December 2006 HITN Profile: Grey Coast

Grey Coast Theatre Company

Grey Coast have brought exciting and radical theatre to Caithness and Sutherland

Mission Statement

Grey Coast Theatre aims to produce exciting and radical theatre which originates from the culture and people of the north Highlands. We aim to both nurture and train theatre artists from the Highlands and Islands and to bring quality theatre practitioners to work with the company.

Everything Grey Coast does is new, but we aim to create a theatre tradition with its creative roots firmly in the north, drawing on both the Norse and Gaelic experience which informs our dramatic vision.

George Gunn.

Based in Thurso, Grey Coast Theatre Company claims the two northern counties of Caithness and Sutherland as its heartland. This is an area of some 1,700 square miles with approximately 250 miles of coastline.

The combined populations represent around 35,000 with by far the largest majority living in the two Caithness towns, with the population of Thurso at 9,000, and Wick at 8,500. In the west of Caithness and in the centre of Sutherland there are vast areas with tiny populations.

This represents a diverse and, in Highland terms, an unusual area. Since 1992 Grey Coast Theatre Company, in the course of its work, has raised and spent over £1 million, and the majority of this spend has gone back into Caithness and Sutherland in one way or another.

Few other arts organisation in the north of Scotland can match this commitment to a single area. Outwith the professional touring which the company has undertaken over the years, Grey Coast has worked with practically ever school, both primary and secondary, in Caithness and Sutherland and in the Highland area north of Inverness.

Over 500 people, so far, have performed as part of our community theatre programme with the emergance of ‘The Skraelings’ as an autonomous theatre group based in the North Highland College Drama Studio in Thurso.

Current Production or Work-in-Progress

Butcher’s Broom. Not so much an adaptation of Neil Gunn’s classic novel about the Sutherland Clearances, more that Andy Thorburn and I are treating the book like a hill, and we are cutting theatre songs out of it for the P5/6 and 7’s of Lybster and Dunbeath to perform (directed by Louise Allen), some on 8 December in Dunbeath Village Hall, and the big event in November 2007 as part of the ‘Light In The North’ Neil Gunn festival, and as Grey Coast’s contribution to the Highland 2007 shindig.

Camster.

Oedipus North. A huge undertaking. Three new plays based on Sophocles’ Theban trilogy. Set in Caithness in the future when the oil runs out. We presented the first ‘Oedipus North’ at Lyth Arts Centre in June after a week’s residency in 2005. The second play, ‘Oedipus At The Split Stone’, we put on as a reading in the North Highland College Drama Studio in September 2006 as part of The Caithness Arts Week.

The third, ‘Antigone’, we will work on next year, perhaps in September or perhaps earlier, depending on money. All these plays require a big cast, so it is no easy task even to get the human and cash resources together to do them as a reading. We are talking to the National Theatre of Scotland about it all, so we will see.

Red Fish. We managed to secure a music commission from the SAC for Andy Thorburn to begin to write the music of this play, which is a three-hander about a futuristic “Vik”, a town in the far north of Scotland experiencing a Klondike of mysterious red fish. Shades of the 1890’s in Wick. Will we make the same mistake again? You bet. We presented a version of the play in December 2005 at Lyth Arts Centre, again after a week’s residency. The two Caithness actors I wrote it for are both off to drama college, so I may have to wait a couple of years until they are let out.

Big Song of Sutherland - Golspie.

Fantasy Theatre

If Grey Coast had the resources I would just like to do what we do, which is to continue to create new work originated in the far north and to develop and train our own actors, and aspire to be properly funded. I want to link up all the professional companies in the Highlands and Island to their immediate FE college so that they can deliver an HNC/HND in drama and then begin, through the UHI, to create a department of performing arts which will, in the long run, give us all a future.

So, by that I mean I desire to live in a mature, arts conscious democratic republic of Scotland, where investment in a company like Grey Coast is seen as natural, not phenomenistic, and where everything is connected and not fragmented as it is at present. Why should this be a fantasy? I would love to change my mind.

Golden Moment

We have been here since 1992 and manifested some 28 productions. It’s all a gradual climb to the top so the last big thing we did must be it; which was ‘The Big Song of Sutherland’, with five primary schools and some 175 bairns, in Dornoch Cathedral in 2005. Great music from Andy Thorburn. Fantastic direction from EricTessier-Lavigne. Poetry in the stones.

The Niss

And Not So Golden Moment

Being told by a culturally illiterate Highland Council apparatchik that she saw no reason for Grey Coast to exist, and watching the spineless wazoo from SAC agree with her. What can you do?

Highland Theatre – Is There Such A Thing, and If So, What Is It?

I think I was one of the first people to ask this question, to make this distinction, and is it fair? No it is not fair, and yet the question goes right to the heart of what we all do. What is theatre anyway? What makes what we produce in our little bit hill and bog different from any other theatre anywhere else?

I would say our little bit hill and bog, or at least the people who live in it, have lived in it, their past, present and future. Of course, it all depends upon what you want to do. Everything is relative. It gets down to what theatre is, I think.

So what is it? Well, it is a defined space where identities are mapped, where memory and experience are presented – all of these drawing on traditions with an eye on the future. All of these identities come from the ground and with which we struggle, through action and story, to make articulate.

Theatre makers in the Highlands know this. The story of the Highlands is not a happy one in human terms. To come to the north and make theatre is, I feel, only seeing the landscape. Blood is not the same as scenery.

I really believe that Highland theatre will change Scottish theatre, if it is allowed to operate on a level playing field. I may be dead by that time. Yet, like the A9, the long narrative of struggle winds behind me and before me, but one thing I do know is that we must train our actors or die.

There are a few great, for whatever reason, theatre makers in the Highlands and the Islands at the moment. Why this is, I’m not sure. We must invest in these individuals or they will be gone. Theatre is people, in the Highlands and Islands as everywhere else.

No actual, significant or meaningful investment is heading their way. This is a fact, although there are no doubt some arts managers who will disagree, so we will lose them, these practitioners. The likes of Tosg, Mull, Dogstar, Theatre Hebrides and Grey Coast could all soon be history. So the answer to your question is “yes”, but soon it could be no. Then there will be silence.

© George Gunn, 2006

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Grey Coast Theatre Company

Grey Coast have brought exciting and radical theatre to Caithness and Sutherland

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