In the early eighteenth century, it’s a stormy start to marriage for 17-year-old Isabel and her minister husband Aneas as they arrive from Edinburgh onto the remote island of Hirta (St. Kilda). Read more …
Amongst the inhabitants lives Lady Grange, based on a true historical figure named Rachel Chiesley, who’s desperate to return to civilisation. Isabel is appalled yet fascinated by Rachel, who tells the young bride unfamiliar stories of betrayal, lost love and abduction. While Isabel uncovers alarming similarities, battling between youthful exhilaration and the danger of being too troublesome a wife, Lady Grange clings with tragic dignity to the two things she has left in the world – a consuming rage and an old straw chair.
Without Rachel Chiesley, real-life wife of James Erskine, the 18th-century Lord Grange, Sue Glover’s 1988 drama The Straw Chair would be a historically interesting but theatrically unexceptional evocation of life on St Kilda.
It is a welcome revival of a play that still poses some sharp questions about whether romanticism about the past disguises true hardships and abuses.
Liz Carruther’s gentle, sensitive production, punctuated by the soaring psalms and soft dance music of the islands, Selina Boyack turns in a stunning performance as Rachel.
Lady Grange's unfettered largesse allows both Glover's writing and Selina Boyack who plays her to let rip. In this respect, it can't help but be Boyack's play, and she deserves every moment in an otherwise stately portrait of institutionalised repression on our own doorstep.
Watching the audience discussing the production as they filed out, it was easy to sense their engagement: somewhere, across wind and water and in the sea-birds’ cries, the play had said something both subtle and rewarding about its tiny corner of the Scottish experience.
This beautifully crafted four-hander deserves to be considered a modern classic of Scottish theatre.
A very welcome and long-overdue homecoming, Borderline Theatre and Hirtle Productions’ revival of The Straw Chair has brought a grave injustice, issues of historic abuses of power and questions of female autonomy to the public once more, for which they should be highly commended.
Sue Glover and Liz Carruthers--The Straw Chair
On Tour, from Monday March 30, 2015, until Saturday May 9, 2015.
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