The Big Picnic Harland & Wolff Engine Shed, Govan Glasgow, Scotland 1994.10.01 cassette masters aud FLAC

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IN BILL BRYDEN's The Big Picnic, civic pageantry comes indoors. And if that statement arouses more interest in the process than the content, then it reflects my response to the show.

Four years ago Bryden and his team first moved into the huge Harland & Wolff engine shed in Govan to stage The Ship, a theatrical epitaph for the Clyde's ship-building industry. The new piece, on an even grander scale, is a theatrical war memorial for the City of Glasgow Battalion which perished in Flanders. In both cases, an epic tribute to the city's past has won massive support from the new Glasgow. One step inside that transformed shed - a venue two-thirds the size of a football pitch, packed to the rafters - and you breathe an atmosphere of all-or-nothing commitment beyond anything to be experienced in the English theatre.

As a mass spectacle, its heart and soul are in the staging. Bryden and William Dudley, the pioneers of promenade performance, have created an enormous traverse set combining the home front and the battlefield. Seated spectators on one side of the scaffolding and promenaders on the other look down on the opening recruiting scenes. Then, as the battalion forms up under a piper for a slow march, a pair of double doors swing open before the marchers and the audience follows them into the war: the promenaders on foot, the seated spectators on what turns out to be an electric railway which shuttles them first to the trenches and then into action in no man's land with laser- beam tracer bullets sizzling through the darkness from the German lines.

Simultaneously, Bryden introduces a deus ex machina in the form of an overhead musicians' gallery (for John Tams's folk-rock group) from which Deborah Pope, as the Angel of Mons, hangs upside down as she sweeps over the dead and dying. Combining the mud of naturalism with advanced lighting technology to stirring effect, it is at once brutally immediate and poetically distanced.

In that respect, at least, Bryden achieves an intimate focus inside an epic framework. His text, alas, does no such thing. Written in stiffly self-contained scenes whose artificiality is emphasised by the fluid environment, it is a formulaic job along the lines of a bomber-crew B-movie. Enlisted by a harsh but warm-hearted Colour Sergeant (Jimmy Logan), the recruits include a gentleman farmer (Stuart Bowman) who insists on staying in the ranks, and a salty old-timer (Russell Hunter) who becomes a daddy to the boys at the front. There are occasional rumblings of doubt, pacifism and tribal intolerance, but no intimate drama ever takes shape inside the patriotic ritual. Perhaps nothing serious can be said about the war in a work honouring its dead; but did Bryden have to show the lads being so pathetically grateful for their little tins of tobacco from Buckingham Palace? By far their most eloquent scene is the mute fresco of warning faces which they present back home after the battalion has been wiped out.

The Setting

The Battle of The Somme and the subsequent trench warfare on the Western Front from 1914-1918, stamped the, then, new 20th Century with its most enduring image No Mans Land, that lethal wasteland of devastation which signalled the end of both innocence and faith with its sudden destruction of the natural world and human life by a completely new and terrifying mechanised process. It was this, strangely visual event that we wanted to describe and commemorate 80 years later and where better, we thought, than Harland and Wolff where we had staged The Ship in 1990. The shed seemed to contain the very essence of the early 20th Century machine age so appropriate for this most grim industrialised war.

We decided to lay out a section of the wasteland exploiting the great size of our shed/theatre. Because its very length of 250 feet was no more than the amount of ground sometimes gained after days of fighting which often cost thousands of lives. To utilise this epic space to the full, we again adopted the promenade style, where the audience move with the action so that they too advance along the 250ft and retreat and advance again and retreat again before the day is over. The other element in our wasteland is our version of the old theatrical device known as the Deus-ex-Machina or The God of the Machine, which in 17th Century theatre lowered in the Gods and the Goddesses. In our version, we have reinstated the bridge crane as used when the shed was first built and which rides on the original rails that can carry over 50 tonne. This mobile crane represents the remorseless, inhuman tide of destruction as it cruises back and forth, like a great bird scavenging over the battlefield. Its central icon is the Angel of Death, here called the Angel of Mons. She is a distillation of the many (over 10,000) sightings and mass hallucinations reported by allied soldiers, who saw visions of angels and folk heroes, saints and lost relatives in the sky over the Western Front. For us, she is the arbitrary hand of fate and the bringer of release from this hell.

In researching this piece, I have been struck by a paradox of trench warfare which many poets and artists have described and that is the terrible beauty of it all, particularly at night with the searchlights and starshell tracer bullets and gas clouds playing over the underground city of the trenches. We have tried to evoke this eerie firework display whose effect was so sinister, despite its beauty and scale. My own grandfather was gassed on the Somme but he would never talk to me about it. In working on our show, I have come closer to understand what he went through. William Dudley (Designer)

Colours............Jimmy Logan
Hughie Frizell.....Russell Hunter
Billy Blair...........Iain Connell
Frankie Nealon....Gary Bakewell
Morris Burns.......William MacBain
Russell Enoch......Stuart Bowman
Norrie Beaton......Derek Riddell
Gus Adams.........lain MacColl
Miss Fensom.......Morag Hood
Bunty................Juliet Cadzow
Nessie...............Ashley Jensen
Rebecca.............Victoria Nairn
Flora.................Sandra McNeeley
lan the Piper........Fred Morrison
Tam, a miner......Lester Simpson
The Gael............lain MacCaskill
Medical Orderly....Stephen Speed
An Angel............Deborah Pope
Oliver Roche-Gordon.....Sebastian Graham-Jones

Gerhard Kupfler......Lewis Allan
Smythe...........Freddie Boardley

Recorded from the promenaders 'section, which enabled you to move to where the action was at any particular part in the show. The dialogue was in a broad Scottish accent of course - so we couldn't understand a word they were saying - except when they swore!!!

The Battle of the Somme sequence in track 20 was awesome and beyond deafening, as I'm sure it was. Many John Tams songs were used.

01 Gay Gordons
02 The Last Waltz
03 Colours announces forming of batallion
04 Waltz
05 Battalion forms up - slow march to pipes main theme tune
06 Why oh me
07 Somewhere the sun is shining
08 Music
09 Scarecrows
10 Bagpipes
11 Somewhere the sun is shining
12 Rollin' home
13 Christmas song
14 In my soul
15 Battle/Scarecrows
16 Scarecrows
17 The Battle of the Somme tune
18 Johnny has gone for a soldier
19 Auld Lang Syne
20 Pipe tune for battle/Battle with main theme
21 Hymn/roll call/main theme tune
22 Always remembered


BAND
Fred Morrison......pipes
Rod Paterson......vocals, acoustic guitar
James Prime......keyboards
John A Sampson......bugle, trumpet, whistles
Stuart Smith......bass guitar
Mike Travis......drums
Wendy Weatherby......vocals, cello, violin
Tadeusz Wyzgowski......Production Musical Director, vocals, guitars