YELLOW MOON
Yellow Moon – the Ballad of Leila and Lee; white blackbird in association with B Sharp at Belvoir Downstairs, September 2-26, 2010. Photos by Patrick Boland.
PROLIFIC Scottish playwright David Greig originally wrote this in 2006 for TAG Theatre Company, the youth arm of Glasgow’s the Citizens’ Theatre; not that it matters to an adult audience. Yellow Moon is a riveting hour and 20 minutes of richly poetic and contemporary story-telling that should satisfy audiences of any age.
Aimless, restless 17-year-old Stag Lee Macalinden makes a series of almost accidental decisions that spin him, like a pinball, out of his dreary day-to-day trajectory onto a path he could never have envisaged. He has a fatal falling out with his mother’s yobbo boyfriend; and he decides that the best way to make some fast bucks is to rob an all-night convenience store.
By chance and the needs of the script, in the store – browsing and dreaming through the celebrity mag racks – is Leila, a well brought up if troubled Muslim girl. Her culturally informed reticence has long since curdled into a silence that confirms to her an invisibility and irrelevance that she can only overcome through her secret life as an accomplished self-harmer.
Stag Lee (John Shrimpton), so-nicknamed because of his cherished baseball cap that bears a logo of a stag and Silent Leila (Layla Estasy) so-nicknamed for already mentioned reasons, go on the lam. With his ill-gotten cash they board a northbound train after she succumbs, with conscious amusement, to his (ir)resistible pick up line: “Are you comin’ or are you comin’?”
Stag Lee is in search of his father, who walked out when he was a toddler but who – he confidently tells Silent Leila – owns a Highland estate and will welcome them. Leila, familiar with the fantasy world of celebrity, appears not to mind the unlikely story; and anyway, what else is there in her life? Reality and fantasy sharply collide when the urban kids from the tough side of town find themselves in another kind of tough place.
They encounter a vivid (and, for the audience, fascinating) disconnect between the heedless psychopathology of a modern dead-end city, with its casual violence and murder; and the traditional Highland life of moneyed lairds, deer stalking, virtually ritual and reverent slaughter and a relationship with animals that is as alien to the city kids as walking on the moon.
The play and production also offer further enticing disjunctures as the two are almost claimed by the Scottish wilds, with its inclement and punishing weather. They are persuaded by a mysterious ghillie, who finds them wandering, to thaw their frozen hands in the life-saving bloody warmth of the newly-slit open belly of a doe. At the same time, some of the play’s most poignantly affecting moments are built around tentative renditions of A-Ha’s “Take On Me”, which is somehow even more incongruous and shocking.
The play’s style is part narration, part observation, part distanciation and part clearly drawn and rich characterisation. It is blessed, in this production, with a uniformly excellent cast, the two younger actors being joined by Kenneth Moraleda in the unforgiving roles of the murdered boyfriend and also the ghillie, who is of course Stag Lee’s long-lost father and not a rich landowner at all. The fourth element of the quartet is New Zealand star Danielle Cormack whose various roles culminate in a glorious reading of a celebrity whose sojourn in the Highlands is as ridiculous as Madonna’s lady of the manor role in her English village.
Director Susanna Dowling brings everything to this play in her choreographing of its characters; and the everything is also blessedly minimal. The actors inhabit their roles with conviction and belong in the space as if planted there. Part of this may be because although they are dressed as you might imagine everyday contemporary Scottish folk might be dressed, they are barefoot. And there is something touching about the vulnerability, individuality and expressiveness of the human foot in these circumstances that is mesmerising.
white blackbird’s signature style is movement and the choreography, by Johanna Puglisi, that underpins Dowling’s work also highlights the awkward poetry of young adulthood with aching clarity. And the whole is rendered clear and bright through Irma Calabrese’s set and costumes and Teegan Lee’s lighting design. The other major creative input into the production is Ekrem Mulayim’s sound design and composition that wash the simplicity of the staging in dazzling aural colour.
Yellow Moon is yet another feather in B Sharp’s already well-plumed cap and credit for a great night’s provocative entertainment has to go to white blackbird too. The company has brought an exciting new cast and creative team into Belvoir Street; and has also shown other companies – whether it’s intended or not – how Australian theatre really should be and could be about colour blind casting.
