The Skeleton Wummin rests at the bottom of the cold sea, withering away in the passing tides and dreaming of life above the waves, in this vivid and poetically eerie Scots-language fable.
The Skeleton Wummin rests at the bottom of the cold sea, withering away in the passing tides and dreaming of life above the waves, in this vivid and poetically eerie Scots-language fable.
The setting is an island peatbank, far from any habitation. The time is bright early summer. A man and a woman enter this empty landscape to cut peat for winter fuel. Before the sun goes down they will encounter shadows from the distant past and begin to come to terms with the troubling realities of the present.
Enraged at the slaughter of Murron, his new bride and childhood love, Scottish warrior William Wallace slays a platoon of the local English lord's soldiers. This leads the village to revolt and, eventually, the entire country to rise up against English rule.
The play The Storm Watchers was originally written as a short piece to be part of a pageant in the late Sixites in Stromness. The work was later performed in its own right with some additions. A powerful and poetic piece, the drama presents the lives, anxieties, regrets, fears and memories of women as they they deal with the waiting and the aftermath of a storm with all their men at sea. Filmed in lockdown in Orkney this project has involved technology, remote rehearsal, mobile phone cameras and much more besides. In this year of Mackay Brown's 100th birthday, it brings to life one of his early but also most powerful pieces of theatre.
