The Road To Sunset
It's funny how being forced to read a book at school can suck all the enjoyment out of it. That's especially true when a teacher decides that each pupil should take it in turns to read it aloud to the rest of the class. I don't know about you, but in my fourth year English class very few of my classmates had the gifts of a budding Gielgud or Olivier. Sometimes it could take ten minutes to complete a paragraph in stumbling Glaswegian. It was torture.
For many years that was how I recalled my first encounter with Sunset Song - the famous novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Even the author's name would conjur up memories of me with my head slumped on a school desk, sneaking looks at my wristwatch and tapping the glass to make sure the minute hand wasn't frozen.
Then there was the setting of Sunset Song. The Mearns and Aberdeenshire seemed like a million miles away from my Easterhouse comfort zones and the dialect of the characters might as well have been Klingon for all the sense it made to me at the time.
But two decades later I picked up the book again and realised what I had been missing. Sometimes you have to be a grown-up to appreciate a childhood story and an author's genius.
Tomorrow (Sunday) on Â鶹Éç Radio Scotland we're doing just that with a four special programmes devoted to Lewis Grassic Gibbon (J. Leslie Mitchell) who died 75 years ago to the day. If you're already a devotee of L.G.G. then I'm sure you'll enjoy the dramatisation of Sunset Song that we originally made for Â鶹Éç Radio 4.
But if you're not familiar with the author then do listen to Road to Sunset. This brand new play - specially commissioned for Â鶹Éç Radio Scotland - tells the fascinating story of Mitchell's life including his early adventures in journalism and his connection to H.G. Wells.
This production is based on the stage play by Jack Webster which I saw perfomed in Aberdeen and wrote about at the time on this blog.
All the programmes will be available on the Â鶹Éç iPlayer for the rest of the week.
Comments
or to comment.