BETH Morton was appointed artistic director of Mull Theatre last year. Many people will, no doubt, think that, living through the pandemic on one of the most beautiful islands in the Hebrides, she has lucked out.

However, wherever they happen to live, the health crisis has made the last 13 months an extremely difficult time for stage artists. Even now, with the ­vaccine rollout an encouraging credit to the NHS, theatre folk are resigned to the fact their industry will be among the last to fully reopen.

For some, such as Pitlochry Festival Theatre, the next step is to programme work to be performed in an outdoor ­auditorium. For Mull Theatre, it’s now time to launch work that was planned and created back in the darkest days of lockdown.

Titled Braw Tales, the project will ­release five short animated films, one on each day of the coming week, from ­Monday through to Friday. The films (which run for between five and eight minutes) all have different writers and directors, giving them a real breadth of both narratives and visual aesthetics.

For Morton (below), the attraction of animation was that it enabled Mull Theatre to use the talents of theatre artists, among others, in a way that was particular to the possibilities of the screen. Animation, she explains, “allows everybody working on it to expand the creativity that we thrive on when we’re working on stage… As creatives, we can go anywhere with animation.”


 
Like many theatre lovers, the director admits to having become a little tired of the online offerings, often referred to as “digital theatre”, that are comprised of little more than a stage show with a couple of video cameras put in front of it. “There’s a lot of digital theatre out there, and it varies in quality,” she acknowledges.

Add to that, she continues, people suffering from screen fatigue (being “Zoomed out”, in the new parlance of the pandemic). Her attention span for ­online drama is, she concedes, “about half-an-hour”.

Which explains why Morton has opted for short, animated films. These mini-movies have the advantages of being both short and bespoke for the screen.

They also have the great strength, like evergreen TV cartoon series The Simpsons or Oscar-winning animated feature film Soul, of attracting top acting talent. In the case of Braw Tales, the actors voicing over the films include doyen of the Scottish stage (and founder member of the legendary Communicado theatre company) Alison Peebles and the ever-excellent Daniela Nardini.

All in all, Morton has been able to employ 26 artists to work on the five films. No mean feat in these difficult economic times for the arts.

Alongside a fine cast of actors, the project includes writers such as established authors like playwright and prose ­fiction writer Alan Bissett (Death of a ­Ladies’ Man, The Moira Monologues) and dramatist Morna Young (Lost at Sea). The animators themselves include ­puppet maker and puppeteer extraordinaire Gavin Glover and multi-talented theatre and music artists John Kielty and James Kielty.

THE project started with Morton approaching the writers. She was clear from the outset that she wanted uplifting and imaginative stories, rather than darkly realistic contemplations of the pandemic.

“The brief that I gave to the writers was quite open,” the director explains. “I wanted them to feel joyful. I wanted hopeful stories that were fun, and a bit whacky.” Most of all, she explains,

she wanted stories that were “not Covid-related”.

It is Morton’s contention that, having lived another day of the pandemic, and maybe had an anxiety dream linked to the experience of the health crisis, the last thing people want is an art work that is explicitly about Covid. That, I suspect, is a very popular opinion indeed.

The subjects of the animations range from a lonely woman’s “chance encounter in the aquarium with a telepathic shark” to a child escaping his dreary birthday party in order to go to the ­circus. They may not be directly about life during a coronavirus outbreak, I ­suggest, but they seem to connect with our experience of isolation and boredom, and our desire to connect and escape.

“I think what you’re saying is really interesting,” the director comments. “Looked at individually, each of the films can, at some level, have something drawn out of them that would have come from the experience of the world we’ve been living in for more than a year now.”

That connection with the pandemic experience comes, she continues, through the films’ broaching themes of, ­“escapism, craving escapism, not knowing what’s real and what’s not real, because we’ve been tied to screens for so long.”

There is also, inevitably, because Braw Tales is a storytelling project, an alighting upon the subject of mortality. That is the case, Morton says, in Ellie Stewart’s film The Night You Were Born.

The piece is, she explains, “all about maternal instincts and mortality”. Which is not to say that it is a maudlin film.

The animation is also about “dreaming big, dreaming of the stars and not letting people talk you down from your dreams”. These are all subjects, the ­director suggests, that can “absolutely be related back, in some way, to what we’ve all been going through with Covid.”

Morton is delighted with the rich ­variety of the films, both in terms of their visual aesthetics and the stories that they tell. She is also very happy that all of the artists seem to have enjoyed the process of working collaboratively, albeit ­virtually via computers.

“The creatives who have made the films have been working so hard,” she says. “But they’ve also been saying how much fun they’ve been having making them.”

Which is, Morton says, exactly what she wanted to hear. “We need fun right now.

“Where are we going to get that from? We’re going to have to make it ourselves.”

Braw Tales can be seen from tomorrow at: vimeo.com/antobarandmulltheatre