REHEARSALS are taking place for a play dedicated to the “strength, wit and resilience” of those hidden away in what was Scotland’s largest mental hospital – some for decades.
Castle Lennox, a co-production between the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh and Lung Ha Theatre Company, is based on playwright Linda McLean’s experiences of visiting a relative at Lennox Castle Hospital for more than 20 years.
When Glasgow council opened what they called a “mental deficiency unit” in the mid-1930s, the £1 million complex was the biggest and best equipped hospital of its kind in the UK.
But lack of funding caused conditions for the hundreds housed at the secluded institution to deteriorate, with the hospital’s medical director in the 1980s, Alasdair Sim, saying how he was “sick to the stomach about the plight of these poor people”.
A 1989 study by the British Medical Journal found that a quarter of patients were perilously malnourished.
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In more recent years, former patients at the castle, now a roofless ruin following a fire in 2008, told of mistreatment and how vulnerable patients were left to fend for themselves.
A play with songs by McLean and composer MJ McCarthy, Castle Lennox is “a big public story and an intimate tale,” says the writer, who previously worked with Lung Ha on Thingummybob, a 2015 production about a man with dementia.
At the heart of McLean’s new play is Annis, a young girl with autism, whose first impulse is to try to escape.
“I have been longing to write this story for a long time, and it’s only now that Lung Ha exists that I can finally do it,” McLean says of the company, composed of actors with a learning disability.
Maria Oller, Lung Ha’s artistic director for more than a decade, says: “Castle Lennox really began through us working together on Thingummybob.
“Linda told me she had something she always wanted to write but before, she didn’t know who she could write it for. While working on Thingummybob she said to me, ‘Now I know Lung Ha has to do it’. Then we contacted David Greig [artistic director of the Lyceum] and he got really interested in it.”
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Castle Lennox sees a trio of Lyceum actors joining members of Lung Ha’s ensemble for a tale spanning three decades from 1969. It is not a documentary, says Oller: “It’s got a fairytale element to it as well. That’s why we call it Castle Lennox instead of Lennox Castle. The people living there had their own drama groups; some had their own world – they didn’t know the world outside. There was this parallel world going on.”
Relentless austerity threatens the progress made in supporting people with learning difficulties in recent years, continues the director.
Oller said: “Lung Ha actors are very clear that they are actors telling a story, but we’ve been talking about how, if they had lived in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, they could have been there.
“In this hostile environment, it is so important to tell this story; that we never, ever go back to that again, of hiding people away, because they are expensive. That’s a driving force for our company.”
May 1 and 2, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 7.30pm, mat May 2, 2pm, £17 and £20. Tel: 0131 248 4848. www.lyceum.org.uk; May 16, Rep Theatre, Dundee, 2.30pm and 7.30pm, £15, £5 to £13 concs. Tel: 01382 223530. www.dundeerep.co.uk www.lungha.com
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