Angus: Weaver of Grass

The strange, sad story of Angus MacPhee, a man who developed schizophrenia during World War II and eventually found peace through weaving grass, is told through a mixture of Gaelic script, puppetry and mask work by company Horse + Bamboo.

Starting in Uist with MacPhee's childhood, the blank white walls that frame the set take on a quality of pure simplicity, a backdrop from which animals peep and the puppet boy Angus hears bedtime tales of magic weaving. Later on the whiteness adopts a clinical starkness when the boards become the hospital in which the adult MacPhee—now played by a masked actor—finds himself.

It is shifts like this that the company does extremely well, undercutting the innocence of Angus's home life with a harrowing sequence that shows him repeatedly receiving electroconvulsive therapy, which in turn makes the colourful redemption he finds through his craft all the more uplifting.

Mairi Morrison's Gaelic songs are stunning too, her voice clean and pure, and equally brilliant are Joanne B Kaar's recreations of MacPhee's weaving, letting us appreciate the breadth of his imagination, especially the tailcoat and magic bonnet.

But the tale does drag in some places and in a way it feels more like MacPhee's story is being washed over rather than probed for its resonance. His breakdown is charted by a surreal dragon-fighting sequence designed to give a glimpse into his discombobulated reality, but without being able to contrast this with the real world, the poignancy of it is hard to grasp.