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Charles Barron’s

Gossip Column

One of the delights of travelling with a play on tour, is the chance to meet members of the audience afterwards. In Longside, at the performance of A Bosie for Luck?,  I was entertained by the reminiscences of a splendid old gentleman who arrived an hour before curtain up to be sure of getting a front seat. In his youth he had played in the local dramatic society, taking leading roles in a number of Doric plays, including the most famous of all - Gavin Greig’s Mains’s Wooing.

At Inverurie, I was approached by Joyce Bonnyman whom I knew when I directed her in several shows presented by Inverurie Musical Society. I particularly remember her fine soprano voice in Carousel. I hope Joyce won’t mind me saying that was 50 years ago!

A Bosie for Luck? is based loosely on excerpts from some of the short stories by David Toulmin, the farm worker who - against all the odds - became a powerful writer in Doric. Again in Inverurie, one of my conversations was with a lady who had known Toulmin (or John Reid to give him his real name) because he worked on her parents farm at Aikenshill, near Foveran.

By coincidence, I lived for 30 years at Newtyle House, just across the A90 from Aikenshill, and I used to sit at my study window watching John Reid ploughing a straight dreel with his tractor, little knowing that, long after his death, I would be so closely involved with his work, having now based four short plays as well as the full-length Bosie on his stories. 2013 will be the centenary of Toulmin’s birth and we intend to mark the occasion by mounting a major tour of my adaptation of his only novel Blown Seed.