Bothy culture

ALAN WILKINS' first play, The Nest, explores the characters and interactions between five hill walkers stranded by storm in a remote bothy in the west Highlands. The playwright describes the genesis of the play, which is touring Highland venues in the Traverse Theatre’s production this month

Arts Journal: The Nest is the first play you have had staged, but is it your first attempt at writing one?

Alan Wilkins: No. The first play I had written was called Childish Things, and was pretty much a typical start out, but I sent it to the Traverse, and they did a reading of it. I then wrote a second play, which is set in Madrid, and that one had a reading from RSAMD students at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, but this is the first one that has gone to a full production. It was commissioned by the Traverse on the basis of the first one.
 

AJ: Where did your interest in hill-walking come from?

AW: I think originally from childhood. We always used to holiday up north, but then other interests intruded and other things took over for a while, so it was latent for a decade or so, I would say. I then did a bit of bar work up in Wester Ross, and was really enjoying being back in the Highlands again, and I made a very conscious decision after that to start back on the hills again.
 

AJ: The Nest is set at Kinbreak bothy below Sgurr Mor – did you do that hill?

AW: No, I haven’t yet, but I did stay in the bothy during a trip I made last summer, a coast to coast walk I did from Montrose to Morar, which I decided to do east to west rather than west to east like the annual TGO Challenge. It was July and absolutely boiling, and I didn’t make the summit that time. I was checking out bothies, not going hugely out of my way, but if I knew there was one nearby, I would make a point of looking. I had already written a couple of drafts of the play, but choosing Kinbreak helped to make it all a lot more concrete in my mind.
 

AJ: How central is hill-walking to the play?

AW: I think it does deal with issues of displacement and our relationship to the environment, and I’m not sure that would work in just any other setting. It does need that context, I think.
 

AJ: Have you based the characters on people you met in the hills?

AW: None of them is based on any one person, no, but I think people may recognize the various attitudes they have toward walking and the hills. You do meet the really serious expedition types, for example, with that macho element to them, and the folk who are more in love with the planning and the gear than the hills themselves, and the people for whom it is really an essential experience. And of course, you do get the people who don’t really understand what it is all about, but are out there looking.
 

AJ: The situation you have is chosen is a classic theatrical one in the broad sense of putting a group of disparate people together in enforced circumstances, although maybe not in a west Highland bothy.

AW: Yes. There is certainly a whole tradition of what we might call confinement drama, so I’m not claiming that as a novel device! I did like the idea of a bothy being the vehicle for that in the sense that there is a literal kind of entrapment for the people who have come there. They all want to be out there walking, and can’t, so their enforced coming together has even greater irony.
 

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