Clay, Smeddum and Greenden

11/17/2024

If you've read his "Sunset Song" trilogy, then you'll know that the devil was always in the detail with Lewis Grassic Gibbon and so trying to squish three short stories into ninety minutes here was always going to mean much of that detail was going under the cart. It's a story about a rural Scottish community across three generations as livelihoods, priorities, and attitudes start to shift from the traditional male-dominated, superstitious, gossip-mongering, agrarian subsistence lifestyle to ones more likely to offer something less mundane and routine, especially for the women-folk. Bill Craig's sparing adaptation translates some of the thick Scots vernacular into something more appreciable by more of us, as we follow the the Galt family, the Menzies and finally the Simpson couple. "Clay"