New play about travelling Roman Britain in a campervan heads to Pitlochry

Then put the play in the beautiful little amphitheatre in the gardens of Pitlochry Festival Theatre (PFT).  It sounds, does it not, like the perfect recipe for a fine evening out in the hills of Highland Perthshire? Greig certainly hopes so. His new play, Under Another Sky, shares its title with Higgins’s book about Roman Britain. It has its origins in an experimental project at the Edinburgh International Book Festival back in 2019.

The playwright was involved in the Festival’s programme called Playing With Books. “We would throw a playwright, a director, some actors and a musician into a room with a book, for four days,” Greig remembers.  “We’d have a showing at the end, with the author of the book on stage, responding [to the performance]. ‘Playing’ was the central word there.’”

Three years ago, Greig was the playwright in the room when Higgins’s volume was the book in question.  “I just thought it would be fun to meet Charlotte properly. I knew her a wee bit, but I wanted to meet her properly,” the playwright admits.  “I also thought it might be fun to try to do an adaptation of a non-fiction book.”  The fun of approaching Higgins’s history from a dramatic point of view took on another dimension when Greig discovered that there was a 21st-century human interest story to add to the consideration of the Romans in Britain.

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“I was talking to Charlotte,” Greig recalls, “and I realised that the story of writing the book had a story. Charlotte and her partner, Matthew Fox, who’s a professor in classics at Glasgow University, had gone in a campervan around Britain one summer, going to all of these [Roman] sites.

“Then I heard from Charlotte that this was their first summer together, it was how they got together.” The couple “hadn’t really known each other” prior to their round Britain trip.

Greig created his impromptu piece for the Book Festival in 2019 based upon Higgins’s book and the journey behind it. That, he thought, was that.  However, that was to reckon without the creative dynamo that is Elizabeth Newman, artistic director of Pitlochry Festival Theatre. It was she who suggested to Greig that he consider working his earlier Higgins project into a full-blown play.  In the midst of the pandemic, when outdoor performance became a Covid-defying option for live theatre, Newman oversaw the building of a beautiful little amphitheatre in PFT’s lovely gardens.  Greig has worked in the amphitheatre before. His drama Adventures With the Painted People, set during the period of Roman settlement in Caledonia, played there in June of last year.

Newman didn’t have to twist his arm too much to persuade the playwright to revisit his dramatisation of the origins of Higgins’ book. Working on the piece for PFT has brought the question of the relationship between drama and non-fiction to the fore.

In fact, Greig says, his play is such a liberal adaptation of Higgins’s book that, “there’s more quoted from Roger JA Wilson’s A Guide to the Roman Remains in Britain” than from Under Another Sky itself. That might sound “a bit cheeky”, the playwright admits. 

However, in his defence, he points out that his drama is not an adaptation of Higgins’s book so much as an “imagining of a story that might lead to a book”.  Which brings us neatly to the drama’s relationship with fact and fiction. The play’s characters are, Greig explains, amalgams of the real Higgins and Fox, on the one hand, and the playwright himself, on the other.

“At the moment, they’re called Charlotte and Matthew,” he says, “and they have some characteristics that both Charlotte and Matthew share.”  However, other characteristics that are ascribed to Charlotte – such as being bad at hitting deadlines – belong much more to Greig than they do to assiduous journalist Higgins.

“I hesitate to say that it’s a romcom,” says the playwright, “but it is a story of friendship and intellectual companionship.”

There is, Greig acknowledges, a creative tension in his play regarding the representation of history. Higgins’s book is all about trying to give a coherent, fact-based framework to the story of the Romans in Britain.

Author Charlotte Higgins, actors Keith MacPherson and Amelia Donkor along with playwright David Greig, Photograph: Connor Going

By contrast, Greig, as a creator of stage fictions, is inevitably engaged in an imaginative leap into the past. The playwright remembers an exchange on this subject between Higgins and himself during the Book Festival event back in 2019.

“I said I’d been recently walking on an old Roman road,” Greig remembers. “And I said I couldn’t help but imagine [fictional Romans] Marcus and Sextus pushing a cart to the nearby fort.

“I imagined what they might have been like and where they might have been from.”

Higgins was having none of it.

“She said ‘you can’t do that … When you try to imagine these people from 2000 years ago, you can’t imagine what was in their heads’.

“[Higgins argued] ‘every time you try to imagine one [an ancient Roman] you’re obliterating all the other possibilities’. She said, ‘that’s why you have to look at the stones’, that’s the only thing you can rely on.’”

AS a playwright who is fascinated by history, Greig admits to being “resistant” to that idea. Well he might be, given that the very nature of his profession is to create characters that, in their essence, obliterate other possible characters.   Greig says that “the intellectual spine” of his play is the question, “what are we trying to find when we look at the past?” This is, by the dramatist’s own admission, no small question.  However, despite its intellectual bent, Greig is keen to point out that his play has an entertaining, light dimension. It is, he says, “intended for a summer audience”.

Under Another Sky runs at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, various dates between August 10 and September 23: pitlochryfestivaltheatre.com