I Was a Beautiful Day

Traverse theatre premiere for moving and involving a new play about degrees of madness set on the Hebrides. Dan and Lube are patients in a psychiatric unit on a Hebridean island. Dan, an ex-soldier, is in recovery from trauma suffered in Belfast and the first Gulf War. Lube, still on medication, is schizoid following a nervous breakdown. Lube forces them both into a half-fantasy about escaping, but gets jealous and disruptive when Dan shows more interest in a visiting female cartographer, who is seeking to recapture the 'lost' Gaelic names of Dan's native village. Lube comes off his medication, and things begin to boil over...In his second full-length play, following the success of Homers, the poet, Iain F MacLeod sets up a moving and effective opposition between man-made notions of order (the military, the mental asylum) and the lure of nature and myth (Dan recounts how the Norsemen found a Hebridean island so beautiful that they tried to tow it back to Scandinavia). "It Was A Beautiful Day" is premiered by the Traverse Theatre, first in Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides, then in Edinburgh in October 2005.