Theatre reviews: Sunset Song | The Girls of Slender Means

The Girls Of Slender Means, Lyceum, Edinburgh ****

One week, two openings of major new shows in Scottish theatre; and together, they make for a tremendously rich and rewarding experience, inspired by two of the finest Scottish novels of the 20th century, and shaped by that century’s two traumatic world wars. In Dundee, the Rep company opens its new stage version – co-produced with Lyceum in Edinburgh – of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, first published in 1932, and acclaimed ever since for the passionate intensity and vision with which it recalls a rural way of life in the Mearns, and its inexorable destruction under the pressures of the First World War.

Its heroine, Chris Guthrie, is a tenant farmer’s daughter, a clever girl torn between her love for the land and the Scots language which belongs to it, and the fine English-language book learning which might offer her the chance of a career as a teacher; and Morna Young’s passionate and loving new stage version faithfully reflects every aspect of her story, from shocking familial violence to shimmering joy, in a lucid and visually compelling style that is often as moving as it is gripping.

Emma Bailey’s beautiful, wide open set – superbly lit by Emma Jones – is all rigs of reddish ploughed earth, with just a few spars to climb on, against the reddening sky. Finn den Hertog’s eight-strong cast are all on stage throughout, supporting Danielle Jam’s bold and troubled Chris, switching roles when necessary, moving powerfully through Vicki Manderson’s vivid movement sequences, and both acting as an on-stage band and providing the vocal soundtrack that twines around Finn Anderson’s haunting score.

There are moments, towards the end, when the show seems so respectful of the novel that it almost ticks off the highlights one after another, rather than focusing on a new interpretation or perspective. In truth, though, the power of the novel is so great that its importance for our time hardly needs to be emphasised; not least in its sense of a society long accustomed to peace suddenly finding itself thrown into war, and its passionate concern for the fate of the land, once bereft of the proper stewardship and care that only those who love it can truly give.

At the Lyceum, meanwhile, Muriel Spark’s mighty 1963 novella The Girls Of Slender Means takes to the stage in even more memorable style, recalling a moment, in the summer of 1945, when the world seemed caught between war and peace, and the looming general election – which produced a Labour landslide – promised seismic social change in the UK.

Spark’s story is set in a Bayswater boarding house for genteel but impoverished young ladies; and in contrast to the cosy Dad’s Army vision of the Second World War, Spark pulls no punches when it comes to the trauma and exhaustion of young lives lived, for half a decade, under the constant pressure of bombing, rationing and bereavement. Gabriel Quigley’s fine adaptation, directed with flair by Roxana Silbert, strikes a perfect balance in capturing how Spark’s girls – five of them, here – live lives overshadowed by the horrors they have experienced; and yet are all the more drawn to the pleasures of love, poetry, unbridled fun, and beautiful clothes, embodied in the gorgeous Schiaparelli dress they all share.

Mollie Vevers excels in the leading role of Jean, the young Scottish woman aiming for a career in publishing who looks back on the story from the vantage point of the 1960s. And Jessica Worrall’s shifting set offers brilliant splashes of colour, against a monochrome backdrop of devastating bomb-damage in London; in a show that, like Sunset Song, reflects on how war cuts huge swathes through the lives of those who survive it, and changes everything, irrevocably.

Sunset Song is at Dundee Rep until 2 May; His Majesty’s, Aberdeen 8-11 May; Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, 16-18 May, and the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 28 May-8 June. The Girls Of Slender Means at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until 4 May.