The Yellow On The Broom Production Pack

THE YELLOW ON THE BROOM PRODUCTION PACK

Photo: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

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CONTENTS 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 20 21 25 33

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THE COMPANY PROGRAMME WELCOME INTRODUCTION REHEARSAL PHOTOS PRODUCTION PHOTOS MEET THE DIRECTOR MEET THE CAST MEET THE PLAYWRIGHT MEET THE DESIGNER THE MODEL BOX MEET THE COMPOSER MEET JESS SMITH MEET DAVID DONALDSON MEET DAVID PULLAR TALKBACK TRADITIONAL SONG PRESS PREVIEWS PRESS REVIEWS CONTACT DETAILS

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Dundee Rep Tue 28 Aug - Sat 22 Sep 2018 Macrobert Arts Centre Wed 26 - Sat 29 Sep 2018

THE YELLOW ON THE BROOM

By Anne Downie Based on the novel by Betsy Whyte Directed by Andrew Panton

CAST Ann Louise Ross

Bessie Townsley

Chiara Sparkes (Graduate)

Young Bessie

Gary MacKay

Sandy Townsley

Beth Marshall

Maggie Townsley

Emily Winter

Mary, Angela, Bella, Betty, Isla

Irene Macdougall

Farmer’s Wife, Kathy, Miss Arbuckle, Jessie, Jenny, Meeshie, Health Inspector

Ross Baxter (Graduate)

Johnnie, PC

John Kielty

Hendry, Andrew, Willie, Teacher

Barrie Hunter

Duke, Robertson, Headmaster, Dr Boddy, Cameron, Father Grey

CREATIVE TEAM Anne Downie

Playwright

Andrew Panton

Director

Kenneth MacLeod

Designer

Sinéad McKenna

Lighting Designer

John Kielty

Composer

Jean Sangster

Voice / Dialect

Janet Lawson

Fight Director

James Gardner

Lighting Associate

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PROGRAMME

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WELCOME

Important stories can often take on new meanings as the world around us changes and they can suddenly seem more relevant than when we first heard them. That’s why I’ve chosen to open my second season at the Rep with Anne Downie’s beautiful play, The Yellow on the Broom, based on Betsy Whyte’s novel.

This important book not only introduced many people to the lives of travellers, but also reminded us that the migration and movement of people is something that is an important part of our culture and how it has always been the cause of debate and division. It seems timely to tell this story in the context of current politics and rhetoric.

The Yellow on the Broom is a beautiful celebration of music, storytelling and community, all central to contemporary Scottish culture. Although set in 1930s Perthshire there is a universality to this story that captures human values and makes us consider our own views on things we may not fully understand, but recognise as different.

Coming together to tell stories is at the heart of what we do here at the Rep and at this performance we have the privilege to share the life of an inspiring woman who helped to change the way we think about an important part of our heritage which is often forgotten.

Alongside the production, we will also be hosting a series of events throughout the month which will celebrate the history and future of Scotland’s Travellers and their culture. From evenings of stories and song to post-show panel discussions, our building will be alive with events for you to engage with and conversations to be a part of.

Andrew Panton Director

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INTRODUCTION

I had the privilege of meeting Betsy Whyte in 1988 when I was commissioned by Winged Horse Theatre Company to adapt her novel, The Yellow on the Broom, for the stage. I was slightly apprehensive at the time, being a total outsider to the world of travelling people. I was therefore relieved to meet Betsy (Bessie to her family) at Edinburgh University’s School of Scottish Studies. We were initially slightly wary of each other but she talked about her grandchildren, I talked about my children, and the ice was broken.

We planned to collaborate on the writing of the play but, sadly, we only had that one meeting as she died shortly afterwards. Fortunately for me, she had left a legacy of folk song recordings and articles in the archives of the University and as I listened to her on tape and read her articles I felt I was being given a further insight.

The beginning of my play came out of a conversation I had with Betsy. I asked her how difficult it had been for her to adjust to living in a house, as she was then doing. She told me that at times she “counted the tiles from the cooker to the window” where she looked outside longing to be out there, living the nomadic life. I got the impression of a caged wild bird and her words to me then became the beginning of the play when the mature Betsy looks back on her life.

