A Horse for Every Man

Cicely Gill’s play about Arran’s part in the 1914-18 war opened the McLellan Festival with both skill and gravitas, and left a packed audience thoughtful and moved. Written as a series of short sketches, it used a static set with an evocative painting of trenches, poppies and an Arran background. Actors brought on their scant props with them and took them off again, so the effect was something like a slide show, and this in itself was strangely evocative.

With a mixture of young people and some star performances by Arran’s most professional actors, many of whom doubled or trebled roles, the pieces connected very seamlessly, giving a picture of a community affected by the war and yet apart from it and continuing its own life. Sarah Cook as an authoritative Lady Mary Graham moved seamlessly from the grand aristocrat to the hospital nursing matron and Allan Nichol supplied a series of cameo parts that included Geordie the Telegraph, silent bringer of fatal telegrams. Stalwarts among Arran’s young players turned in solid performances, often doubled, and much credit should go to Wallace Currie, Finlay Murchie, James Mutch, Ceilé Swinton Boyle, Robert Ingham, Mollie Hodkinson, Iona Flewitt and Eilidh Blair, among others.

Cicely has great talent as a comedy writer, with an unerring sense of comic timing, and the early days of the Arran Dramatic Society provided some very funny scenes. The darker side was harder to establish, but the play came to a sombre and thoughtful end as Angus Adamson played The Flowers of the Forest on the little Northumbrian pipes with their lovely, plaintive tone. As the audience slowly began to file out, everyone paused to scan the eighty names of the men killed, inscribed on a long banner silently held between two soldiers. As an older man in the audience said, ‘They showed respect.’

Between older people, brought up by survivors of that terrible war, there were glances of an odd kind of personal understanding, for those who have been in a war have an understanding of it that is almost impossible to convey. But A Horse for Every Man had left nobody unmoved, and everyone concerned with its creation deserves congratulations and a respectful salute. Heather Gough’s skilled production gave the piece great stablity, and Lorna Halliburton’s linking passages of music on the accordion provided exactly the right setting, offering the old tunes as they were then, hopeful and brave in a situation that was to change the world.

Alison Prince