Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
When Fiona Allen was seven, her parents took her to the theatre in Inverness, where they lived, to see a production of AA Milne’s story The House at Pooh Corner. Instantly, Allen fell in love. “The moment I saw Christopher Robin come into the white spotlight, I was starstruck,” she says. But although she took part in school and college plays, she never thought it could lead to a career. Instead, she studied business at university and joined the civil service, working for the Land Register of Scotland until she retired in 2012. Her newly free time reignited a decades-old spark. “I still wanted to do something with my brain so I went back to university to study theatre and performance,” says Allen, who’s now 72.
That year, she took part in a folk drama workshop and discovered mumming, an ancient masked form, in which male actors travel through villages, performing simple plays, often in exchange for food or shelter. “It’s a simpler story than conventional plays. It has one central conflict and sword fight, rather than slow character development. It’s steeped in history and involves more improvisation because the play is always tailored to a local audience,” says Allen.
