The new theatre show grew out of the fight over St Fittick’s Park.
Residents in Torry are making a play because they weren’t being heard. As many of you know, St Fittick’s Park, the area’s only green space, faces a proposal to be bulldozed for an Energy Transition Zone. The council hasn’t been listening. So people decided to put their story on stage instead.
A Play for Torry uses the actual words of residents who’ve watched industry reshape their community for decades. Old Torry was cleared to make space for fishing and oil. The Bay of Nigg became a concrete harbour. The park sits next to a landfill and waste incinerator. Now there’s a new development proposal, and the pattern repeats.
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How it came together
Directors Emer Morris and Annabel Lunney shaped the show alongside community members. It fuses verbatim storytelling with live music by Simon Gall and Coralie Usmani. The production includes ensemble performances and appearances from local guest artists.
Co-written by Mae Diansangu, Shane Strachan, Morris and the community, it’s part ceilidh, part protest. The show asks pointed questions about who benefits when decisions about land and climate get made without consulting the people who live there.
What makes it different
Most community theatre tries to amplify local voices. This one exists because those voices were being ignored by the council. Nathaniel Campbell-Scott-Howells, a Torry resident, put it directly: “A Play for Torry represents the voices that organisations like Aberdeen City Council and ETZ continue to ignore.”
The show isn’t polite about that. There’s humour in it, but there’s also defiance. It’s explicitly about Torry residents caring more about each other than making corporations wealthy. It’s not subtext.
The story connects to industrial and coastal communities across Scotland. Morris said it “has real resonance for what unfolds across Scotland and all of these isles.”
A Play for Torry runs at Aberdeen Arts Centre on 31 January and Nigg Bay Golf Club in Torry on 1 February. It will be presented in partnership with Friends of the Earth Scotland, Aberdeen Arts Centre and funded by Creative Scotland’s Open Fund.
