Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed evaluation – the poetry, prose and keenness of a Scottish modernist

The name comes from a brief tale about two hikers on a tenting shuttle. They come to a decision to do away with their garments and stroll in the course of the nation-state as nature meant, best to be flawed for poachers. The tale’s mixture of humour, transgression and ear for the Doric dialect of north-east Scotland have been function qualities of its writer, Nan Shepherd (1893-1981), a creator unashamed through her nakedness and celebrated for her evocations of Scotland’s rural setting.

Celebrated, this is, as soon as The Living Mountain, her brief ebook about strolling within the Cairngorms, was once printed. That was once in 1977, 3 a long time after its crowning glory, however extra particularly in 2011 when it was once republished through Canongate, simply because it was once slipping again into obscurity.

It had now not at all times been that approach. As the writer of 3 interwar novels, Shepherd was once regarded as a vital modernist creator in her day. But, having grew to become her consideration to instructing, to not point out roaming the hills, she were in large part forgotten on the time of her loss of life in 1981.

As this one-act play through Richard Baron and Ellie Zeegen would have it, she is a lady with little worry for posterity. Played through Susan Coyle, Shepherd is immune to flattery and modest about her achievements, coming maximum alive on the sound of poetry; infrequently her personal, simply as regularly now not. At occasions in Baron’s manufacturing, she asks contributors of the target market to learn her favorite passages aloud (which, at my efficiency, they do impressively).

Part of a era that incorporated the novelist Neil M Gunn and the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, Shepherd enthuses about contemporaries similar to Virginia Woolf, to whom she was once when compared. This literary hobby, along side an unconventional personal lifestyles, is on the middle of a play that swirls round her tale, taking us from wide-eyed kid, finding the wonderful thing about pine cones, to care-home resident, refusing to be patronised through the body of workers.

Coyle switches from excitable adolescence to stiff-limbed previous girl and all issues in between, whilst Adam Buksh gamely performs enthusiasts, lecturers and carers. If the play skims the skin of Shepherd’s attraction as a creator, it’s however a warm-hearted evocation of a lifestyles led with self-determination out and in of the shadows.