Bondagers
We forget this sometimes even in the intensely verbal medium of theater, but British playwright Sue Glover’s historical drama Bondagers reminds us of the power of the spoken word. Set in rural Scotland in the 1860s, the piece offers a banquet of beautiful language. From the moment the play begins, the audience is immersed in the rich sounds of the Scottish dialect: the luscious vowels, the trilling rs, the scads of unfamiliar words, many of them ancient ancestors of modern words or mid-19th-century Scottish agricultural terms–“ken” for know, “bairns” for babies, “tumshie” for turnip, “hinds” for farmhands. And the Shattered Globe cast are eager to display how well they’ve been tutored to speak this Celtic spin on English.
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In writing Bondagers Glover seems to have had two competing goals–to create a compelling story and to convey a message about the subjugation of women, the cruelty of the class struggle, and the rape of the land and culture in pursuit of greater and greater production. A bad artist or fervent ideologue could easily have botched both. But happily Glover, like Bertolt Brecht, is a great enough artist, or a subtle enough propagandist, that her didactic points take a backseat to her art.