“In ma mind I’ll be oot cookin’ over an open fire, wi’ the stick reek in ma nostrils, or maybe gatherin’ the fruit o’ some byeway hedge for supper.”

From that beginning the shape of the play was defined. In keeping with the storytelling tradition of the travellers, Betsy tells this story, taking us, in dramatic terms, into the world of memory and hopefully providing an insight into a different way of life.

In these days of mistrust of anyone who is ‘different’ it is important to remember that the Nazis included travelling people, rounded up and exterminated in concentration camps, along with gypsies, homosexuals and Jews.

I hope my play celebrates ‘difference’ and provides a further insight into the values and culture of a vanishing way of life.

Anne Downie Playwright

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REHEARSAL PHOTOS

Photos: Sean Millar

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PRODUCTION PHOTOS

Photos: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

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MEET THE DIRECTOR

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT Hello, I am Andrew Panton. I’m Artistic Director of Dundee Rep Theatre and I am directing The Yellow on the Broom.

The Yellow on the Broom is Anne Downie’s adaptation of Betsy Whyte’s novel. It’s a beautiful story of Bessie, about her and her growing up in 1930s Scotland, particulary around Perthshire area and north east Scotland. It’s about what it was like as a child in the Travelling community then and her experiences of what life was like on the road and then how that changed towards the end of the thirties and how the culture shifted. I think it’s important that we know and we celebrate this massive part of Scottish culture that’s often kind of sometimes forgotten about.

It’s a beautiful, poignant, gorgeous and also very funny story but also quite hard in moments as well. It’s a really loved story and it resonates with the people of Scotland but I think it has a universality this story and I want people to come away knowing a bit more about the culture, being taken on a journey with this young, well she starts as a girl but she becomes a young woman.

But also a celebration of the Travelling culture and how important it is to us, it was then, but how important it still is to us now.

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MEET THE CAST

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT Chiara Sparkes: My name is Chiara Sparkes and I’m playing Bessie Junior. She’s a really grounded, really mature for her age character and she totally believes in this community that she is part of and even at a young age defends it.

Gary MacKay: My name is Gary, Gary MacKay. I am playing Sandy, Sandy Townsley. You kind of want to say he’s the patriarch, you know, he’s the head of the house but actually the Mother is really.

It’s about a Travelling family, a little girl by the name of Betsy Whyte who reminisces about her childhood growing up.

Beth Marshall: I’m Beth Marshall and I’m playing Maggie Townsley who is Bessie’s Mum. Bessie’s Mum is, I don’t want to say a formidable character because she’s not, it’s just the Travelling life is hard and you’ve got to be quite resourceful but there’s that lovely community thing, it’s a real family, there’s a real strength of family in the play.

Ross Baxter: My name is Ross and I am on the Graduate Scheme this year at Dundee Rep. I’m most looking forward to actually exploring my Scottish heritage and the Scottish culture of the play. I’ve not been able perform in a piece that has explored that, so it’s nice to do something different and I’m learning a lot.

Chiara Sparkes: I’m really looking forward to the conversations after the show and hearing what people have to say because it’s a topic that I knew nothing about so hearing what other people have got to say and having a conversation from that is going to be really exciting I think.

Barrie Hunter: Hi, my name is Barrie Hunter. I’m a member of Dundee Rep Ensemble. These people did tell wonderful tales about themselves and other folk but there was also a lot of prejudices against them too. Hopefully that’s going to be highlighted within the mix as it is in the book and indeed the play.

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Emily Winter: My name is Emily Winter and I am a member of the Ensemble. There’s going to be so much movement and singing and the characters are all wonderful, the stories are wonderful and so I think the whole thing in itself is going to be a delight.

Photo: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

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MEET THE PLAYWRIGHT

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT My name is Anne Downie, I’m an actor and a writer. They are a people and a period of history that most people knew very little about; I knew nothing about Travelling people. I remember one of my Uncle’s saying, I was listening to a BBC programme and it said “Now Anne Downie is going to be talking about Travelling people” and he said “What on Earth does she know about Travelling people?” and I didn’t know anything, quite honestly, until I read the book. So it was a real insight to me and I felt it was an insight to an audience as well.

