‘These were the last of the peasants, the last of the old Scots folk. A new generation comes up that will know them not, except as a memory in a song.’ Soldier, Marxist, anarchist and writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 book Sunset Song was rightly decreed by this publication in 2005 to be one of the most important Scottish novels of all time: Ali Smith hailed it as ‘the rightful rich ceremony of loss after the war and the end of a kind of innocence.’
In the early 1900s, the Guthrie clan try to make a living on those brutal plains and bogs of Blawearie in the parish of Kinraddie. Dysfunction, violence and death haunt the family and poison the land, but from misery and misogyny emerges Chris Guthrie, a feminist shape of things to come. Morna Young’s stunning adaptation uses the lyricism of old Scots, with its blunt Doric beauty and mystery, to create an impressionistic tableau of heartbreak and hope. A simple set of bunkers and sand is the Aberdeenshire Mearns of the book’s setting; the poetry of its beleaguered inhabitants casts a spell every bit as enchanting and magically realistic as those of Dylan Thomas’ Llareggub in Under Milk Wood.

Director Finn den Hertog’s production plays on ideas of mythology; the protagonist’s journey through trauma and societal transformation is an arc that is bleak, elemental and sparse, but also odd and horrific. Musical director Finn Anderson’s inspired interludes shift the unease, like a pre-World War I version of The Wicker Man: unsettling and always a little beyond the rational.
The stand-out cast, most of whom play multiple characters, zigzag effortlessly across the set, picking up instruments and performing like their lives depend on it. Ali Craig, Murray Fraser and Naomi Stirrat are particularly worthy of note but it’s Danielle Jam’s Chris that dominates and stays the distance: the north-east quine, a legend and an inspiration.
Sunset Song, Dundee Rep, until Saturday 4 May; His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, Wednesday 8–Saturday 11 May; Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, Thursday 16–Saturday 18 May; Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, Tuesday 28 May–Saturday 8 June.