IT is four years now since much-loved Scottish folk rock band Runrig bid a fond farewell to their legions of fans at home and abroad with a tour titled The Last Dance.
It had been a long journey since the group was formed on the Isle of Skye back in 1973.
Now – thanks to acclaimed writer Morna Young, director Luke Kernaghan, musical director John Kielty and actor Alan B McLeod – the band’s considerable songbook is forming the basis for a new work of musical theatre. A co-production between Eden Court theatre in Inverness and production company Raw Material, The Stamping Ground makes its world premiere at Eden Court on July 14.
The musical tells the story of Euan and Annie, a young couple in their thirties, who return to live in the small Highland community in which they were raised after a long time away. The pair raised their 16-year-old daughter, Fiona, in London, and, having only visited in the interim, they have decided to relocate permanently to the Highlands.
It’s a storyline that overflows with emotional and political resonances. Combined with the heartfelt songs of Runrig, it has the potential to make for a deeply memorable show.
I catch up with Young – a self-confessed Runrig fan who hails from Burghead in Moray, in the east Highlands – in the midst of rehearsals for the show. Bringing together her own ideas for a homecoming narrative with the songs of Runrig could not, I suggest, have been an easy proposition.
Aligning songs – each of which has its own, independent life – with an original story was, the writer says, like building a jigsaw. “Figuring out those jigsaw pieces was really hard,” she says.
In fact, it was much harder than simply sitting down to write a story of her own, she continues.
Not least because she, Kernaghan and Kielty had to go through the painful process of deciding which Runrig songs to put in the show and which to leave out.
Young was fascinated to discover how much of a crossover there was between the songs she identified as good for her story, those noted down by Kernaghan and Kielty, and the numbers chosen by Runrig themselves for The Last Dance in 2018.
“That made me think,” she says, “‘there’s something in these songs that’s speaking to everyone’.”
Interestingly, when she’s not writing, Young is playing fiddle in the band Folkify, with Sandy Nelson and others. The group take well known songs from rock and pop music and translate them into the Scottish folk tradition – their version of the late Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, for example, is a YouTube gem.
A tremendous bit of fun Folkify may be, but Young believes that being in the band has helped her in the process of writing The Stamping Ground.
The writer explains that Folkify, “strip off all the music and just go back to the lyrics”, always asking themselves, “what’s at the heart of this song?”.
In writing the musical at a cottage retreat on the west coast of Scotland, her approach to Runrig songs was remarkably similar to that of Folkify, she says. “When I went to that cottage, I stopped listening to Runrig and just went to the lyrics.”
Young wanted to know, she explains, what story was coming through the songs. She found that, by engaging with the songs first-and-foremost as text, she was able to connect the lyrics with the voices of her characters.
In penning what she calls her “jukebox musical”, the writer developed no fewer than four different narratives. Eventually, she alighted on the tale of Euan, Annie and Fiona.
Does such a Highland homecoming story, I wonder, take us inevitably into the political territory of property ownership and land ownership in the north of Scotland? “How do you write about going home to the Highlands without writing about how hard that is?” Young asks, rhetorically. “So many of the properties now are rental and Airbnbs.
“I’ve got good pals who live up on the west coast and they say that locals are just constantly forced out. You end up in this world where you can’t borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbour, because you don’t know who your neighbour is.”
Musical theatre is, Young says, “about emotion and finding that human connection.” Do that, she contends, and you will find that the politics emerge, almost naturally, from the story. Euan and Annie are, the writer observes, “going back with that idealistic notion that their daughter will be safe in this wee place. Therein lies the dynamic of how you remember somewhere.”
It’s a subject that is ripe with emotional potential. Someone should write some songs about it.
The Stamping Ground is at Eden Court, Inverness, July 14-30
