Belle Moral: A Natural History

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“What is objectivity but the ability to consider every influence on our powers of observation? Facts, uprooted, can tell us only so much. A fact out of context is like a fish on a slab, inexplicable without water.” And so it is the story, an “inextricable web of affinities,” said Darwin, and not disembodied facts, that Ann-Marie MacDonald draws us into. In our journey to the coast of Scotland, 1899, she asks us to remember our own childhoods, our dreams and ghosts and hauntings, our apprehension of a world that calls on all of our senses. She asks us to observe our lives, our part in evolution. “We are all here so briefly,” says Pearl. “Awake, for a moment. Unique, for a moment. Able to look and to love, for a moment.”

Theatre, unlike literature, is a social art form and so it is important that we are here together to participate — to see, hear, smell the stories percolating deep inside the stone walls, hidden attic, and candle-lit drawing room of Belle Moral. Five miles outside Edinburgh, itself a haunted city with phantom pipers and memories of murder, we are thrust into the present lives and troubling histories of the MacIsaac family.

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