NO ONE CAN SAY that a comedy, however 'black', need be devoid of meaning.
The Wicker Tree is a work of fiction and yet all of it is based on present reality or well documented fact about our Celtic ancestors in Scotland and in all of the British Isles. Much of their religion is still with us in the days of the week and the months of the year and, most particularly, in Christianity itself, especially Easter and Christmas.
While working on the film of The Wicker Tree, I was aware of how strong this ancient inheritance remains in Scotland today. I had recently seen the amazing Beltane festival in Edinburgh, where, on Calton Hill high above the beautiful city, a group of young people reinvent the ancient Celtic celebration which comes with each May Day. What can we know of it thousands of years ago before the Romans came? What matters to these young solicitors' clerks, students, artists and actors is that its inspiration is the same today as then. The sap rising in the blossoming trees, rising in their own bodies, inspiring them to make music and dance, to celebrate the renewing elements of nature: fire, water, air – the very earth itself.
Along with seventeen thousand other people I watched this joyous pagan masque unfold, while, below, the lights of the city started to twinkle and the spires and the domes of the great churches stood in bleak silhouette, as if besieged by fireflies. I had to have a version of this is my film and the perfect place for it is on the hill leading up to The Wicker Tree. For there the tree stands in for all the lovers in nature, for every evolutionary mating of every sentient thing. This is the climax of the film although not quite its ending.
In the transition from book to film we have kept the yearly drama of riding after the Laddie, a reality to this day in the little border towns where almost everyone seems to have a horse. All sorts of myth laundering cannot disguise how the most handsome young man, the cleverest and the bravest, elected by all as their Laddie each year, could never have been hunted over heather and heath simply to sit down at the climax of the chase for a cosy picnic of cup cakes, canned beer and tea.
The final reality, underlining the whole story, is the sinister presence of the Nuada nuclear power station, its threat implicit in the whole plot. While the book, of necessity, explains more of the apparent danger to our village of Tressock, we are re-publishing this story in the immediate wake of the ghastly nuclear disasters that have befallen Japan.
Some will see in this book or film a choice between two beliefs, the Christian and the Pagan. But in the end it is simply raising questions the answers to which are unknowable.
While we were making the film inspired by this story, the wicker tree left the forest and appeared amongst us, an icon, it seemed to us, every bit as potent as The Wicker Man that preceded it. Whereas The Wicker Man is an icon of death, The Wicker Tree heralds new life. The song says it all:
Wicker is woman and she is a tree.
With soft tendrils, tender and free.
Oh, wicker is man and hard wood is he.
Strong are the arms of the wicker tree.
They'll meet in the forest and passionate be.
For the fire that consumes them Consumes all of we.
It licks and devours. So must we be.
Insatiable tree
Part he, part she,
Oh Wicker Tree – Wicker Tree – Wicker Tree.
The Wicker Tree song by Robin Hardy and Keith Easdale © Tressock Films Ltd.
Robin Hardy, 2011