MORNA Young was certainly doing backflips in her mind when Dundee Rep’s artistic director Andrew Panton called with an idea; would she be interested in adapting Sunset Song?

Would she ever. The writer had been in love with Scotland’s favourite novel since high school days. She had previously written a monologue for the Scots Language Centre which was little less than a love-letter to Sunset Song. And then the phone rang . . . “It was a moment of incredible synchronicity,” recalls Young, smiling. “And this was a storyline that had been in my mind constantly.”

Lewis Grassic Gibbons’ central theme, one of duality, truly resonated. The story of Chris Guthrie, a young, clever writer with a future well outside of agrarian Aberdeenshire - who chooses to remain on the land and has to face a torrid set of personal circumstances - is so reflective of Young’s own story.

Growing up in a small working-class village, Morna Young had to contend with grief and loss at a very early age after her fisherman father died at sea.  But Young was also blessed with an imagination that was to signpost her away from her birthplace. She would escape to the local library where her mum worked, lose herself in stories, and begin to write her own. Yet, this pull on the then teenager, away from her Doric history, towards a future in writing, was massive.

Morna Young took off to Sheffield (to study journalism) and then to London (where she studied acting) and developed an inferiority complex. Where did she truly belong?

“For a long time, I’ve felt I’ve had two identities,” she reflects. “On one level, I’m part of a theatre world, and yet my voice is Scots.” She laughs. “I can remember being in London getting blank looks when you speak in Doric. People don’t get it when you tell people where you’re going by saying ‘Doon-aroon the corner.’ And then when I’d go home, I feel a bit posh. And this sense of double identity has never been expressed so brilliantly as it was in Sunset Song.”

Yet, once the backflips abated, Young was entirely aware of the responsibility that came with adapting the classic novel. “It’s massive,” she admits. But did she feel that the book also asked the readers questions of personal sacrifice, the sense of doing what we should do, rather than what we wish to do?

“That’s interesting,” she muses. “Chris Guthrie does talk about the two Chrises, about going off to university. But then her mother dies, and she chooses to stay at home. And that choice is really pivotal in the drama. Yet, we have to view it through the time frame in which the choice takes place.”

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The writer, whose debut play Lost at Sea was a multi-award winner, adds; “Through a contemporary lens we ask why she would choose that option.” Young believes the story to be about wanting both worlds. “For me it’s been about trying to belong in a new world, yet when you go home you don’t fully belong there either. And these days we are much more transient, so that question of belonging is a theme I return to time and time again in my work.”

Sunset Song sees Chris Guthrie’s choosing to remain at home partly because of the pull of the land. In the 2015 film starring Agyness Deyn, cinematography simply captures the lure of this mystical landscape and its quiet beauty. In the novel, the writer describes it. But how do you set that imagery in the minds of a theatre audience?

“For me, the land is a character in the play. It’s part of the ensemble. But we use incredible music, with Finn Anderson telling us what the land would sound like, and we use body movement in an attempt to dramatize the land itself.”

And does the play turn the lights up on the novel’s unabating darkness?  Chris Guthrie’s mother is raped by her husband and later takes her own life. Chris’s father tries to rape her. And later, Chris’s husband, on return from war, rapes her.

 “That’s a good question because many people who have read the book forget the darkness and place a softer lens on it. The book is extremely dark. And right from the development we didn’t want to shy away from the trauma, instead building upon the relationships that shaped her.”

What emerges in Young’s voice is that the duality of a writer (who has been writing for BBC Scotland’s River City) serves her well. Her confidence as a successful playwright sits endearingly alongside the concern that she just may not be able to pull it off.

And as result, it’s almost a certainty she will.

Sunset Song is directed by Finn den Hertog and features Danielle Jam as Chris Guthrie. It runs at Dundee Rep Theatre April 16 to May 4, touring Aberdeen, Inverness and Edinburgh, until June 8.

 

Don’t Miss: Who Pays the Piper sees Jen McGregor tell the tragi-comic story of a young talented singer who teaches opera to a wealthy older lady with delusional ambitions. Oran Mor, Glasgow, until Saturday.