Scotland has experienced enough
religious strife on its own account, so I have always been rather
puzzled as to why, particularly on the west coast, the folk echo the
sectarian tribalisms of my native Northern Ireland, and do so with a
surprising virulence. Ian McDiarmid’s stage adaptation brings these
bigotries out of the background of Andrew O’Hagan’s original, with
Republican and Orange songs sung between scenes, and so turns the play
into a shifting tapestry of moral absolutisms.
When David Anderton, the fiftysomething Anglo-Scots priest in a small
Ayrshire town, tries to give World Religion classes to his fourth-year
Special Needs set, he argues with ineffectual politesse against the
fierce Islamophobia of a couple of 15-year-olds in his class.
(Tellingly, he later finds himself echoing such a hard line at a dinner
party, and pitting contemporary geopolitics against the religious
ideals of his fellow priests.) When he begins to keep company out of
school with those two students, the absolutes momentarily feel as
unsettled as the sea around nearby Ailsa Craig. However, when Anderton
allows himself to be so entranced by young Mark as to join him in a
night of alcohol, hash and Ecstasy culminating in a brief, rejected
kiss, the juggernaut of child-abuse hysteria begins rolling. These are
the several great ideological engines of the world of O’Hagan’s story,
in the face of which the longings for intimate companionship of an
unworldly man, too fey for his own good, cannot but be mown down. The
background story of Anderton’s unfulfilment, a constant pulse in the
novel, is here sown in a few seemingly offhand allusions which are then
all brought together within half a minute or so in the second act,
without any of the too-usual sense of contrivance or portentousness.
McDiarmid’s adaptation is eminently actable, and he acts the part of
Anderton with eminent excellence in John Dove’s National Theatre of
Scotland production (which after this Donmar run tours Britain until
mid-May). He pitches the character’s effete manners well, so that we
feel not derision but a pity and an agony for his alienness in this
environment. Dove also resists the temptation to go for a conventional
courtroom-drama climax: as other characters exaggerate their
performances slightly in this segment, lending them a sense of
unreality, Anderton’s crippling, misunderstood sincerity comes across
all the stronger. The lines of Tennyson which give the play its title
sound still and small in such a world.
Written for the Financial
Times.