Play: Whisky Galore

The celebrated Compton Mackenzie novel and 1949 Ealing comedy Whisky Galore is currently touring in a superb all-female stage adaptation, staged to mark the 100th anniversary of partial women's suffrage in Britain.

Based on true events, Whisky Galore recounts how the dull and harsh existence of the islanders of Little Todday and Great Todday during World War Two is joyfully transformed when the SS Cabinet Minister, bearing a massive cargo of whisky, runs aground within easy reaching distance.

Like its literary and filmic predecessors, this current theatre production by Philip Goulding, and directed by Kevin Shaw, is full of rich comedy in terms of character, plot and observation.

The real-life foundering (of the SS Politician) took place off the Outer Hebrides whose islands are a mix of Catholic and Calvinist. South Uist and Barra are almost entirely native pre-Reformation Catholic; Lewis is strongly Calvinist and strictly observes the Sabbath; and the other islands are a mix of Catholic and Protestant.

Compton Mackenzie comically encapsulated this division by having his fictitious islands Little Todday Catholic and Great Todday Protestant.

The current company ensure much mirth in performing the agonised wait by the denizens of Great Todday, obliged to count down the minutes until the Sabbath midnight is passed before they are able to row out to the wreck for their division of the spoils. There they are greeted by their Catholic neighbours who ensure full conviviality. Toasts are drunk in a secular Eucharist, and the erstwhile tantalised Sabbatarians of Great Todday, now relieved and fortified by the 'water of life', bless their beloved neighbours of Little Todday with a whisky-fuelled exuberance. Slàinte mhath!

Other plot-lines see an English soldier convert to Catholicism in order to marry his island inamorata; a Catholic socialist poacher leading an impressionable Protestant neighbour astray, and the whole culminating in a merry Catholic wedding presided over by the mischievous Fr Macalister where the flowing whisky ensures all are in fine voice.

There is another Catholic dimension, too. The all-female company performing here go, in the play, by the name of the Pallas Players - an homage to the pioneering all-women's theatre company, the Osiris Players (later the Osiris Rep). Led by the redoubtable Nancy Hewins, the Osiris toured theatre, notably Shakespeare and other classic plays, across the length and breadth of Britain and Ireland for some 40 years between the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s. My late mother Marie Seaborne earned her equity card by touring with the company in the 50s, and, as her mother was Irish and she was a Catholic, Marie was generally the improvising 'negotiator' in terms of securing accommodation and other associated matters of survival on a tour of the Emerald Isle.

The company toured with a caravan, a trailer and two Rolls Royces (later a Wolsey), and Nancy generally slept in the caravan along with two of the seven-strong company who were on catering duty that week. The others would bed down, generally on camp beds, in the ad hoc lodgings - and these were often convents in Ireland. Marie had been educated by French sisters in Alton and so had an easy rapport with the religious. It would be fair to say that conditions were basic to challenging, and the pay negligible.

Whisky Galore nods to some of this in a manner which could have been more richly developed in the script but the fullest tribute actually comes by way of the company playing a gamut of male roles with playful gusto. It is often noted that the Church remains fixed in its observance of the binary essentialism of sexuality, whereas gender theory posits that you don't so much have a gender as realise it through performance. So with an array of (sometimes hilariously extravagant and be-tartaned) costume, moustaches and the odd beard, we are treated to an assortment of males: islanders, clansmen, pukka officers, a dashing doctor, and a Jacobite bard. A voluptuous vamp and a querulous and judgemental mother see as much fun being played with female gender traits, too; and mention must also be made of Paddy, the pet dog. Bravo to Sally Armstrong, Lila Clements, Isabel Ford, Christine Mackie, Alicia McKenzie, Joey Parsad and Shuna Snow for being such a strong and versatile ensemble. Designer Patrick Connellan's clever jigsaw-like box-set also nods to the Osiris's basic and adaptable travelling décor; and fun is had with a movable bar and 'revolving' scenery.

This is an affectionate and delightful tribute to a beloved comedy classic.

Whisky Galore plays at Cast, Doncaster until Saturday 16th June, and then tours to the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, 20th-23rd June, finishing its run at the Salisbury Playhouse, Tuesday 26th-Saturday 30th June.


Dr Philip Crispin is a lecturer in Drama at the University of Hull