CHIPS AND FISH

Atlantic Salmon Migrating Upstream

Yesterday we arrived early at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, which really  is in a Camelot sort of spot beside the dark tumbling river Tummel and in the shadow of the lowering hills.  The sun shone but we took limited advantage as we were soon entombed in the entrails of the theatre with a guide showing us that hidden land beyond the proscenium arch, all the wizardry and gadgetry, the levers, pulleys, trucks, lights and rooms hidden deep in the earth, which all the same manage to have windows looking out across the river.

In this nether world, carefully stacked and parked, we saw the sets of the play we had seen the day before and more bits of set belonging to the play we would see today. We saw the actors' dressing rooms, the costume rooms, the wig rooms (full of wigs, naturally) and the green room, called that for a reason long lost in the mists of time. We learned that the actors work up to 13 and a half hour days for two months learning three or more plays at the same time and rehearsing over and over so that they can then appear in them for our benefit eight times a week. I think such practices are medieval and should be banned.  After all with most of the acting profession 'resting' why make one man or woman do the work of three.  But I suppose that would increase the price of tickets.  Still did they not say something like that about the cost of cleaning chimneys?

It's exhausting enough doing one play, but to finish a matinée and then go straight into something else requires a stamina that has long since passed me by - but then these actors, I suppose, don't have to lead normal lives, don't have to shop or run businesses or write books. Yet even if I didn't have to do these things I very much doubt I could do their job even if I were blessed with a modicum of acting talent.

We are here in the Highlands on holiday with Rosie and Jim, this land of mountain, river and lake and we also took good advantage of these aquatics, for conveniently the theatre is located next to a hydro-electric plant so if ever you are bored with the mechanics of putting on a show you can wander along the riverbank for five minutes to watch the salmon climbing the salmon ladder.  So far this year 5,163 salmon have passed through the 15 metre ladder. The season is from April (Spring fish) to October (Grilse and Stragglers) and the average is 5,400 fish (salmon) in the season, so this is likely to be a below average year, yet more evidence of the inexorable decline of the world's most beautiful fish.  We saw only a trout of some unknown persuasion in the observation chamber, but you never know what you are going to see there for suddenly out of the darkness will come a black shape,streaked with silver and vivid in the brown water. It will fix you with its beady eye and hooked beak, snarling almost in its rush to find the gravel redds in which it will spawn and then to limp back, spent and flattened to the reviving waters of the sea.  Only one in ten salmon make it back to the sea but among those 5,000 salmon that return each year five will have returned three times, or so I have always supposed and so perhaps be candidates for the 49 and three quarter pound monster, a plaster cast of which hangs on the wall of the power station. These in the picture are not so large, but convey the image of something looming out of the water, like silver spotlights in a theatre.