Clay, Smeddum and Greenden

If you've read his "Sunset Song" trilogy, then you'll know that the devil was always in the detail with Lewis Grassic Gibbon and so trying to squish three short stories into ninety minutes here was always going to mean much of that detail was going under the cart. It's a story about a rural Scottish community across three generations as livelihoods, priorities, and attitudes start to shift from the traditional male-dominated, superstitious, gossip-mongering, agrarian subsistence lifestyle to ones more likely to offer something less mundane and routine, especially for the women-folk. Bill Craig's sparing adaptation translates some of the thick Scots vernacular into something more appreciable by more of us, as we follow the the Galt family, the Menzies and finally the Simpson couple. "Clay" sees a life of backbreaking regularity. Farming by hand, with an horse to till the soil and with no time to spend on leisure save for on the Sabbath. Women's work, though not quite so manual, was likewise never done and it's a tragedy that helps take us into the more light-hearted "Smeddum" stage of the triptych. That's an old Scots word meaning spirit or gumption. Eileen McCallum holds this segment of the storytelling together strongly and mischievously with a blend of determination and character before the story finally condenses it's last chapter into a disappointingly undercooked chapter that revolves around the selfish "Simpson" (Brian Cox) and his increasingly neglected wife "Ellen" (Claire Nielsen) who have rented the remote house at "Greenden". Fulton Mackay provides one of the stable conduits to the story, featuring in all three as the grocer whose observations on the changing aspects of the lives of his customers, and his occasional narration, serve to keep us on the right trammel. The photography marries the glorious and the bleak effectively and the cast - well known faces from Scottish theatre and television - combine well to offer us a convincing glimpse of a society that hadn't changed in generations and that was ill-equipped, and reluctant, to do so now. this production does sort of fall between two stools. It might have benefitted from three distinct hour long episodes, or from a complete rewrite to better weave the three stories into a more stand alone feature, but as it is it's a still quite a poignant look at a way of life before electricity and where only the doctor could afford a car.