When I've got a day off I regularly spend my lunchtime at
Oran Mor enjoying a pie with gravy, a pint of Guiness and a 45 minute play (on Mondays for only £10). This week, after now having done a few hundred plays, was their first attempt to do one in Gaelic. This seemed appropriate as the
Mòd was in Paisley (or Pàislig) last week and we were informed subtitles and animation would make it accessible to all.
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My Scotch pie, though obviously
not one from Oran Mor |
Written by Catriona Lexy Campbell the play, Doras Dùinte (Closed Door), involved an agoraphobic woman in an isolated cottage looking for a lodger, who turns out to be not quite as he seems. The set up was fine, but after that the story made not a lot of sense, and the denouement seemed to come suddenly, was rather confused and inconclusive. At the end my reaction was "Eh?".
I had hoped to say that it was an unparallelled success, but it wasn't. The actors were speaking in Gaelic, as advertised, but the idea of having the subtitles (and then only every second or third line) projected behind the performers made no sense. As the actors were pretty static on stage, they obscured almost all of the lines for the audience. This meant you were no longer following them, but juking left and right trying to make out the odd word. Even then, I'm not sure I missed much of the plot.
Maybe if you speak Gaelic the whole story made more sense, but it seemed a bit half-finished. A work in progress maybe?
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