I think what would strike contemporary audiences is the kind of resonances that are here. I mean we’ve had problems, you know, people are very critical of migrant communities and things like that because their way of life is different and here was a group of people who lived in this country and were subjected to prejudice so there are these contemporary resonances I think in the play that come over very strongly.

Well it has been very interesting because since I first wrote it and it went on, I just kind of, I really didn’t appear at rehearsals in other companies, I just let them get on with it so it has been very interesting for me. Andrew wanted a few nips and tucks here and there so it was interesting for me to revisit it in a way. I found that quite stimulating to be honest.

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MEET THE DESIGNER

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT Hello, my name is Kenneth MacLeod and I am the Set and Costume Designer for The Yellow on the Broom. So The Yellow on the Broom is all about the Travelling people in Scotland and the whole design for the show is really inspired by that. So their sort of transient lifestyle, their culture of storytelling and songs, that’s all kind of fed into the shape and style of the design.

I suppose the most important thing for me and Andrew at the beginning was trying to work out how we were going to jump from all these different stories quite quickly, quite fluidly, so we decided the space had to be something that suggested the beauty of the Perthshire landscape but could change and double as lots of different locations at once.

There’s so much in the text about these people’s connection to the land and their frustration every winter having to move back into a house and be penned in by the walls so the Perthshire landscape was a brilliant starting point. We’ve definitely abstracted it and not done anything too naturalistic but there’s definitely suggestions there.

I really love the first time that you sit the model box and the designs in front of the cast and you get to see their reactions as they try and work out how they are going to inhabit the world as it were.

And then of course seeing it realised on stage for the first time is always a fantastic moment.

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THE MODEL BOX

Photos: Sean Millar

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MEET THE COMPOSER

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT I am John Kielty, I am responsible for the music and I’m playing a couple of parts as well. It’s a very organic process. I’ve got a very big book of songs that were sung by a wonderful artist called Jeannie Robertson, there’s about 80 songs in it and I’m just sort of going through them and listening to them and suggesting them to Andrew and we’re saying “not that one, that’s not right” and “it’s great, it’s great” and I’m being exposed to music that I otherwise would never have heard before and I’m loving it.

We’ve got a rough idea of roughly what’s needed based on the script and then we get it in the room and see what the scene is calling for and I’ve got a couple of options up my sleeve and we try them out and we pick the best one.

Well it’s all very traditional. I’ve done a little bit of composition to link scenes but mostly it’s just songs that would have been sung at the time that are relevant to the situation, might have been sung around the campfire or while they were working, there’s a lot of working and walking songs and songs you will have heard as well.

I think it’s just a little keyhole into a life they might not have experienced before, the Travelling life.

I certainly didn’t know a lot about it before I read this and it’s fascinating. It’s part of our heritage that isn’t as well known as it should be and this is just an opportunity to explore it and experience it.

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MEET JESS SMITH

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT My name is Jess Smith. I’m a Scottish Traveller. I stopped Travelling when I met my Husband when I was 17 and I’ve never travelled since but the culture I belong to is really important to me. I’m a Scottish Author and Betsy Whyte wrote her books The Yellow on the Broom and Red Rowan and Wild Honey and that’s when I decided that if a Travelling Woman can open the gates to the bigger world, because we were very secretive people, and Betsy opened the door to the wee moor tent and said “Come on in folks and I’ll tell you a story.” It’s a beautiful story, it’s not an easy story, it’s a very difficult story but as far as I’m concerned it’s worth telling.

If we don’t know who we are or where we come from, we don’t know where we’re going and no two people have travelled the same path. That’s not just Scottish Travellers, that’s the entire world that we live in, and that’s what paints the artist’s picture, is the passions, the emotions and the journeys of everybody involved and the Travellers are just a small part, just a thumbprint of Scotland’s journey story and I think that is special.

