Double bill of plays by local writer planned for the Hamefarin

Serpentine Drama are busy rehearsing two plays to be performed at the Hamefarin in June.  Will Shu and Shetland in 60 Minutes are both written by local playwright Jacqueline Clark, who won the MacLellan Award for plays written in Scots in 2007 and 2009.

Will Shu is set in Firth, Shetland during the year 2000, exactly one hundred years after the Delting fishing disaster.  The story of the disaster is married alongside the story of a young woman called Jess.  When Jess was a girl she took her little sister Freya paddling at the beach on her birthday.  They then played a game of hide and seek which went horribly wrong.  Twelve years later and Jess is haunted by both memories of the past and her own more recent personal ghosts.  The past and the present mingle as Jess contemplates her future in her home community.

Later in the same evening Jacqueline’s new comedy Shetland in Sixty Minutes will be performed.  The play is directed by John Haswell from Shetland Arts.  The play is set in a spoof game show and features two teams battling to share their knowledge of Shetland.  The teams promise that you will find out everything you’d ever want to know about these islands including Viking invasions, dowries, castles, nasty lairds, socks fit for a Queen and cabbage white butterflies.

Jacqueline is delighted to be working with Serpentine Dram again and is also particularly excited to see Will Shu finally being performed in Shetland.  The play had a rehearsed reading in the Town Hall as part of the Playwrights Studio ‘Evolve’ programme back in 2005.  After that, Jacqueline entered the play in the MacLellan playwriting competition and the play was selected as the competitions first ever winner.  Following that success the play was performed for the first time in Glasgow in a professional production directed by Kate Nelson last February.

Jacqueline said ‘Will Shu was a very important play for me to write having grown up in Mossbank and it has been really exciting to have revisited the play after a time away from it.’  She added, ‘It’s very apt that the piece is being performed as part of the Hamefarin celebrations as hopefulyl some of the visitors will have connections to the Delting Disaster!’

The plays will be performed as a double bill in the Garrison Theatre on Wednesday 23rd June and Thursday 24th June at 7.30pm.  Tickets and further information is available from the Shetland Box Office, telephone 01595 745555.