Shades of Tay, Pitlochry Festival Theatre

The Guardian 31 August 2020

YOU can’t fault Pitlochry Festival theatre for industriousness. Under artistic director Elizabeth Newman, the company has channelled its energy into a prodigious online programme during the pandemic. Using the hashtag #PFTLightHopeJoy, it has been uploading as many as three YouTube videos a day. They come in bite-size chunks and range from actor Felicity Sparks singing about doing the washing-up to playwright May Sumbwanyambe talking about 18th-century slavery.

That’s in addition to Shades of Tay, a two-year project that, for the time being, has been moved online. The idea is to generate artistic responses to the Tay, the 120-mile river of which Pitlochry’s Tummel is a tributary. The first six poems, plays and stories are online, with more on the way from writers including Timberlake Wertenbaker, Jo Clifford and Daniel Bye. [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).