Somersaults

After a morning's shopping, I popped into Westminster Cathedral for lunch - they have a very nice little cafe in the crypt, which serves delicious food at very reasonable prices.   The menu is fairly limited, with today the only substantial meal with roast turkey and vegetables for £5.95, but they do excellent sandwiches, cakes, jacket potatoes, and various things on toast - I had my usual scrambled egg and a cup of tea, which is quite sufficient for lunch.   

As I came up the stairs and into the Cathedral, I saw they were just starting a special Mass connected with the display of the relics of St. John Bosco; the Cathedral was packed, and the music beforehand was wonderful.   I would have like to have stayed, but I was going to see a play, called "Somersaults", at the Finborough Theatre in Finborough Road,  Chelsea.

The Finborough Theatre used to be above a pub, but this was changed to a cafe and wine bar which has now gone into administration, although they hope that someone will come forward to take it over.   So they only thing on the ground floor at the moment is the booking office for the theatre, standing lonely in the middle of what used to be the bar.

"Somersaults", by Scottish Gaelic playwright Iain Finlay Macleod, was first produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, and was having its English debut under director Russell Bolam, who has previously directed plays at the Finborough.

It tells the story of James, a young man from Stornoway who has made his fortune in London, acquiring a huge house in Hampstead and numerous possessions which he has bought because he has the money and can afford to buy them.   He is very much the materialistic man, with a wild lifestyle to go with his extravagant tastes.

All this comes to an end when he is made bankrupt; his wife, whom he met at university, leaves him, and all his possessions have to be sold to pay his debts.   He is left with almost literally nothing in the way of possession.

In this depleted state, he turns to his past, as a child growing up in a Gaelic speaking household in Stornoway, a past from which he had moved away as he became wealthy.   His father is dying of cancer, and he goes to see him, so try and find his identify in his past, rather than in money.

He latches on to the fact that his mother tongue, Gaelic, is an important aspect of who he is, and the title of the play, "Somersaults", refers to his obsession with trying to remember what the Gaelic for the word somersaults is.  

All the characters  have some connection with the Gaelic, although all are totally Anglicised, and the the play raises the question of what part language plays in a person's identify, particularly if it is a minority language which hardly anyone speaks.   Is it important to keep minotiry languages alive, when fluent English will enable one to survive anywhere in the world, whereas Gaelic is only useful within a small area of Scotland, and even there one can mange quite well with just English.

"Somersaults" is quite short, only an hour and a quarter, but it packs a lot into that time, and the final scene, where all the characters line up and put their view on the qustion of whether people should keep minority languages alive, leaves the audience with something important to think about.   James's father, for instance, had a completely different view to his son, seeing the large sums spent on Gaelic television programmes being a waste of money.

However, I'm not sure that they were correct in saying that Gaelic speakers are looked down on and told to speak in English if they speak Gaelic in pubs etc, whereas speakers of other languages, such as Welsh (or, perhaps more relevant, Polish?) aren't.   That may have been the case in the distant past, when it was forbidden to speak Gaelic in schools, but I doubt if it is true today, although it may well be the case that, since Gaelic is almost entirely spoken in the western highlands, people who speak it are regarded as less sophisticated than those from places like Edinburgh, who are English speaking.

One other point which I felt added nothing to the ideas being put before the audience was the had language and the sex scene.   Although the obscene language used might be typical of wealthy young City types, some of the lines were unnecessary and the sex scene could have been cut completely without losing anything from the plot.