Putting on a play about Torry, Aberdeen

In late 2023, I went for a walk with Emer Morris around the headland of Girdleness and Greyhope Bay. This is the part of Torry, in Aberdeen that sticks out into the North Sea. It sits beyond the glow of the city, so at nighttime it can be the best place in Aberdeen to witness the Northern Lights when they shine.  

Emer and I met through our work in the UK climate movement, having coordinated a demo on Aberdeen beach together to protest drilling in the North Sea. Emer, who was based in London at the time, learnt about the community’s campaign to save St Fittick’s Park while she was up. During our walk I described why it’s so important to keep telling the story of what’s happening in Torry far and wide, because it’s a story that transcends the people and place it directly affects. It’s a story of injustice, one that gets repeated. More people must hear and heed its lessons if ever we have chance to stop it being played out on the backs of other people, elsewhere or in the future. 

I told Emer I thought it would make a great play, something like The Cheviot, Stag and the Black Black Oil, if they had heard of it? It turned out to be one of their favourites and had been thinking the exact same thing. It wasn’t until after I’d shared this idea that I learned Emer is in fact a playwright by trade and had even made community-led plays that use verbatim text from interviews with people to form the scripts. 

Celebrating resistance of the land

So we set off to make a play about Torry, but before getting too far along, we agreed on some core aims and principles for the project. We felt it had to be a celebratory play about resistance of the land and people of Torry – past, present and future. We felt it had to be a community-based theatre project that centres community members as culture bearers, storytellers, artists. Using verbatim interviews, music and poetry, we’d develop it directly with the people of Torry. 

We also set out some principles that underpin everything we do in the project, and ideally feature in the finished play, these being: 

• Centring injustice (done to people and land) 

• The responses are collective rather than individual (as seen through the ensemble) 

• The individual is the tip of an iceberg (systemic under the surface) 

• Authentically represent the richness of and in Torry 

• Health is impacted by society and wider social structures 

• Joy is resistance (there will be singing about the dark times!) 

• A community informed process of making this work.  

Gathering stories of the community

Over the last year, Emer and I have conducted hours of interviews with people living in or connected to Torry, gathering personal and historic stories about life in Torry, from “the fish, to the oil, RAAC and the wind”, a phrase from the play that highlights theme of industrial change and issues that have affected the community.

We’ve held writing workshops, cooked breakfasts and lunches for people, to help capture a diversity of perspectives from the loons and quines of Torry, both longstanding and new. We’ve scoured library shelves and internet pages, building an archive of key events in the community’s history, and uncovered numerous personal anecdotes. 

 
In January we recruited a Torry resident, Nattie, in the role of community producer to help coordinate the various community workshops we were holding. We also have the privilege to work with two of Aberdeen’s leading lights in writing, Mae Diansangu and Shane Strachan. We now have a draft script, which was shared with the community for the first time, via a public reading in a local pub, with community members reading their own and other parts. 
 
Thankfully the event went even better than I’d hoped. Everyone performed their parts beautifully, the script seemed to land well with most, if not all, of the audience, and we received some useful feedback to make it better. At times I felt moved by what I was hearing and seeing, which I thought must bode well for the full production. 

Unusual campaigning?

Now you’ve read all about how the play has come to be, you may still be wondering why Friends of the Earth Scotland is supporting the making of a community-based theatre production about Torry. It might seem some way off our usual campaigning against new fossil fuel projects and organising protests – but really, it’s all connected. 

Our support for this project is part of our continued solidarity with people in Torry, who have been burdened with the fossil fuel industry impacting their lives for decades. They carry the environmental burden for the wealthier parts of society who are consuming and polluting more. For example, all the unrecyclable waste produced in Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire and Moray, ends up in Torry, to be burnt in a giant waste incinerator, just yards from a primary school full of the community’s kids. (The Tullos Death Star as it’s aptly referred to in the play.) It’s crucial for us, as a climate justice organisation, to support working class communities that are being exploited like this. 
 
But still, why support a play? 

Creating spaces for connection

I believe, theatre projects that are directly informed or made by the people that they are representing can contribute to broadening the movement.  Building more spaces where we can create the understanding and connection we need is crucial work to truly bring about climate and environmental justice. These projects have the potential to provide people with organising skills and confidence, that orthodox political organising spaces are unable to.  

Sometimes, meeting spaces within the current social and climate justice movement can be alienating for people not accustomed to the language and practices used in those spaces. This is not always a fault of those leading those meetings, but sometimes we forget that many people have never seen themselves as agents of political change – other than say casting a vote every so often – and so might feel intimidated to walk into a traditional organising space.  Providing alternatives for people to meet and organise, like a community theatre project, can provide people ways to work, learn and make decisions together, that is not ‘work’ or part of some other hierarchal structure, such as a sports team.  

I also believe well-made theatre can provide more weight to stories of injustice and resistance, than say a written report, film or even a book. I don’t go to the theatre that often, but when I have, I feel involved in the story and moved emotionally, more so than other forms of public story telling. Live theatre has the power to move and shape people in profound ways, that can have consequences long after the event.  

Sometimes I’ve even left with a sense that I want to change the world. I remember that feeling walking out the doors of Dundee Rep in 2015, after watching the play I previously mentioned – The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil. That feeling made me want to study the consequences of the highland clearances for my degree, which got me a job in academic research, which eventually brought me to Aberdeen, and then onto this organising job through which I’m now writing these words to you. I hope a ‘Play for Torry’ is similarly impactful for those who come to see when we eventually perform it. 

The next stage of the project is to seek funding for full production, performing it first in Torry later this year before a Scottish tour.