Review: Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed, Pitlochry Festival Theatre
⭐⭐⭐⭐
The quiet renaissance of Nan Shepherd has been a wonder over the last few years.
Once neglected to the point of being erased from the twentieth century canon of Scottish letters, the belated publication of Aberdeenshire born Shepherd's masterpiece, The Living Mountain, a personal memoir of the great outdoors that had lain unread in a draw for thirty years, tapped into a readership who similarly felt the transcendent nature of being alive with the hills. These days, Shepherd is rightly held up as great a writer as her peers, and her image can be found on the back of a Scottish five-pound note.
Richard Baron and Ellie Zeegen's studio-sized play rifles through Shepherd's back pages for this dramatic homage that attempts to get to the heart of Shepherd while acting as something of a primer to those perhaps unaware of her life and work.
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Flitting back and forth through assorted time zones between 1901 and 1981, Baron's recast revival of his production of his and Zeegen's script after premiering in 2024 opens with Nan the child being introduced to the wonders of nature by her father. This sets the tone for a skip through Nan's life as a schoolteacher, her unconventional amour with philosopher John Macmurray and her relationship with the literary scene of her day, her overdue rediscovery by an American journalist, and her final days in Woodend Hospital, Aberdeen.
With Adam Buksh playing all the men in this co-production between Pitlochry Festival Theatre and the Borders based Firebrand Theatre Company, his assorted characters are but feeds for the play's leading lady. Nan is duly played by Susan Coyle with guts and gusto that embodies Nan's passion, freethinking libertine spirit and wilful individualism in the face of artistic neglect. The result over the play's seventy-five minutes is a love letter to Shepherd that can only help her work to be discovered in pastures new.
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