Theatre reviews: Flora: A New Musical | The Boy at the Back of the Class
It’s good to experience a new Scottish musical so unsparingly determined to bring a female perspective to our history, writes Joyce McMillan
Flora: A New Musical, Eden Court Theatre, Inverness ★★★★
The quest for the great Scottish musical continues, this weekend; and on this long and winding road, you will encounter few shows less interested in the traditional sparkly showbiz image of the musical than Flora, produced by new Scottish company Genesis Theatre, and now on a short tour from Inverness to Glasgow.
Written by Belle Jones, with music by AJ Robertson and John Kielty, Flora sets out – over two hours, and often in the bold rhyming verse of an old ballad – to tell the story of Flora MacDonald, the woman famous for helping Bonnie Prince Charlie to escape through the Western Isles, after his failed 1745 attempt to reclaim the British crown for the Catholic Stuarts.
The first half of the show therefore focusses mainly on this story of youthful adventure, as young Flora – from a Protestant South Uist family, and not a Jacobite supporter – becomes caught up, through sheer compassion, in efforts to get the desperate prince out of the country via Skye. Yet even as Karen Fishwick’s eloquent and poignant young Flora leads us through the story of her arrest and imprisonment in the Tower, her rise to fame and eventual pardon, the foreboding figure of the older Flora – played by Annie Grace – stands by, singing and warning in English and Gaelic.
For Flora, it seems, had a knack for ending up on the wrong side of history. She marries a local Skye land factor, and has seven children; but failed harvests and cruel rent increases drive them, in their 50s, to join the migration to North Carolina, where they find themselves bound to an economy based on slave labour, and then plunged into the violence of the American War of Independence, in which the Carolina Scots supported the losing British side.
All of this is told with impressive fluency and ingenuity in Stasi Schaeffer’s fast-flowing and sometimes epic production, by a cast of eight that also includes David Rankine, Alan McHugh and Stephen Clyde, with Lana Pheutan and Sally Swanson outstanding as Flora’s female family; and that also delivers an astonishing musical score ranging from Gaelic laments and lullabies, to American hoedown and darkling sea shanty.
Flora’s later suffering, both physical and emotional, is painful to witness, though it is good to know that she was able to live out her final years with her daughters, in her beloved Skye. And it’s also good to experience a new Scottish musical so unsparingly determined to bring a female perspective to our history; not only in the story it tells, but also in the very texture of its words and music, shot through with all the hidden culture of women often robbed of choice, but still full of a strength, wisdom and song that they strove to pass on, down all the female generations.
The Boy At The Back Of Class, meanwhile – briefly in Edinburgh over the weekend – is a stage musical based on the novel by Onjali Q Rauf, about a refugee boy who joins a London school class, and about how some of his classmates eventually come to understand his story, and take action to help him find his shattered family.
Nick Ahad’s adaptation and Monique Touko’s production, for the Rose Theatre and Children’s Theatre Partnership, are almost painfully well intentioned, with a cast of young adults playing nine-year-old children in desperately wide-eyed style. And if subtlety is nowhere to be found, in what eventually become a bit of a royal fairy story about racial inclusion in Britain, it’s still difficult not to warm to a show that works so hard to include older school children in that debate - like a London version of The Glasgow Girls, but without the pzazz, the politics, or the truly banging theme tune.
Flora is at the Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow, 26-28 March. The Boy At The Back Of The Class, run completed.
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