A 21st Century Fairytale: An Interview with the Writer of The Selkie
I had the pleasure of chatting with Eleanor Pitt, a fourth year English and Film student and writer-co-director-producer of St Andrew’s latest student production, The Selkie. Pitt’s play engages with the classic Scottish myth of Selkies - the women-seal hybrid all too often stolen from the sea by wife-less men. She takes this old tale and turns it into a 21st century fairytale, calling into question all the complications in our identities.
The Selkie, for those like myself who’d not previously heard of the creature, is a piece of ancient folklore, women who can change their shape into seas. Often in Selkie tales the narrator will steal the Selkie’s sealskin, trapping the woman into a life of marriage and childrearing until one day the Selkie finds her skin and escapes back to the sea.
Pitt explores the myth of the Selkie and the heavy themes associated in a way that navigates the abstract ideas at the centre of the Selkie without getting lost in them.
For Pitt, the play is an opportunity to confront our shared understandings of identity, “what does it mean to be me?” This question, for Pitt, is at the heart of what every woman-seal-Selkie must be asking herself.
The fact that traditional Selkie tales were consistently told from the point of view of those trying to catch Selkies allows Pitt to not only call into question identity, but especially the identity of those historically-marginalised groups. She discovered, after showing some friends her play, that they all came away seeing the Selkie as exploring an identity close to their own. Neurodivergent friends saw the Selkie as a clear depiction of someone struggling with their mental health whilst others saw it as a struggle of what it means to be Scottish. Pitt stresses the Selkie is used as a perfect symbol for the intersection of the many question marks that lie around our identities.
It might seem difficult to be light-hearted with such heavy themes, but Pitt says that whilst the play might be serious, the rehearsal process was no funeral – with fun, collaborative work between Pitt and her co-director (Angelina Nayar) and the actors throughout. Most of the actors share scenes of just two, as the Selkie meets each character individually as she explores her newly found mythic identity.
As a co-director and writer, you might imagine it’s hard to change your project after you meet the actors, but the process was completely collaborative. Recalling the rehearsals, Pitt says: “I found out things about the characters I’d written working with the actors… a few times I’d have to go back and re-write a line.”
I couldn’t resist the temptation to ask for her “one sentence summary” of The Selkie; a modern variation on a fairy-tale about identities. Pitt’s attraction to fairy-tales was clear: they’ve always been the stories that interest her and they allow us to directly confront these huge themes that pervade our lives - life, death, love, identity, it’s all there, even if it’s not always completely transparent. The Selkie takes this fairytale structure and modernises it. By leaving us without the firm and safe answers we might be used to, The Selkie promises to leave us with more questions about ourselves than we might ever have had before.
For Tickets to The Selkie (3/04/23-4/04/23, 7.30pm) click here: https://www.yourunion.net/events/7986/2455/
By Iain Lynn