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MEET DAVID DONALDSON

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT I’m David Donaldson, I’m a 20 year old Scottish Traveller and I’m an activist and advocate for the community. The Yellow on the Broom, although it’s set in the past and although it’s very historical in terms of how it shows Travellers living, you know it shows them living in tents, it shows them living on the road making a subsistence lifestyle, although that’s very much in the past, the issues which it brings up are very much in the present. The issues around shifting, around being nomadic, around our camps getting shut down, around how young Travellers are treated in school, around the sort of language which is used as well, it’s all very contemporary and it’s all still an issue. So for me, The Yellow on the Broom not only shows our past, not only shows the beauty of Travelling culture, but it also deals with some very important issues.

I think the performance was incredible. The way that the actors were able to show Travellers was unbelievable actually, it far surpassed what I had in mind. The way it’s humorous, the play, it’s dramatic in parts, it’s emotive in parts, but the way that the central themes played the whole way through and the core messages was fantastic.

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MEET DAVID PULLAR

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT My name is David Pullar and I am the Chairperson of Scotland’s charity HOTT - Heart of the Travellers. I’m the very proud Great-Grandson of Betsy Whyte whose adventures have been brought to the stage in Dundee Rep’s adaptation of her classic book.

The Yellow on the Broom is an authentic portrayal of how life was, you can’t help but connect with the story of the play.

Granny Bessie was exceptional, and by bringing her life to the stage it lets you see that wherever you come from and however little you have, you can always do something extraordinary.

I’m often asked as well, “Can you still be a Traveller if you live in a house?” Well, as singer Bob Knight sings in his song, “It’s nae traivellin that maks ye a traiveller, It’s jist something that’s bred in yer bones. And even in hooses, it’s still in oor minds, for we ken whit we are, we’re the traivellin’ kind.”

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TALKBACK

Watch our Talkback with Artistic Director Andrew Panton and members of The Yellow on the Broom Ensemble.

TRADITIONAL SONG

Listen to Jess Smith singing a traditional Traveller song.

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PRESS PREVIEWS The Herald 27 Aug 2018 Neil Cooper

Anne Downie on adapting Betsy Whyte’s memoir Yellow on the Broom Anne Downie had never heard of The Yellow on the Broom when she was approached with a view to adapting the first part of Betsy Whyte’s memoirs of growing up in a Scottish Traveller community in the 1920s and 1930s for the stage. The idea had come from playwright Tom McGrath, who was then Associate Literary Director for Scotland, who suggesting to John Carnegie, the then head of Winged Horse theatre company that Whyte’s captivating story, which she first started writing in the 1970s, might make a good play.

“It toured everywhere,” says Downie on the eve of a revival of the play at Dundee Rep almost thirty years after it first appeared. “It opened in Skye, and went all over Scotland. It was on at the Tron in Glasgow, and a woman came up to me from what I think was then Strathclyde Region, and she wondered if there might be any possibility of it going on in the camps, because while the women from the camps would come and see it, the men wouldn’t go into theatres. It never happened, which is a pity, but they did a production in Arbroath, and Betsy’s husband and family came.”

Downie met Whyte with a view to collaborating closely on the project. Whyte, alas, died before it could come to fruition.

“I met her once,” says Downie, “but she was found dead in her caravan at a folk festival, so we didn’t really get a chance to collaborate at all. The one thing she did do was give the play its opening. I kept wondering how I was going to begin the play, because it’s all a series of her memories, and I said to her at that meeting, how do you feel now living in a house, because her husband had a bad back, and they had to live in a house in Montrose. She said, there’s many a night I count the tiles from the cooker to the window, and I’m out there in the open air. As soon as she said that I had my beginning.”

Downie had her eyes opened to such cultural differences from the start.

“I thought Betsy’s book was an insight into a world that I knew nothing about, and that most people knew nothing about,” she says. “That was the interesting bit for me. The fact that they had certain beliefs about doctors that went right back to body-snatching days, and ideas about cleanliness, that dirt comes out the ground not dirty, these were totally different beliefs to anything most people know about. I think people get confused now because of things like My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, but there’s the fact that Travelling people have been in Scotland for hundreds of years. There was an article I read recently that said there were references to Travellers dating back to 1102.”

