No Great Mischief: Adapted from the Novel by Alistair MacLeod

By David Young

The long history of the Clan MacDonald begins in 1779 as Calum Ruadh leaves Scotland to begin a new life on Cape Breton Island. Haunted by the stories and songs of the ancestry, two brothers seek to reconcile their past with their present. From the writer of Glenn and Inexpressible Island (Scirocco Drama) comes this adaptation from the award-winning novel by Alistair MacLeod.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scirocco Drama
• Release date: Jul 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781990737510

David Young

David Young is best known for his plays Glenn (Stratford Festival, 1999) and Inexpressible Island. His other plays (with Paul LeDoux) include Fire and Love Is Strange. David is the author of two novels and has written extensively for radio, television, and film. In a former life, he was President of the Coach House Press for ten years.

Book preview

Production Information

No Great Mischief premiered at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto on November 9, 2004 with the following cast:

CALUM MacDONALD ..........................................David Fox

ALEXANDER MacDONALD .........................R.H. Thomson

GRANDMA ............................................................Nancy Palk

GRANDFATHER/FERN PICARD ......... Geoffrey Pounsett

GRANDPA/CALIFORNIA COUSIN ........ Joey Richardson

Stephen Guy-McGrath on fiddle and in various roles

Mike Ross on various instruments and in various roles

Directed by Richard Rose

Set and Costume Design by Charlotte Dean

Lighting Design by Graeme Thomson

Music Direction and Arrangements by Mike Ross

Sound Design by Todd Charlton

Stage Manager: Kathryn Westoll

The premiere was sponsored by Marianne Anderson and Andrew Clarke.

Production Notes

This play was conceived as a mental landscape. In our production the memory play unfolds on a bare stage with six chairs that are moved here and there to suggest a world. Minimal props are hung on Shaker pegs. The story is told in rapid transitions—past/present/future coexist in a single moment. Lighting design drives the telling. Traditional Gaelic music is vital, a trellis for the ancestral truths. Mike Ross, our musical director, is eager to collaborate with future productions. His arrangements are available upon request.

A black and white photograph of the author David Young.

David Young

David Young has written extensively for stage, film and television. His other plays include Glenn, Inexpressible Island and Clout. He lives and works in Toronto.

Act One

Dispersion of the Highlanders hummed in the background.

Lights up on ALEXANDER, DS, behind the wheel of his car. The rest of the cast is US against the back wall.

ALEXANDER: As I begin to tell this it is the golden month of September in southwestern Ontario. In the splendid autumn sunshine the bounty of the land is almost overwhelming. Everywhere one looks, abundance topples over into decay. Along Highway 3 the roadside stands are burdened down with produce.

Migrant pickers move DS, filling their baskets with produce.

Migrant pickers far from home, their souls displaced, stoop and straighten or stagger with overflowing baskets. Others stand on ladders that reach into trees of apple and of pear. On the larger farms that have already been picked over, the farmers’ tractors move across the darkening fields, ploughing under the old stalks while preparing for the new.

GRANDMA appears at the passenger window of ALEXANDER’s car. The migrant pickers freeze.

GRANDMA: LOOK AT THAT! Perfectly good tomatoes! Why are they ploughing them under?

She gets in and sits beside him.

ALEXANDER: (Stunned.) My grandmother, not a ghost and not a dream…

GRANDMA: Stop the car. Alexander, STOP THE CAR!

ALEXANDER stops the car.

Good Lord, fifteen hundred miles from my preserving kettle, they’re throwing away enough tomatoes to get a dozen families through the winter.

ALEXANDER: Hello, Grandma.

GRANDMA: Seeing all that waste. It will depress me for days. You don’t look depressed. I s’pose you can get used to anything except a nail in your shoe.

She leaves the car. ALEXANDER drives on. The migrant pickers return US.

ALEXANDER: Yes, a nail in the shoe. Exactly so. (Pause.) The clank of a wrench as it lands beside me. I push it with my foot, toward my older brother Calum.

Memory Collage: The clank of the wrench hitting the ground. Sounds of men fighting.

MALE VOICE: C’mon man, let’s go! These guys are going to kill each other!

ALEXANDER loses focus, the horn of a truck in the oncoming lane dopplers by, snapping him back to his senses.

ALEXANDER: Sometimes it’s hard to choose or not to choose those things which bother us at the most inappropriate of times. Voices from the past arrive unbidden, singers from a Cape Breton kitchen, the echoing shouts of workmen in a mine under Elliot Lake, family voices mingling in the hyperbole of oft -told tales that are neither true nor accurate. The legacy of my people handed down across the centuries—half-memory, half-imagination—family history elevated to myth. I do not choose to hear any of this private music. It is simply there from what, even in my relatively short life, seems like a very long time ago.

And now I drive to Toronto to visit my older brother Calum. I reconnected with him three months ago after a long and difficult silence. Since then, it has been my custom to visit him every Saturday, a four hour drive along the 401 from my home in Windsor. There’s a degree of stress attached to this journey. Thankfully, my dental practice has given me the tools to deal with it. A methodical, systematic approach—you control stress by naming it, then, plink, you drop it into its own little compartment. Works like a charm, under normal circumstances. (Pause.) Unfortunately, these visits with my older brother are anything but normal. As I approach the outskirts of the city my pulse quickens, I feel my soul accelerating…as if I drive off the edge of a cliff…

ALEXANDER stands. Sounds of a city street. The cast members US become denizens of a flop house.

I arrive in the grim back laneways of Spadina Avenue about mid-morning…in front of a nondescript brown door, no number, that opens into a dim hallway a row of battered mailboxes, a single forty-watt bulb, wallpaper stained with human suffering,