Theatre reviews: The Needle Room | Salt

The Needle Room, St Nicholas Hall, Lanark ★★★★

Salt, Perth Theatre ★★★

Theatre – particularly in its small-scale touring form – can often be an ideal art form for recovering lost aspects of our history; and no company currently working in Scotland understands that better than Braw Clan, the touring group based in South Lanarkshire and Clydesdale dedicated to producing plays in Scots based on the often neglected history of the area.

This weekend, Braw Clan brought their latest play, The Needle Room, to Lanark, and to a venue within a stone’s throw of Castlepark, the fascinating Victorian house that inspired the story. The title of the play refers to the little sewing room built on top of the house in the early 1900s; but Martin Travers’s play is a bold fictional melodrama set in the 1930s, imagining a time when Castlepark is inhabited by Jessie – once a humble farmer’s daughter, now the ageing widow of a wealthy local jam manufacturer – and Duncan, her son, who is increasingly drawn to the fascist ideas promoted by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

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The drama revolves around the impact of those ideas on Jessie and Duncan’s relationship with their housekeeper Rebecca, once an abandoned child from the local Catholic orphanage, taken on by Jessie as a half-adopted servant. Rosalind Sydney’s intense 75-minute production offers a powerfully Scottish take on the rise of fascism, as Travers observes the growing tension on the streets between fascists and communists, and Duncan’s increasing tendency to dehumanise Rebecca on grounds of class and disability – her little daughter is a polio victim – and of her despised Catholic faith.

It’s on the attitudes and decisions of the dying but still vigorous Jessie, though, that the story finally hinges; and all three actors – Shannon Lynch as Rebecca, James Mackenzie as Duncan, and a superb Fletcher Mathers as Jessie – deliver fierce and tightly focused performances, in a play that takes a risky final swerve into melodrama, but will still leave audiences in Clydesdale with plenty of food for thought, as it tours on next week.

Contemporary Ritual Theatre or CRT, based in Great Yarmouth, is also a company that gives new life to historic communities and world views at risk of being lost; and particularly, in their touring show Salt, to the ancient fishing community of east Norfolk, with its own powerful language, songs, myths and legends.

Set in Yarmouth in 1770, Beau Hopkins’s play-cum-ritual tells of the god-fearing Widow Pruttock and her vulnerable son Man Billy, a strong but simple-minded young man who experiences occasional terrible rages. Billy fishes in his late father’s boat, his mother guts and sells his catch; and the rhythm of their life – and of the world around them – is also captured through powerful and disturbing traditional song, and dance-like movement, as the three performers create a rope circle on the stage, and move around it, raising forces that drive the characters like ghosts and demons.

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The show takes a slightly long two hours (including an interval) to reach the crisis of its story about Man Billy’s growing infatuation with the mysterious and alluring Sheldis, whom he meets in the marsh, and who seems more like some bruised but defiant goddess of the sea-margins than a human being; the drama might gain in intensity from being played straight through, as rituals usually are.

There’s no doubting the energy and originality of the company’s approach, through, as they boldly expose the pagan undercurrents of the community’s overtly Christian culture, and revel in the bold archaic rhythms and sounds of Hopkins’s stylised Norfolk language. And with Bess Roche as Sheldis, Emily Outred as the Widow and Mylo McDonald as Man Billy all delivering performances of huge conviction, Salt emerges as a strange but intriguing theatrical experience, immersed in a whole lost world of fishing, fighting, faith, superstition and bloody, salt-spattered survival, on England’s cold east coast.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Needle Room is on tour until 27 September to Leadhills, Coulter, Crawfordjohn, Symington and Bigger. Salt is at the Universal Hall, Findhorn, 25 September.