'Period parody run riot' The 39 Steps Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Neil Cooper
Four stars
John Buchan probably couldn't have predicted what liberties maverick film director Alfred Hitchcock would take with his 1915 novel, in which dashing Richard Hannay takes flight to Scotland after a night at the theatre throws him into a world of intrigue and adventure.
Hitchcock too might have raised an eyebrow regarding how writer Patrick Garland transformed his 1935 big screen adaptation into a pocket sized stage pastiche requiring just four actors to do the business.
Garland's irreverent hybrid of Hitchcock and Buchan's creations has run and run for two decades now and counting. Ben Occhipinti's new Pitlochry Festival Theatre production breathes fresh life into a show that has tremendous fun with the existing material while managing to put a personal stamp on things.
This is led by Alexander Service as Hannay, who flaunts his character's matinee idol looks with a nice line in self parody as he flees from his bachelor pad that has just acquired a murdered German fugitive as part of the furniture.
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The panoply of skullduggery and accidental romance that follows sees Blythe Jandoo too play assorted leading ladies with similar lashings of style, charm and comic strip satire aplenty.
This is especially the case with Pamela, who ends up in an involuntary clinch with Hannay on the train to Scotland in order to help throw the cops off the scent, then later spends the night with him in handcuffs.
Chris Coxon and Stephanie Cremona keep things rattling along as the show's self styled Clowns, changing hats, coats and accents in rapid fire succession as assorted pulp fiction spies, Highland hoteliers and the Mr Memory vaudeville turn that sets things in motion.
All this takes place on Liz Cooke's sliding doors set featuring a mini revolve and a track that allows miniature trains and Highland sheep alike to speed their way home. The end result sees a Freudian dream team forever in motion in a period parody run riot.
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Bissell deftly and fairly indicates some of White's own limitations as well as summarising the sometimes harsh and reflexive criticisms White has come in for. The book is a quest narrative. Bissell takes us into his confidence, and locates White, and himself, in the company of a wide range of other writers, ecologists and artists whose priorities are shared, sometimes exchanged and largely endorsed, including Nan Shepherd, Jessie Kesson, Katharine Stewart, Rachel Carson and Joan Eardley. His argument is that these women were in pursuit of similar or related and overlapping realisations in their respective works. White's writing may be masculinist in various obvious ways, but his concerns are not a male prerogative. In fact, one might argue, feminine principles are deeply ingrained in them, no matter how macho, or even, one might say, misogynist, he can sometimes be in his writings. Ultimately, Bissell's book is an affirmation of a world where truths can be accurately valued. And it's a moving history of a friendship. Here's his poem, Elegy for KW: It's hard to take in that he's gone the man who was such a big part of my life and thoughts for almost sixty years. I think back to those Jargon Group days when he opened my mind to so many ideas and more than ideas to the joy of life itself and how after we went our separate ways he to pursue a cultural revolution I to foment a social revolution I tracked him down at the Sorbonne and en Bretagne after twenty years. Reading his work this past year when writing my book about geopoetics I felt I got to know him even better and to tell my truth about how I found him. His books will live on to influence even more seekers of truth and to spread the good news of the creative expression of the Earth. That afternoon when I heard of his passing we walked along the shore and out in the bay the rigging on a white schooner clanged a death knell for the life of Kenneth White. And this is reminding me of those wonderful lines of Charles Olson: 'There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only / eyes in all heads, / to be looked out of' – which when I think of it now extends my own remit all the way around the world to New Zealand, where I spent 14 years of my own life, and I'm remembering the first book of my friend the artist and poet Gregory O'Brien, entitled, Location of the Least Person (1987). And this now draws me to my last point here about Kenneth White's legacy, that it stands as a permanent reminder and encouragement, so that we know that the world is in need, even of us, however damned and marginal we might seem to be. The legacy of White's work may not directly be the spread or escalation of 'geopoetics'. The poetic initiatives already being undertaken in the condition of global climate catastrophe have their own dynamics, and as Norman Bissell explains in his book, White described Geopoetics, but did not define or originate its meaning or purpose. Its practise predates him, overlaps with his contemporaries, and goes far beyond without reference to him. I'll come back to it. The legacy of his writing lies in the threefold identification of its genres: poetry, fictionalised travel journals, and skipping, skimming philosophical essays, referencing rich sources. Each genre is written lightly, some might say, superficially, glancing at great depths below, indicating other writers of far more difficulty, challenge and provocation, but embodying a spirit of enquiry and observation. He can be flat-footed, but never very ponderous. He can risk banality, pretentiousness and stridency, but is not over-wrought with anxiety or gestural ennui. What seems like innocence can be insouciance. This means that a sober critical account of his poetry is yet to be made. As Guy Davenport says in an essay on Ronald Johnson, 'A poem as it is generally understood is a metrical composition either lyric, dramatic, or pensive made by a poet whose spiritual dominion flows through his words like the wind through the leaves or the lark's song through twilight.' White's actual practice doesn't quite match that conventional romanticism. But if his legacy is a prioritisation of open enquiry, opposed to the closed mind of predestined conclusions, and that's no bad thing to be remembered for, and for future generations to take forward. And it's a lasting reminder that what always matters most is the reality all our arts are founded upon, draw themselves from, and, yes, can take forward – even against all the odds, vast as they seem at present.
