Review: Grain in the Blood (Traverse Theatre)

Rob Drummond is a really original voice in Scottish theatre, with shows like Bullet Catch and In Fidelity proving hugely successful both at the Fringe and beyond. Compared with these, his new play is decidedly conventional, though that’s not an unalloyed strength.

Grain in the Blood is set in an isolated rural Scottish community that is steeped in ancient folklore to a degree that is both quaint to enlightened postmoderns like us, and also a little creepy. In fact, there is something a little Wicker Man-ish about their incantations to the Grain Mother who blesses the annual crop and to the symbolic importance of the Grain Dolly that they find on the farm. Three generations of women live in the farmhouse, and twelve-year-old Autumn, who was born at the Harvest Moon, is gravely ill. Grandmother Sophia has brought Isaac, Autumn’s father, back after a long absence to see if he can help.

The technical elements of the play work well. It’s effectively paced so it satisfyingly drip-feeds elements of the plot’s backstory, combining suspense and resolution like any well-made play. And there is a set-piece episode – in this case a game of Truth or Dare – that dutifully reveals deeper points and drives the plot to its climax.

It has a compelling atmosphere, too, helped by Michael John McCarthy’s hypnotic score, sparingly used, which helps to cast a claustrophobic spell over the action, and there is something strangely creepy about the repetitions of the rhymes to the Grain Mother. It’s staged very directly, too, in Orla O’Loughlin’s fuss-free production, with Fred Meller’s simple but flexible set managing to combine homeliness with a sense of isolation.

The writing is too clumsy in places, though. The story’s moral is stated with jarring baldness by Bert when he says that "just because the past has been horrible, it doesn’t mean the future has to be", and while the action challenges this it does so only half-heartedly. There seems to be something sinister in the air, but ultimately not much comes of it, and the creepy atmosphere is squandered at several points when I thought it might take off. Furthermore , lots of big issues of culpability and responsibility are raised but then skirted over, and the denouement is pretty outrageous when it comes.

It’s acted with commitment, though, presided over by Blythe Duff’s conflicted Sophia, who struggles to handle the tensions that Isaac’s visit has unleased. Andrew Rothney plays Isaac with compelling physicality and a subtle suggestion of derangement, while John Michie and Frances Thorburn add some welcome humane grounding as Burt and Violet. Best of all is Sarah Miele’s wraith-like Autumn, however, pale and other-worldly, seemingly suspended between death and life, but perhaps, in the end, the only trustworthy character in the play.

So it had me on side all the way through, and it’s worth catching for the performances, but I was left wishing there’d been a bit more depth to the ideas.

Grain in the Blood runs at the Traverse Theatre until 12 November.