Captain's Collection, The

Photo Andrew Wilson

Part of Celtic Connections 2012

The story is set around a published collection of Highland music, the family inheritance of Captain Simon Fraser of Knockie. In the era of Sir Walter Scott and Waverley, when Highland Scotland was becoming viewed as the Romantic ideal of Europe, Captain Fraser attempts to win fame by publishing his Highland music. Read more …

In order to gain the favour of elitist Regency society, Captain Fraser is forced to remove the Gaelic verses, often of Jacobite and virulently anti-Royal sentiment, from his collection, to be presented as refined chamber pieces fit for the drawing room.

Visiting Captain Fraser in old age, as he draws his final breath, he is visited by the ghosts and dreams dwelling within the pages of his collection. Transported through the legends of the music itself and back through his own turbulent existence as composer, British Army Captain, dispossessed laird and imprisoned bankrupt, through a story where ambition to succeed has been thwarted at every turn.

The triumphs and tribulations of Captain Fraser’s life are played out through a tapestry of moving and rousing tunes and songs that lie at the heart of traditional Gaelic and Scottish music. The music from the play was commissioned as a CD on the Greentrax label and highly acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. The play was also adapted into an international award-winning radio series for BBC Radio Scotland. Dogstar’s last appearance at Celtic Connections was with Matthew Zajac’s fantastically successful solo show The Tailor of Inverness in 2009.

More information on this production is available at www.dogstartheatre.co.uk.

The critical consensus

Informative and entertaining with one witty referendum gibe, it's worth catching on its spring tour.

(*) Marianne Gunn, The Herald, 27/01/2012

The sweetness of the singing, the freshness of the playing and the inventiveness of the staging go a considerable way to compensating for a play that doesn’t give teeth to its own powerful conceit.

Mark Fisher, Northings, 30/01/2012

Instead of building the drama around the songs, their original meaning, and the wordless things Fraser made of them, MacDonald offers instead a jumbled and unclear historical narrative, the odd impressionistic burst of political poetry, and episodes of jokey traditional storytelling with musicai accompaniment.

(*) (*) (*) Joyce McMillan, 27/01/2012