Product Description

Strathoykel, Sutherland. "When the Sheriff and his men arrived, the women were on the road and the men behind the walls. The women shouted 'Better to die here than America or the Cape of Good Hope'. The first blow was struck by a woman with a stick. The gentry leant out of their saddles and beat at the women's heads with their crops." (John McGrath)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #153659 in Books
• Published on: 1981-10-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 80 pages

Customer Reviews

A still photograph of a wide screen epic
Reading the words twenty years after seeing the play is like looking at a long forgotten photograph of a former love. Age has not withered this epic version of the history of the Scottish underclass. Exploited and evicted by the landowners and their clearances of the land for sheep in the 18th and 19th centuries, deer stalking in Victorian and Edwardian times and lastly the oil boom of the 1970's. They retained some of their culture on the coasts, the cities and the colonies and this play uses the ceilidh format and the long tradition of story telling to record the hidden history of the landless. This is not the history written by the winners but it is still great history and great theatre.