Sunset Song theatre review: a gripping tale that’s ‘close to magic’

If you didn’t grow up in Scotland, said Simon Thompson on What’s on Stage, you may well not be fully aware of the cultural significance of, and popular affection for, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel “Sunset Song”, the first in his “A Scots Quair” trilogy. 

Set on the brink of the First World War in rural Mearns, it tells the story of Chris Guthrie, the clever, spirited daughter of a pious but brutal farmer. It’s a gripping, harrowing tale, but what really endears it to the Scots is Gibbon’s descriptions of the landscape and natural world – an aspect that is brilliantly conveyed in writer Morna Young’s “triumph” of a new stage adaptation.