Anna Burnside reviews this week’s offering at A Play, A Pie and A Pint.
In Hamnavoe, the whalers’ wives wave off their husbands and get on with surviving during their long absences. Marion, Elsie and Beth gut herring, smuggle booze and look out to sea waiting for the men’s boats to return.
Hamnavoe, the Orkney town now known as Stromness, has a warren of tunnels underneath. Many of the secrets portentously mentioned by Marian in her opening monologue scurry through these dank underpasses.
Orcadian writer Izzy Gray gives herself a lot of work here: a multi-stranded story that requires lots of exposition within the script and a glossary of Orcadian dialect in the programme.
The characters establish themselves while discussing the geopolitics of whaling in the 19th century. Marion, played by a sonsie Joyce Falconer, is the mooning matriarch who bids farewell to her husband’s ship by pulling down her drawers by the quayside.
Anyone who has watched The Hardacres on Channel 5 may notice similarities with the grandmother of the Yorkshire fish eviscerating dynasty.
Shawney Henderson’s Elsie is the cynic of the trio, delighted to see her abusive husband set sail for a long stint. She is a strong performer and a delightful singer, but her 21st-century gloss indicates stronger familiarity with Charlotte Tilbury rather than what Marion charmingly calls “a herring’s jacksie”.
Emma Tracey, the young, green Bess, rolls her eyes at the other two and does a lot of the plot-based heavy lifting. Think Greta Thuneberg meets Doreen in The Steamie.
Director Beth Morton lets the first half meander along then changes gear to tie up all the strands. The Whaler’s Wife needs better pacing from Morton and more consistent plotting from Gray. It also seems a shame not to call it “Desperate Fishwives”.
The Whaler’s Wife performs at Oran Mor’s A Play, A Pie and A Pint until 26 September 2026. It then tours to the Traverse Theatre (29 September – 3 October), The Gaiety in Ayr (6-10 October), Fairlie Village hall (15 October), Ballantrae Community Hall (16 October) and Ochiltree Community Hub (17-19 October).
Photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.
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