The critics who responded to Muriel Romanes's production showed to what degree Stellar Quines had succeeded in refuting the pre-production controversy. Sue Wilson (2000) in The Independent wrote that the play's 'underlying motivation ... in seeking to understand the deepest dynamics of such an appalling yet endemic human dysfunction seems an eminently moral and responsible one'. On 30 April 2000, under the heading 'Theatre The Reel of the Hanged Man, MacRoberts Art Centre, Stirling', the anonymous critic in Scotland on Sunday described the play as 'a work which demands to be seen as much as the issues it considers demand to be discussed' whilst describing the Morin family as 'almost unimaginably dysfunctional, yet still recognisable in our society'. And in The Scotsman Joyce McMillan (2000) saw the play as dealing 'with the subject of incest and abuse in the family not so much by condemning it as by trying to explain it, as a response to powerlessness and emotional repression'. More lyrically, Neil Cooper (2000) said that 'Muriel Romanes's production ... whirls, crashes, burns and bleeds with a blind power of spiritual self-laceration'. In claiming that the play 'addresses something in the Scottish national psyche', Steve Cramer was another critic who saw the relevance of the play for a Scottish audience. He seemed to have his eye on the controversy as well as the play when he wrote, 'It's not the incest itself which Delisle's play is concerned with, this is in no way endorsed, but rather the capacity of our culture to condemn without recourse to analysis' (Cramer, 2000). Cramer recognised the complexity of Delisle's treatment by saying that the work explores '... an emotional landscape which is too fraught with complex causalities to bring us simple solutions, as the play's tragic momentum visits upon one and all' (Cramer, 2000). Cramer's insight implicitly recognises the musical form of the play, as a reel turning back on itself in potentially endless reiteration. Thus, at the end of the play, the three surviving women remain paralysed with no alternative but to imagine a visitor who will start the bitter inescapable ritual all over again.
In some ways the most heartening and deeply understanding review of The Reel of the Hanged Man was written by critic John Haswell of The Shetland Times. Without overdrawing the parallel, Shetland, as a Scots-speaking territory beyond the Highlands, is perhaps the place in Scotland most like Abitibi and certainly a place far from the perceived center of the culture. The Reel of the Hanged Man was given one performance at the Garrison Theatre in Lerwick on 5 April 2000. I quote Haswell's review at length as it describes what those of us involved with the production hoped to achieve:
The Reel of the Hanged Man studied the total dysfunction of one particular family living on the outermost edges of all forms of civilisation. Faced with extreme poverty, an unyielding environment and the effects of finding solace through drink, the father of this family sought to reinforce his status as its natural head through increasingly desperate and morally bankrupt means (neglect, violence, bribery and physical abuse). The physical relationship between the father and one of his daughters was the most disturbing manifestation of a man at war with himself and with the world around him and it is to the great credit of the play that it attempted to explain rather than universally condemn. The incest was portrayed as a cancer affecting everyone in the family and the destructive nature of such abuse was strongly presented.
This production was both as controlled and as wild as the family that it featured and as emotionally frightening and yet full of life as the step dancing which embraced it. It was not a show just about incest. It was a show about dreams broken by an all-pervading poverty in an unyielding landscape and an emotional and physical isolation. It was brave, bold and thought-provoking. That a Shetland audience had the opportunity to witness such a powerful production ... is something to be applauded. What a shame that there are those who over react to possible controversy. The Reel of the Hanged Man with all its rage, its life and its destruction was the very stuff of theatre. (Haswell, 2000: 31)
What began as a play in a regional theatre in Rouyn, Abitibi, Quebec in 1978 had crossed more than an ocean in getting to the Garrison Theatre in Lerwick, Shetland, Scotland in 2000. Its success there, however, in a region regarded within its country as remote as Abitibi is in Quebec, is a confirmation not only of the importance of Jeanne-Mance Delisle's play but testimony to the relevance of vernacular theatre beyond its original culture. Bill and I were particularly pleased that Haswell had entirely neglected to mention that the play he attended was a Scots translation. This critic had received the play directly, noting its 'raw, expletive-ridden language' but hearing it in the ur-language of the universal tongue of the people. That was the dream with which Bill Findlay and I began our collaboration together over a quarter of a century ago. We wanted to discover whether Scots language could be the vessel for plays from beyond Scotland. The importance of The Reel of the Hanged Man to this work should not be underestimated. We were lucky in Michel Tremblay, but had our success been limited to his work, the point we were trying to make would be less surely proved. Jeanne-Mance Delisle gave us a play with such a thorough-going vernacular quality – its language, its music, and, above all, its form situated between ritual and the demotic – that Scotland, reluctant as it was, found another playwright that it had never had.
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