Continued ...

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The Herald continued ...

Downie discovered all this while she and Carnegie delved through the archives of the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

“There was a lot of Betsy’s stories and songs there,” says Downie, “and we got a lot of information from that, because I wanted to be true to her and not impose my own ideas on it.

I wanted to find out where Travellers came from, and one of the things I found out from the School of Scottish Studies was that a lot of people joined the Travelling community after the Jacobite Rebellion, so there seems to have been a travelling community for hundreds of years, but I think now, you don’t have the freedom to roam, so there’s a way of life that’s being lost.”

Downie also integrated ideas from Whyte’s sequel to The Yellow on the Broom, Red Rowans and Wild Honey into her adaptation, which she has revisited for Dundee Rep’s production, shortening it slightly, as well as adding new material.

“I was re-reading Red Rowans and Wild Honey recently,” says Downie, “and I took this idea from the book that not only is a way of life is being lost, but the fact that the countryside isn’t what it was. In those days there was no pollution, and you could drink from any mountain stream, but now that land’s polluted. That’s so true, so in a way The Yellow on the Broom isn’t just an elegy for the travelling community, but for the countryside as well.”

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The Courier 29 Aug 2018

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The Evening Telegraph 29 Aug 2018

The story of Scottish Travellers living in the 1930s has opened a new season of ensemble plays at Dundee Rep. The Yellow on the Broom is an adaptation of Betsy Whyte’s 1979 autobiography, told through music and song.

Written for the stage by Anne Downie, the play tells the story of young Traveller Bessie Townsley. Her mother and father teach her the ways of the land but their lifestyle is under threat. With winter approaching, the family settle in Brechin for the season.

There, Bessie must attend 100 days of compulsory schooling and although she shows promise in the classroom, the Travelling life she adores is viciously attacked by those around her.

The show is the first in Dundee Rep Ensemble’s new season, and is directed by the Rep’s artistic director Andrew Panton.

Opening last night at the Tay Square theatre, it runs until September 22, before moving to the Macrobert Arts Centre in Stirling for a week-long run.

In addition, a series of events shining a light on the Traveller culture will be held each Friday evening.

The first will feature “A night of stories and song” with author and Traveller, Jess Smith.

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PRESS REVIEWS The Herald 3 Sep 2018 Neil Cooper

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Like the seasons, Anne Downie’s adaptation of Betsy Whyte’s autobiographical novel about a young female traveller growing up in and around Scotland in the decades leading up to World War Two comes around as part of a slow but steady cycle of quietly poetic contributions to Scotland’s dramatic canon. First seen in 1989, Downie’s play, rendered here in a vivid production for Dundee Rep’s Ensemble company by Andrew Panton, is revealed as something of an evergreen.

The story revolves around Whyte’s alter ego, Bessie Townsley, the spirited and smart-as-awhip daughter of a family of permanent transients, whose life on the road is a hand-to-mouth existence forced to square up to everyday prejudice and suspicion. This comes from police, land-owners and Bessie’s jealous school-mates alike as Bessie discovers her powers of self-expression.

Unlike previous productions, here the role of Bessie is split, with Ann Louise Ross’s older incarnation acting as narrator, watching her memories made flesh from the side-lines, or else shadowing her younger self, played with exuberance and vim by Chiara Sparkes. This device refreshes Downie’s play with another layer, which gets back to the roots of oral story-telling.

Accompanied by a live score of traditional music and new compositions by John Kielty and played and sung by a nine-strong cast on Kenneth Macleod’s panoramic set, Panton’s revival of Downie’s play strikes a timely chord, arriving as it does just as ethnic minorities are being demonised in ways which a few years ago would have been unthinkable. As public spaces are being increasingly co-opted by corporate interests, loss of the right to roam, not just for travellers, is presaged here too. The result of this is a deceptively gentle portrait of a hidden history and a way of life all but domesticated out of existence, but which lives on here in a moving elegy still very much in bloom.

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The Times 3 Sep 2018 Allan Radcliffe

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There are moments during this production of Anne Downie’s oft-revived play about a family of Scottish travellers in the 1930s when the audience appears to be lost in a haze of nostalgia. Mentions of pearl fishing on Speyside, neep gathering in Angus and berry picking in Perthshire are met with appreciative murmurs.

