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"...a timely reminder of how much Scottish theatre needs this strand of Highland-made work, with all its wild surrealism, structural anarchy, passionate lyricism and spiritual openness, if its to achieve its full potential."
Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman
Written by Hamish MacDonald
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Directed by Matthew Zajac and Hamish MacDonald
Performed by Matthew Zajac and Alyth McCormack
Live music performed by
Jonny Hardie - Fiddle, Guitar & animal noises
Mary MacMaster - Harp & Vocals
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Production Design & Management David Ramsay
ASM Derek Urquhart
Project Administrator Lara McDonald
Publicity Design Karen Sutherland
Photography Euan Myles
All the world's a stage
And all the men and women are merely players
They have their exits and entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts
His acts being seven ages
From As You Like It by William Shakespeare
You who are the product of the four elements and seven planets
We are the puppets and the firmament is the puppet master
For a time we acted on this stage
We went back one by one into the box of oblivion
From The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Man is called a microcosme
Because he may by his conceptions and words
Contain within him the representatives
Of what in the whole world is comprehended
From Logopandecteision by Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty
Premiered in Inverness at Highland Festival 2001, Seven Ages was originally directed by Matthew Zajac and performed by Alyth McCormack and Hamish MacDonald, with formidable music and Gaelic song accompaniment provided by Mary Ann Kennedy, Ingrid Henderson, Maggie MacDonald, Iain MacFarlane and Bruce MacGregor. The play was remounted for a Scottish Tour in 2004.
The idea of producing a play around the theme of the Seven Ages of Man was originally proposed by Bruce MacGregor, reasoning that Scottish songs and folklore, in common with the wider world, had much to say about the cycle of life and our journey through it. The idea of life divided into a series of ages is a very old one, reaching back through ancient Greek philosophy and Babylonian astrology, with rites of passage to mark the transition from one age to the next practised by tribal cultures. So the structure was raised against a coastal Highland backdrop, a series of seven plays based on the Seven Ages of Man: birth, discovery, love, war, wisdom, dotage and death.
On a bare circular stage with only and upright wooden kist holding a burning candle, a man and woman appear, reciting the litany of the seven ages, the rhythms of which are picked up and accompanied by a fiddler and harpist who loom like ghostly reflections within a circular portal. As their prologue quickly sweeps from the first settlers delivered to the land from the sea, to a vision of firth-spanning steel bridges and wheeling satellites, the imminent stories and their inhabitants become placed within a timeless range. From the idyll of the prologue, the audience is thrust into the vicious and fanatical world of 17th century Scotland, confronted by a man and woman who are pleading, as though to a kirk session, for clemency for a spae-wife and new mother who have delivered a baby into the world outwith the rites of established religion. As a bitter winter descends and hunger begins to grip, the accused witch and the young mother and her baby become the focus of blame for the woes of their remote community, their story underscored by lullabies, psalms, witches' rants and An Taladh - the haunting Gaelic call of the swan.
Thus, the stage is set for episodic dramas which now move in time, the actors shape-shifting before our eyes through a multiplicity of roles. The kist has disgorged its costumes and Mary MacMaster's beautiful singing gives way to the baroque maestoso of Jonny Hardie's Hannah, as the leaping, foppish Restoration figure of Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty dances to the stage, confronting himself in childhood, reliving both his own formative years and those of his finest literary work - the infant Gargantua, whom he has translated from the works of Rabelais.
Walking through this world are many characters: the lonely novelist who finds love with a Jewish refugee; the Highland soldier bound by tradition to serve and destroyed by the 2003 war in Iraq; Dan the Leg,the wooden-limbed navvy hero who challenges the brutal Scobie to a contest of strength, speed and wit and beats him against all the odds; a Glasgow prostitute and an old derelict, whose memories reach back to a love affair in his coastal Highland town sixty years ago; and, in the last act of all, the Grim Reaper himself, embodied in one of Scotland's, and the world's, greatest stories, Death in a Nut.
Seven Ages was supported by a project grant from the Highland Producers' Fund with additional support from the Chase Charity and toured to the following venues:
Spectrum Centre, Inverness
Laggan Village Hall
Wick Academy
Skerray Village Hall, Sutherland
Ullapool Village Hall
Sabhal Mor Ostaig, Sleat, Isle of Skye
Arainn Shuaineirt (The Sunart Centre), Strontian, Lochaber
Mount Stuart, Rothesay, Isle of Bute
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Gilmorehill G12, Glasgow
Carnegie Hall, Clashmore, Sutherland
Plockton Hall, Wester Ross
Aros Centre, Portree, Isle of Skye
Lonach Hall, Strathdon
Lochinver Village Hall
Eden Court Theatre, Inverness
Birnam Institute
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
In November 2007, Seven Ages was performed in Ukraine at the Ternopil Theatre Festival and at the L'viv Young People's Theatre. The performances were met with standing ovations. The company for this remount was: Matthew Zajac and Alyth McCormack, performers; Jonny Hardie and Mary MacMaster, musicians; lighting design and stage management by Andrew Wilson. Writer Hamish MacDonald came too. The Ukraine trip was produced by Matthew and Hamish.