Saint Magnus’s death began the first ever St Magnus festival in 1977 with Peter Maxwell Davies’s opera The Martyrdom of St Magnus. His birth opens the 2023 festival in David McNeish’s powerful if static new play, Thora, which gives a voice to the mother of the patron saint of Orkney. Magnificently brought to life by Isabella Jarrett, Thora, in her old age, tells her story including the brutal rape that begat her son, whose own life ended in violence and whose skull is in Kirkwall’s 12th cathedral that bears his name.
The St Magnus festival was co-founded by Maxwell Davies, Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown, arts campaigner Marjorie Linklater and Norman Mitchell, music teacher and cathedral organist. Ticket sales have always been split equally between visitors and residents, but the local community was and remains at its heart, and the islands’ rich past is a tangible part of the midsummer festival, which takes in classical, contemporary and traditional music, literature and dance as well as drama.
