Bog Myrtle & Peat

I met the poet Tom Pow at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2018. I’d often enjoyed his work in the past, and I was more than a little starstruck to meet the man himself on a hot summer’s evening in Charlotte Square. Since then we’ve been for a pint or two, and my reading world has been dramatically expanded by several important suggestions he’s made, not least one single email which contained life-altering links to Emile Zola, Jean Baptiste del Amo and Henri Alain Fournier. But there’s more than simple loyalty here if I use this blog to promote a show that Tom has coming up at the Edinburgh Festival this year in association with The Galloway Connection. I’ve been to see The Village and the Road twice now, and enjoyed it more than I can possibly say. I’m usually slow to recommend anything I haven’t wholeheartedly loved, but I have no hesitation here. If you can get to Edinburgh in August, please make time to see this.

The morning after the first time I’d first seen this show, I was asked to produce a short review for the company. For a little more context here, I’ve reproduced it below:

The Village and the Road

Tom Pow and The Galloway Agreement

August 29^th, Catstrand New Galloway

In the humdrum normality of village life, even the most basic human interactions generate a accumulative friction of culture. The Village and The Road treats these distinctive accretions as the essence of belonging, and the people who live in Tom Pow’s villages are woven together by a shared experience of the small, the seasonal and the interlinked. But as people have drained away from the countryside over the last few decades, that ancient sense of co-dependence has begun to fade. Villages have become something new. Many are dominated by holiday homes; homes where the windows are dark for nine months of the year. Young people head for the cities and the old dynamics are sorely altered by their absence. Far from serving as a communal hub, some villages have begun to feel cold and peripheral.

There was a fresh and exciting energy to the performance as it began, and the movement of speakers, singers and musicians felt loose, comfortable and wonderfully well-oiled. The Village and the Road opens with a recording of a woman’s voice as she mourns the destruction of a local rookery – a bird village. Human neighbours complained that the birds were too noisy and the trees were a mess; they had to go. It’s a challenging expression of our growing reluctance to share space with nature, but the recurring motif is that lost villages cannot be replaced. That’s a poignancy which persists in music and verse throughout the performance, and it’s wide-eyed enough to sidestep the risk of sentimentality or nostalgia. There’s no space for that kind of aspirant “Escape to the Country” aesthetic where it’s always time for a picnic. Many of the tales in this depiction of village life are painful and strangely claustrophobic. All human life is here, and if we cannot easily express what has been lost in the decline of rural places, we surely know it’s gone. 

Matched against these ideas of lost belonging, there are more challenging tensions around that often confusing desire to depart from the comfort of home; the irreconcilable pulls of staying and leaving. That’s a bittersweet balance at the best of times, but it’s reassuring to remember that travel and exploration link us together as if all villages were invisibly bound by the same foundational rules. 

The Village and The Road is made up of numerous parallel strands and episodes which build a tapestry of stories, thoughts and counter-thoughts. Although not wholly theatre in the traditional sense, individual scenes are neatly evoked in small vignettes which sometimes amount to little more than a gesture or one performer catching the eye of another. Within that structure, there is scope to balance the fanciful freedom of Laurie Lee’s adolescent wanderings against the modern realities of refugees and forced migration. Nested inside the show’s multiple stories, a lightning rod abruptly grounds ethereal possibilities of lost love and decay with the image of Syrian migrants adrift in the Mediterranean. It’s a jolt. And without skipping a beat, the conversation rolls on to new seams of poignancy and confrontation, the atmosphere heightened by thrilling, gorgeous turns of music and song by the Galloway Agreement.

Villages have changed, but the psychological value of that primitive unit has survived. As Tom Pow’s words explain, we all still reach for that age-old sense of connectedness with nature and ourselves; the hiraeth which refuses to let us sleep at night. Extending an expression of hope for the future, the performance winds down with the dream of a new journey; a journey almost biblical in tone and language. The solution is ambiguous – new homes and fresh places. We cannot clearly see the way ahead, but the first step towards reconciliation is to understand the strangely opaque nature of what we’ve lost. The Village and The Road takes that step by striving to locate the fulcrum which lies between staying and going; stillness and movement; comfort and curiosity. It made for a performance which felt simultaneously rich and relaxed. My enduring impression is that the performers were enjoying themselves, and how fine it was to share that feeling with them.