Lorna Irvine looks at the most recent recipient of the celebrated Platform 18 Award.
Platform 18 Award winner Ishbel McFarlane's work is mired in traditional storytelling and the rhythms of poetry, and in this latest piece for Behaviour at The Arches, she examines semantics, particularly Scottish language, from the stories we were told as children to ownership and limitations of language, and its wider cultural and political impact.
McFarlane has researched this for over a decade, and describes it as ''a dream dinner party with some great guests from different walks of life and different centuries, who want to talk about Scots, and argue about Scots.Although she adds cheekily, ''Unlike most dream dinner parties, though, Stephen Fry is not invited''.
She has interviewed some leading lights on linguistics, including expert on the English language Professor David Crystal, Dr Cor van den Meer of the Mercator Centre for Multilingualism and Language Learning, Leeuwarden and Editor of Scottish National Dictionaries Dr Christine Robinson, and references oor ain Makar Liz Lochhead and Robert Burns, amongst others. A thought-provoking, humorous addition to the Behaviour canon.
O Is For Hoolet is at Behaviour at The Arches, 15th-17th April, before going on to the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.
www.thearches.co.uk
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