When the nine-strong ensemble performs Adam McNaughtan’s song, which gives the play its title, everyone sings along, word-perfect.

Downie’s 1989 play, based on the memoir by Betsy Whyte, is full of vivid invocations of a rural way of life that no longer exists but its mood is rarely sentimental. There are scenes of physical hardship, including the Townsley family’s toughing out the winter in a “Brechin fleapit”, as well as several brutal depictions of the mounting conflict between an embattled traveller culture and uncomprehending “scaldies” (householders) and “tobies” (the police).

Although the action is rooted in the Thirties, with references to the abdication crisis and the coming war, the play’s portrayal of how mainstream society struggles to accommodate difference feels timelier than ever.

From its opening moments, Andrew Panton’s production for the Dundee Rep ensemble strikes an appealing balance, convincingly evoking both the rich culture and affinity with nature of the traveller lifestyle while acknowledging its darker challenges. Downie’s script retains the episodic structure of the book, following the Townsleys as they travel around Scotland in search of gainful employment, with their various adventures and encounters threaded together by the protagonist, Bessie, played here in a pair of beautifully complementary performances by Ann Louise Ross (as the narrator, reminiscing from the safety of old age), and as a youngster by the newcomer Chiara Sparkes.

Among the supporting cast, Gary Mackay and Beth Marshall are very moving as Bessie’s parents, the latter still connected to an older world of ritual and superstition that brings a powerful sense of the numinous to some of these scenes. Sinéad McKenna’s subtle lighting designs bring a sense of space and changing seasons to the simple, open set, designed by Kenneth MacLeod.

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The Stage 3 Sep 2018 David Pollock

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There’s an air of rustic nostalgia to the Dundee Rep Ensemble’s first production of this year’s autumn season, a revival of playwright Anne Downie’s adaptation of Betsy Whyte’s 1979 memoir The Yellow on the Broom, which was first staged in 1989. Yet the themes in which it deals are raw and current.

Whyte’s book recalled her own childhood as the daughter of a Scots travelling community in the 1930s, their home ground the fields and roads of rural Angus and Perthshire, from where much of the core audience of Dundee Rep is drawn.

Yet although she was unique in earning a scholarship to high school in Brechin, Whyte’s family and community were still subject to mistrust and harassment – most often from the police, or ‘tobies’ as the poetic Scots traveler cant the play is delivered in has it. The parallels with the current treatment of shifting migrant and refugee communities, and the role of distant war in defining their situation, are powerfully implicit.

Kenneth MacLeod’s set combines deceptive simplicity with hidden depths, much like the duties the nine-strong ensemble are asked to perform. The stage is a wooden platform surrounded by a half-horseshoe of rocky foothills, yet hidden panels and attachments reveal a campfire pit, a flowing stream and a garden clothesline.

Similarly, the six non-principal cast members perform 24 roles between them, and the versatility of the Rep’s team allows a rich sense of changing place, time and even season to be evoked.

At the core of the piece, Chiara Sparkes – one of two newly-graduated performers in the cast – as young Bessie Townsley and Gary MacKay and Beth Marshall as her parents Sandy and Maggie form a close-knit trio, hardened by the changing winds’ of others’ kindness or scorn.

The only partial mis-step is the role Ann Louise Ross plays as Bessie in her elder years; a commanding performer when given the stage, Ross is too good to float, quiet but present, on the fringes for much of her stage time.

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Across The Arts 3 Sep 2018 Joy Watters

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Dundee Rep opens the new season telling tales not far from home. Born into a traveller family in 1919, Betsy Whyte described her childhood roaming round Tayside with her family in her first memoir, which inspired Anne Downie to write the play.

Designer Kenneth MacLeod sets the scene, first placing the characters silhouetted against the lowering sky, like a storybook illustration with the darkness intimating the hardships that are to follow.

