Flowers of the Forest - Campbell (about Flodden)

THE FLOWERS OF THE FOREST

by

Donald Campbell

Broadcast December 1994

Directed by Hamish Wilson (Edinburgh Studios)

Cast:

Michael McKenzie
Monica Gibb
Kieran Falconer
James Bryce
Jan Wilson
Bella Anajaro
Eileen McCallum
Robin Thompson
Martin Heller
Mark McDonal

Technical Presentation by Gregor Graham, Leigh McPhail, Anne Dyack



"But the Scottish story that lingered in my mind this week was Donald Campbell's Flowers of the Forest, a run-of-the-mill horses-hooves and clash-of-steel radio history play about the Battle of Flodden [1513], on Radio 4 on Thursday. I don't know why the piece touched me so deeply; the characterisation was ropy, the dialogue wooden, the explanation of battle-plans and manoeuvres impossibly awkward. But Hamish Wilson's production, and Campbell's quiet, unassuming Scots prose, had a quality of sorrowing humanity that somehow overcame the structural difficulties, and seemed to lift the performances of a doughty Scottish cast. When the royal herald stood up at the cross of Edinburgh to read out the names of all those nobles and gentry dead in battle, the last real army and leadership of Scotland devastated beyond the nation's worst nightmare, I felt suddenly as if my heart would break. From that day on -- the desolate, echoing voice seemed to say -- nothing for us in Scotland but a culture of wee hard men with a huge tribal chip on their shoulders, big sweetie wives at their mothers' apron strings, strong women coping alone; and an identity crisis that rolls on and on, from one dreich St Andrew's Night to the next."