Cairngorms’ own Nan Shepherd goes on the stage
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Following the success of their podcast series, A Journey with Nan Shepherd, the award-winning Firebrand Theatre Company in co-production with Pitlochry Festival Theatre, are set to stage the world première of Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed.
The new play that uncovers the extraordinary legacy of the elusive Scottish naturalist and poet, Nan Shepherd, who so encapsulated the spirit of the Cairngorms in her famous “The Living Mountain”.
Opening at Pitlochry Festival Theatre from May 24 and running until July 6, the play is filled with poetry, humour and romance and reveals the untold story of how Shepherd’s experiences as an author, teacher, hillwalker and lover helped shape Scotland’s recent literary history.
It also explores the mystery of why the manuscript of her ground-breaking masterpiece lay forgotten in a drawer for decades before being self-published, translated into 16 languages and hailed recently as “one of the finest books ever written on landscape and nature in Britain.”
Produced in association with Dr Kerri Andrews, Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed is co-written by Ellie Zeegen and Richard Baron (The Monarch of the Glen, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, The 39 Steps, UK tours and Look Back in Anger featuring David Tennant) who also directs.
The cast features Irene Allan (Wilf, Traverse Theatre Company, Red Dust Road, National Theatre of Scotland) as Nan Shepherd and David Rankine (The Fair Maid of the West, Royal Shakespeare Company, ) as Robertson, Neil Gunn, and John Macmurray.
Director and Co-writer Richard Baron said: “Firebrand Theatre Company’s signature is ‘epic theatre in intimate spaces’, so we are thrilled to be invited by Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s Artistic Director Elizabeth Newman to create a production in their superb new studio theatre which will explore, in Firebrand’s typically inventive style, the fascinating backstory of Nan, this fiercely independent, wild-walking, convention-breaking teacher, and ground-breaking feminist novelist.”
Co-writer Ellie Zeegen added: “We discover, at times very funny and at times intensely moving fashion, how Nan was at the heart of the famous Scottish literary renaissance of the 1930s, but because she was a woman in a man’s world, she came to live much of her life in obscurity.
“However, our research also newly reveals how a bruising unrequited love affair with her best friend’s husband, the free-thinking philosopher John Macmurray, may have inspired Nan’s solitary journey into the mountains.
“Here, through communing with the landscape, she finally gained the thrilling insight to surmount all these personal obstacles, achieving not only posthumous celebrity as the so-called ‘Scottish Virginia Woolf,’ but the unique honour of becoming the first female writer to feature on a UK bank note.”
Tickets and further information about Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed are available from the Box Office on 01796 484626 or online at pitlochryfestivaltheatre.com.
