A Play For Torry: looking for justice in the 'just transition'
Joyce McMillan meets the community players fighting big business with theatre
Torry, on the south side of Aberdeen, is the kind of place that people who don’t live there think they know all about.
High deprivation, bad reputation, plenty of poverty and poor health; until recently, all I knew about Torry came from the affectionate but telling jokes made about it in the big Aberdeen pantomime at His Majesty’s Theatre.
This past weekend in Aberdeen, though, a very different show has taken to the stage; a show called A Play For Torry, in which people who live there speak for themselves about the place, its past and future.
At the moment, Torry is in the news because St Fittick’s Park – a much-loved local green space cleaned up and restored just 20 years ago, as a vital coastal wildlife haven – has been partly re-zoned for industrial development, as an “Energy Transition Zone” proposed by leading Scottish oil tycoon Sir Ian Wood.
Since that 2020 decision, though, a strong campaign to save St Fittick’s has developed; and many across Scotland now see Torry as a test case for whether the transition to renewable energy will be “just”, or will only repeat the old patterns of exploitation and environmental degradation that communities like Torry already know so well.
“As we say in the play,” says Scott Herret – Torry resident, Friends of the Earth worker and one of the moving spirits behind the project – “people have often come to Torry to make ‘poverty porn’ type documentaries about its social problems.
"But it has never worked, because in reality, Torry just isn’t like that.
"So we were really determined that this play would be about people who live here speaking for themselves; and about why they feel so strongly about defending their community, and the local environment they love.”
The script for the Play For Torry – developed over the past two years by Herret and director Emer Morris – is based on interviews with dozens of Torry residents; and five of them are now telling their own stories in the play, alongside five professional cast members and two musicians.
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They range from Ian Stuart Baird – veteran community activist, and a 1970’s co-founder of the Aberdeen People’s Press – to Shanu Gupta from India, who arrived to live in Torry at the height of the Covid pandemic.
“All you could do at that time was to walk the streets,” she says, “so that’s what we did.
"And when they told me Torry was this deprived place, I just couldn’t believe it; because I thought it was absolutely beautiful, here between the river and the sea, with the hill behind.
“Then when got to know people better, I realised that Torry was a place that still had all the things I missed most in western culture – the sense of closeness, and of everyone knowing and caring about everyone else.
"It’s an amazing community here, so diverse and yet so close-knit. So for me, talking about Torry as a place full of problems just completely misses the point.”
It’s a story that could be retold by working-class communities across the planet; and Shanu Gupta’s hope for the Play For Torry is that it will eventually find audiences far beyond Torry itself.
“Back in 2015,” says Scott Herret, “I went to see the revival of 7:84’s great 1970’s show The Cheviot, The Stag, And The Black, Black Oil at Dundee Rep and it just changed the course of my life.
"It’s why I ended up working for Friends of the Earth, and thinking that a play could be part of our campaign here.
“And although the ETZ development is going ahead, what we’ve realised is that telling the story of our resistance is important in itself.
It helps us value what our community has achieved, even if it rarely wins.
"We think that’s a valuable message at this moment; and we’re definitely not giving up.”
“No,” adds Shanu Gupta. “We’re from Torry, and we’re not giving up. Not at all!”
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