'The machair always calls you home' - the proverb quoted by the characters in Machair.
Machair is the typical short grass full of harebells and cowslips that grows at the edge of the sea on the islands bordering the Atlantic west of Europe.
Here, 'An Fear Mor' (the great man) who founded the Gaelic college on the island has died, leaving a will that bequeaths his estate to his legitimate son, a London-born man with no love for Gaelic or Scotland.
It is widely thought that the trusty assistant of An Fear Mor, a man with a strange resemblance to this son, is also a son; it shocks the islanders when they hear of the will, as it was expected that he would leave his acres, his money and his problems to this man, who has been his faithful helper since childhood.
The stage is set for conflict - and in an island full of secrets, this is just the start. There's the returned teacher with his city wife - who doesn't realise that it's a sin to hang out washing on the Sabbath. There's the helpless attraction between this teacher and a young woman... And there's the teacher's old mother, who has the second sight, and foretells events through double-speak.
Every character is related to every other in half a dozen ways; there's a claustrophobic sense of secrets concealed by lies and sometimes by truth; revelations unreel one after another as reality writhes and changes - and all set against the beauty of the wild landscape.
The Gaelic is startlingly like Connemara Irish - Teilifis na Gaeilge, now TG4, showed this with subtitles in its early days and the subtitles were often less understandable than the original. The acting is top class, and the writing brilliant - terse, incisive and imbued with the poetry of its native language.
Machair is the typical short grass full of harebells and cowslips that grows at the edge of the sea on the islands bordering the Atlantic west of Europe.
Here, 'An Fear Mor' (the great man) who founded the Gaelic college on the island has died, leaving a will that bequeaths his estate to his legitimate son, a London-born man with no love for Gaelic or Scotland.
It is widely thought that the trusty assistant of An Fear Mor, a man with a strange resemblance to this son, is also a son; it shocks the islanders when they hear of the will, as it was expected that he would leave his acres, his money and his problems to this man, who has been his faithful helper since childhood.
The stage is set for conflict - and in an island full of secrets, this is just the start. There's the returned teacher with his city wife - who doesn't realise that it's a sin to hang out washing on the Sabbath. There's the helpless attraction between this teacher and a young woman... And there's the teacher's old mother, who has the second sight, and foretells events through double-speak.
Every character is related to every other in half a dozen ways; there's a claustrophobic sense of secrets concealed by lies and sometimes by truth; revelations unreel one after another as reality writhes and changes - and all set against the beauty of the wild landscape.
The Gaelic is startlingly like Connemara Irish - Teilifis na Gaeilge, now TG4, showed this with subtitles in its early days and the subtitles were often less understandable than the original. The acting is top class, and the writing brilliant - terse, incisive and imbued with the poetry of its native language.