The Townsley family’s travels are dictated by the seasons, picking tatties and berries, selling baskets and anything else they can to scrape a living. When winter comes it’s time to hole up in a house in Brechin. Old Bessie (Ann Louise Ross) narrates while the rest of the cast, playing a host of characters, show what life was like for travellers in the 20s and 30s.

Andrew Panton’s production takes a while to engage the audience as the family encounters prejudice and also unexpected kindness from the people along the way.

There is a large amount of music and song that sometimes plays against the storytelling which lies at the heart of the work. John Kielty’s score has a traditional Celtic theme, but there are no fiddles or pipes so loved by the travelling community.

There are strong performances from Beth Marshall as Bessie’s mother and ensemble graduate Chiara Sparkes as young Bessie. Both capture the feistiness of traveller women and the dialect. Barrie Hunter livens the action playing a mad Laird who opens his home to the family in this tribute to a way of life that was vanishing.

The Yellow on the Broom at Dundee Rep until Saturday 22 September and Macrobert Centre, Stirling, 26-29 September.

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The Scotsman 4 Sep 2018 Joyce McMillan

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Theatre review: The Yellow On The Broom Dundee Rep ****

There are two elegies running side by side, in Anne Downie’s fine 1989 stage adaptation of Betsy Whyte’s magnificent autobiographical novel, first published in 1979. The first is an elegy for the travelling way of life into which Betsy Whyte was born in the 1930s, already threatened even then by the advancing tide of bureaucracy and urban development. Like Betsy herself, her fi ­ ctional heroine Bessie Townsley is an academically gifted girl; but even the demand that she go to school for more than one term a year is enough to threaten the t­raditional rhythm of a life that leads her, her beloved parents and huge extended family on a time-honoured annual round of Perthshire and the north-east, from tattie-howking near Perth to pearl-fishing on Speyside, and the grand gathering of the late summer berry-picking at Blairgowrie. The early part of Anne Down’s play is devoted to introducing us to this rhythm and making us feel it in our bones, along with the intense pride and code of morality that came with the much-maligned traveller culture, its magnificent heritage of songs and storytelling, and the hard cutting edge of the bitter prejudice and hostility to which travellers have been subjected by settled folk from time immemorial.

In Andrew Panton’s new Dundee production, all of this is played out with a wonderful, eloquent fluency by a nine-strong company of actor-musicians on the rock-fringed open space of Kenneth MacLeod’s set.

Chiara Sparkes gives a heartbreakingly fine performance as young Bessie, Beth Marshall is superb as her mother, devoted to the travelling life; and Ann Louise Ross is magnificent as the older Bessie, looking back on her glorious childhood, and taking the audience with her into that world. Among them, this fine ensemble succeed in capturing both the joy of the world Bessie remembers, and the shadows that lengthened over it in the late 1930s, when rumours began to arrive of Hitler herding gypsies and travellers, along with others, into what were to become his death camps. As the audience gathers its own memories, and begins to join in the songs, they also capture the sweet, sorrowful undertow of the show’s s­ econd elegy, the saddest of all; the lament for the glorious unspoiled landscape of fields, hills, burns and moorlands – teeming with pristine springs of water, berries and wildlife – where B ­ etsy Whyte grew up, and which, given the ever-heavier hand of humankind on the earth, has now effectively disappeared, perhaps for good. - JOYCE McMILLAN

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The Courier 4 Sep 2018 Dawn Geddes

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The Sunday Herald 8 Sep 2018 Mark Brown

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The Yellow on the Broom, Betsy Whyte’s memoir of her early life as a member of a traveller community in Scotland in the 1920s and 1930s, is an important document. Its account of the stigmatising and injustice (including police violence) faced by travellers in Perthshire and Angus is sobering (not least as much of it will be familiar to traveller and other minority communities in Scotland today).

In this revival of Anne Downie’s 1989 stage adaptation, directed for Dundee Rep by Andrew Panton, we see the traveller family unjustly expelled from a farm without pay and unfairly threatened with eviction from their flea-infested rooms in Brechin. We witness, too, the bigotry, passed down from adults to children, which manifests itself in a nasty schoolyard conspiracy against the young Bessie Townsley (as Whyte then was).

