The Testament of Gideon Mack

BY JAMES ROBERTSON, ADAPTED BY MATTHEW ZAJAC

James Robertson's blockbuster 2006 novel, long-listed for that year's Booker Prize, comes to the Scottish stage for the first time. The Testament of Gideon Mack instantly became a Scottish classic, a story about grief and the crisis of faith in our society, channelled through the story of one generous, energetic, perceptive, constrained, ashamed and very Presbyterian individual, the Reverend Gideon Mack of Monimaskit.

This is a story of late 20th century post-war Scotland, of the manse and the permissive age, a story of a Church of Scotland minister who doesn’t believe in God. Then he meets the Devil.

Full of humour, provocation and the supernatural, the show presents a microcosm of small-town Scotland with a cast of vividly-drawn characters, including Gideon’s unassuming, long-suffering mother Agnes; his austere, angry minister father James; the agnostic, combative old historian Catherine Craigie; Gideon’s perceptive wife Jenny; John Moffat, the friend he betrays and his wife Elsie, the woman he really loves.

An ensemble cast of eight actors will evoke Monimaskit’s community as it grows into the country’s most generous and then its most baffled and outraged as the disappearance and miraculous reappearance of Gideon results in his final, extraordinary revelations.