Given the critical success that Muriel Romanes's production of The Reel of the Hanged Man enjoyed in Scotland, the pre-production controversy can now be seen in a perspective that none of us involved in the production felt at the time when there was suddenly the possibility that the work might not be produced. Keith Bruce in The Herald summarised what had happened: 'A schism in the performing company led to the departure of one of its founders, a playwright withdrew the rights for the company to perform her current work, and a theatre manager pulled his venue out of the proposed tour' (Bruce, 2000). It is beyond the focus of this paper to rehash the story of the play's 'controversial gestation' (Bruce, 2000) in Scotland, except in terms of the misreading of the text that the controversy implies. A kind of politically-correct censoriousness raised its head in the press, and the result could well have been the silencing of an important text based in inquiry rather than polemic. The problem does not so much lie with the objections of Gerda Stevenson, co-founder of the company, and Janet Paisley, the playwright who withdrew her permission for Stellar Quines to produce her work, but with the way in which the Scottish press distorted and reduced the work of a playwright utterly unknown in the country. The headlines alone tell the story: 'Artists quit as theatre group stages incest play' (The Scotsman, 1999); 'This play about incest is morally bankrupt. I'm appalled by it' (Scottish Daily Mail, 1999) 'Theatre group insists "incest" play will go on' (Scottish Daily Express, 1999); 'Theatre chief explains banning of "incest" play' (The Press and Journal, 2000). The most worrying statement about the play was the opinion expressed under the title 'Unnecessary act' on the editorial page of the Scottish Daily Express (17 November, 1999): 'Although we have not seen The Reel – it has never been performed in Europe – we are ready to accept the views of those acquainted with its lack of moral perspective'. Some of the articles took a more balanced view than the attentiongrabbing headlines would indicate. David Taylor of the Scottish Arts Council, for example, was quoted as saying (Harding, 1999), 'This play comes with a strong pedigree. We acknowledge that the subjects covered by the play are sensitive, but believe that theatre in the right hands can help the public to explore and understand difficult issues'.
In the end, thanks to Muriel Romanes's understanding of the play and her unnaturalistic production, The Reel of the Hanged Man won through. I described the production in my diary for 29 March 2000:
The production begins with the entire cast sitting. There are four benches, one on each side of the playing area. The backdrop is a kind of wall of discarded clothes, an abstraction of abandonment. The only furniture is a wooden table and chairs. The performance begins with the primitive rhythm of step dancing, which gradually intensifies in complexity. This leads into the card-playing scene. The music segues into the French 'Bang Bang' and the two girls dance in a back corner.
The stage is darkly lit throughout ... And the ending was brilliant as Muriel went back to the beginning, the dancing, and the opening scene with the music taking over, the fiddle tune, the masked fiddler upstage.
At the end of the performance the reel seemed poised to begin again, underscoring the cruel and sad ritual that Delisle had put at the centre of her play. The story may be rooted in Abitibi, Quebec, in the 1950s, but the conception of the action as ritual brings a powerful universality. Delisle's approach had taken vernacular language into a new territory, a sort of ritual epic in the demotic. It is as if one is witnessing an age-old story that is doomed to endless re-enactment. The epigraph that Delisle chose for the play best identifies the exact place where Delisle (2000: 99) situates the work: 'Tragedy situates itself in the intermediary and ambiguous place between ritual and the spontaneous model that this ritual is striving to reproduce (René Girard, La Violence et le Sacré)'.
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