Actor Barrie Hunter is given the pleasurable task of representing the good in the scaldie (house-dwelling) community. Playing both Bessie’s enlightened and supportive Brechin headmaster and the wonderfully eccentric, comic and hospitable aristocrat Cameron (who thinks he’s a Jacobite in the time of Charles Edward Stuart), Hunter brings, by turns, a warm humanity and a delightfully energetic craziness to the production.

Indeed, the cast is generally impressive, not least recent graduate Chiara Sparkes, who plays young Bessie with real emotional depth.

For all this, one can’t help but feel there is something a tad couthie, not to say laboured, in the play’s straight delivery of Whyte’s chronicle. The presence on stage of the overseeing, older Bessie (played here by Ann Louise Ross) only serves to highlight the piece’s origins in autobiographical prose, rather than theatre.

Designer Kenneth MacLeod’s set, with its fake rocks and malfunctioning camp fire (which puffs out a gratuitous extra flame when it’s extinguished), adds little to the production’s fragile sense of theatricality.

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The Wee Review 10 Sep 2018 Claire Wood

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Bessie Townsley grew up in a community of travellers in 1930s Perthshire. She recorded her experiences in her memoir, The Yellow On The Broom. The book was adapted for the stage in 1989 by playwright Anne Downie who was lucky enough to meet the author and drew on her stories, the book and recordings of folk songs to bring the world of travelling people vividly to life, decades later.

The play shows us Bessie’s early life on the road with her mum, dad and siblings, living in impromptu groups, finding work where they can, striking out alone and – grudgingly from her mum’s point of view – spending winters indoors to ensure Bessie gets the then obligatory 100 days of school. Downie’s script nicely juxtaposes the many small kindnesses of strangers with the Townsleys’ continual struggle for stability.

If the families’ experiences are typical, life for Scotland’s Travellers hasn’t improved a whole lot in the intervening years. The play documents the bullying, the judgements, the lazy assumptions heaped onto this community by the people they live alongside, coupled with the gradual exclusion of travellers from local land as the years go by.

With eerie contemporary resonance, the travellers are accused of living off the local community without giving anything back. As immigration, racism and the refugee crisis continue to be political hot potatoes, it’s easy to see why Dundee Rep’s Artistic Director, Andrew Panton, felt the time was right to stage this play. And it’s great to see the theatre using this production as a platform for a series of events through September that celebrate the history and future of Scotland’s Travellers and their culture.

This is a boisterous, joyful production, packed with music, traditional songs and a continual restless movement that evokes the travellers’ claustrophobia if made to stay in the same place for too long. Gary Mackay is defiant as Sandy, Bessie’s dad, fiercely proud of his family, fiercely committed to avoiding alcohol following a fight he was too drunk to remember. Mackay conveys a resolute strength in his commitment to do what’s right, despite (most) provocation. Beth Marshall is a warm-hearted Maggie, Bessie’s mum, but you wouldn’t want to mess with her. Chiara Sparkes, as Young Bessie is a complete delight, a beautifully convincing petulant child growing into a righteous warrior who uses her dad’s moral compass to navigate the adult world.

Panton’s direction is expert, revelling in the joy of life outdoors, of nature, of freedom but using all the theatrical tricks at his disposal to show that this 1930s story is just as much a story for today. But this production is a team effort. Kenneth MacLeod’s set is a proper box of tricks, with multiple heights, a wistfully evocative backcloth that nicely narrows to convey claustrophia, a fire pit that the cast brilliantly, religiously, douse before it’s packed away again, even a babbling brook that was only missing trout. Sinead McKenna’s lighting is artfully unobtrusive. And composer John Kielty has assembled a foot-tapping collection along with the much loved “Yellow on the broom”. “I’ll be singin’ that aw’ evenin”, one audience member confided to her friend as we left the theatre.

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For further information about our Education projects and resources, please contact Heather Cassidy (Education and Pathways Associate) on 01382 342660 or email hcassidy@dundeereptheatre.co.uk

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Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance Theatre Limited is a Registered Company No: SC021201 Scottish Charity Registered No: SC017315 - Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance Theatre Limited gratefully acknowledges support from: