christine Arthur. Set on a cliff top at Beachy head, the play amusingly depicts the eponymous pub-owning hero's rather ineffectual attempts to talk down a down-on-his-luck actor, and a woman showing many signs of disturbance, including multiple-personality disorder and compulsive lying: Cliff's motives for this philanthropic work seem to be as much trying to convert one-visit, one-drink, one-jump customers into regulars at his pub, as any genuinely human fellow-feeling! It was all good fun, presented well by an engaging and friendly company; the play provided the audience with a welcome comic finale to the Thursday night, following the more intense and serious offerings from Deerness and Aberfeldy.

The play providing the cast with perhaps the widest emotional range to convey was Lucy in the Sky, by Tony Layton, directed for Carnoustie Theatre Club by David Cheape. Performed on the Friday night, the play is set in a refuge for homeless women, and amusingly introduces us to 3 contrasting temporary residents. Through the increasingly intense and dramatic interactions between the characters, the playwright exposes us to many, many themes (as the adjudicator suggested, the back story for each character provides enough material for a one-act play in itself - for the main character I thought that even a full-lengh play might not do justice to her complicated life, and relationship with her dead daughter, Lucy). Wendy, the central performance, is a BIG part - and I thought it was performed charmingly and effectively in this performance. There was good support from the other cast members, and good direction, and a very clear (the adjudicator thought slightly overdone) set. To my eye, there had been insufficient planning for transferring the production from a larger stage to the much smaller Arts Theatre space, leading to some awkward or stunted moves and a bit of masking. The intimate revelations demanded by the script from each of the cast members, and the climax of the play was handled very well, and the whole production was interesting and enjoyable (as is always the case with productions Carnoustie!)

On the last night of the festival Alison Scott, a former secretary of the SCDA Orkney District (and far from a new member of the SCDA, as she amusingly made clear in her brief remarks) gave certificates to all the participating teams on behalf of the Northern Division committee; she also presented the trophies to winning teams. Summing up the festival, Tony Rushforth expressed his pleasure at having had the chance to visit Orkney, and at the welcome he had received. He said that assessing and marking such a great range of plays had been stimulating, taxing and demanding, requiring him to focus on the job to an even greater extent than was usual at a festival.

Paula Gibson, chair of the SCDA Northern Division thanked everyone who played a part in producing a very successful, varied and entertaining festival (including the Orkney District committee, the stage crew and the participating teams). "SCDA audiences are informed people," she said. "Sometimes adjudicators don't realise this, but Tony Rushforth did, giving us the most inciteful, intelligent and frank adjudication I have heard for some time."

Amici and the Atholl Players will represent the SCDA Northern Division at the Scottish Final, to be held at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre in April.