In one of the first events in this year’s Scottish Storytelling Festival, Letters to Jackie seeks to marry old, with ancient remedies to eternal human problems. With the combined talents of Bea Ferguson, Heather Yule and Maria Whatton, plus a clutch of venerable issues of DC Thomson’s legendary Jackie magazine, it proved a fine old time.
Essentially a show of two parts, the opening detailed the history of the magazine, told with huge affection, and easy clarity by the performing trio. From an office with one phone, a team of talented female writers armed with only two typewriters would produce the U.K.’s best selling magazine of the 1970’s. However the evening was most concerned with agony aunts, ‘Cathy and Clare’, and the problem pages.
A clutch of reader’s questions, chosen for their period defining qualities were read with relish, along with replying words of wisdom. There was plenty of humour laced in the magazine’s output then, and time has only seasoned the punchlines. The broader idea of Letters to Jackie, drew a link between this 20th century wisdom sharing, and a far older tradition of storytelling as a means to unlocking life’s dilemmas.
Letters to Jackie might have lost the DC Thomson thread when the storybooks were opened, and if this created something of a seachange in atmosphere, the talents of the storytellers were sufficient to plaster over the gap as it were.
Each storyteller came equipped with a story, plucked from traditions oriental and occidental, each concerned with love lives running anything but in a straight line. Yule held forth with a tale of three brothers, and three selkie brides, two treated as possessions, one as a cherished companion. Only the last would find an ending unstepped in tragedy. Gilding her words with a dextrous hand upon her harp, Yule makes fine theatre of a story.
Ferguson told of a Korean princess, enchanted by a singing sailor, only to discover a common fisherman worthy only of her laughter. Foregoing happy endings, her cruelty first destroys the fisherman’s heart, and teaches her a lesson in compassion. Ferguson has a fine voice for tale telling, and an ear for the well crafted sentence.
However, for theQR, the evening’s tour-de-force fell to Whatton, with a story of the Fianna, and a less glorious result of one of Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s bloody victories. The Legend of Mis and Dubh Ruis told with abundant feeling, and patient development, proved utterly spine-tingling. Mis’s trauma at witnessing her father’s brutal slaying, and spiral into madness first broke the listener’s hearts, before Dubh Ruis’s surpassingly tender ministrations offered healing.
Heartfelt and sprinkled with nostalgia, Letters to Jackie offered a little agony, and a balm of ancient wisdom.
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