Follow Pauline Lynch, director of Secret Wrapped In Lead, as she reflects on what she’s learned.

Tuesday 16th May

Production manager Paul came round after dropping his daughter at nursery. We’re already feeling the benefit of being able to work in the area we live – he left his house on foot and was sitting at my kitchen table by 9.15am. A good long meeting chatting through the play and our staging options.

Very kindly, we’ve been loaned aluminium decking by James Cameron at Arts At Loaningdale, a relatively new organisation in Biggar. The pressing decision is what size to make the playing area whilst remembering we need to transport it, and whatever we decide upon has to work for different sized spaces as, once we’ve played Leadhills and Biggar, we’re playing in a different hall every night.

I’ve been out to these spaces before but I don’t recall certain practicalities like: where are the toilets, where will the actors change, how will they arrive on stage when we don’t have a traditional backstage area? We need to get inside all these halls asap so it’s off to Facebook I go, researching what activities are on and when we might hope to tag on to the end of an existing group to do quick measure ups. Handily, there’s a local ceilidh group in one of the halls this very evening so Paul picks me up just after 8pm. Locality is proving very helpful!

Dancing is in full swing when we arrive.

We hold back, not wishing to interrupt, or worse – be made to join in.

Instead, Paul uses the car park to do a very loose mark up of various sizes of stage based on the measurements of the decking we’ll be borrowing. The dancers file out to catch us in a very strange ritual, our ‘stage’ denoted by a mobile phone, a purse, a rucksack and a ringbinder.

Amid much good-natured teasing and ad hoc punting of the show, we slip into the hall. I know the organiser as he’s a Soup And A Story attendee and he lets us crack on.

It’s great to be with Paul in one of the spaces we’ll be using. As a first time director, I will be relying on his guidance.

Straight away he suggests that where I’m inclined to position the stage might work better against a different wall.

We try it and he’s right.

He’s also encouraging me to opt for the smaller version of the stage but I’m reserving judgement on that until we get into our rehearsal space and can see it laid out.

Although the scenes in the play are highly pressured and a tight space might add to that, I also want the actors to have room to move, and I’m bearing in mind the one piece of furniture denoted in the play is a table that I don’t want to become a stumbling block in a small space. (Tomorrow morning, born from this conversation, I will wake up before 6am with thoughts about audience numbers and degrees of intimacy).

But back to my morning meeting with Paul. I want to write down what he said about the script. Paul was born and grew up in Fife. He is dyslexic so I was particularly interested to hear how he’d found reading the Scots in Martin’s script. There were a few words he had to look up to make sure they meant what he thought they meant.

And they did mean what he’d thought.

It was all so familiar. “It’s like knowing a language in a dream,” he said.

We talked around the humour and the darkness in the writing, Paul unsure if those combined elements in this particular play would translate well into English.

We discussed the word “gallus” and whether other countries had a word meaning “gallus” or whether “gallus” was even a thing outside of Scotland.

And if it’s not, and we’re the only people who have it, then you start to wonder about any other uniquely Scottish words we might have lost over the years, words that describe who we are, and you think to yourself, “What do we use if we can’t describe exactly who we are? Who do we become then?”

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