Making a drama out of gardening

WITH a theatre production at Eden Court, the audience is usually guaranteed to be safe from the vagaries of the Highland climate.

Not so with Nutshell Theatre’s award-winning play "Allotment".

Like certain past visitors including Polish theatre company Teatr Biuro Podrozy’s version of "Macbeth" with stilt walkers and motorcyclists, "Allotment" takes place in the outdoors, though the dark comedy about quirky sisters Dora (Gowan Calder) and Maddy (Nicola Jo Cully) will not be such a noisy affair.

Winner of a Fringe First Award at Edinburgh last year, it features the sisters probing at their rivalries and secrets as they dig and weed in the garden.

Here director Kate Nelson helps us dig a little deeper into the story behind "Allotment".

Because the show is site specific, what effect does that have on the audience and cast in being able to lose themselves in the play?

The play draws on Scottish story telling tradition and being in the open air adds to this.

The audience sit with a hot cup of tea and a scone and are told a tale. Being outside, with the actors actually working in soil, listening to birds and watching the clouds (and sometimes feeling the rain on your face) means we all take part in a different way. The event is more immediate and audiences say they are far more caught up in what goes on than they are inside. We don’t really call ourselves a site specific company so much as a company that puts on plays where they belong. This play could be performed inside a wee theatre, but it would really lose the atmosphere and power it has when being played in the elements — it was written and always intended to be performed in the open air.

The original proposal involved digging up a bit of Eden Court’s lawn for the Inverness performance. Have other venues been so co-operative?

Actually we’re not needing to dig up the grass any more! We’ve found that our own raised beds, which we travel with, work amazingly well. I think our stage manager must have really green fingers, because in spite of travelling over 1000 miles the length and breadth of the UK over the last six weeks he’s managed to raise a stunning set of lettuces, cabbages and some lovely lavender and mint!

All the places we have toured to have given us such a warm welcome. I think that gardeners are a special breed — anything about plants and gardens seems to bring out the best in people.

Has performing in the "allotment" brought some additional challenges?

The weather! We’re fine with rain — if you’re a Scottish company working outside you have no choice.

The show actually works amazingly in the rain and some of our best audiences have bee when the rain has come down. It’s really exhilarating to watch. We’ve more trouble when it’s really hot as one of our actresses is a very fair skinned Scots lassie and doesn’t really do well in hot sun — we’re looking forward to Inverness and touring in Aberdeenshire as she’ll be more at home there than in the heat of Dorset where they are at the moment.

The gardening is not just confined to the play. You are also organising a planting project in conjunction with the tour. Could you tell us a little about that?

We’ll be doing this project in Logie, Laurenckirk, Inverurie, Banff and Torry and if anyone is interested in taking part in those communities they should contact info@nutshelltheatre.co.uk and we’ll get back to them.

The planting project is an inter-generational project where we ask people over 65 to get together with local parents with toddlers to decorate planters and create the living set for the show. We’re really excited to be running the project with the support of North East Arts Touring and Aberdeen Council.

It’s a lovely project as it gives parents with young kids a chance to get out of the house for a few hours and older people enjoy meeting the little ones and also doing some planting — especially if they’ve moved to accommodation where they can’t do much gardening any more.

For younger parents it’s great as they pick up tips on gardening and growing from people with a lifetime’s experience.

• "Allotment" written by Jules Horne and directed by Kate Nelson will be performed on the lawn at Eden Court on Thursday at 1pm, 3.30pm and 7.30pm.