Get Up and Tie Your Fingers (2005 tour)

'Get Up and Tie Your Fingers' was Ann Coburn's first play and won the 1997 John Whiting Award. This was a new version, with a vocal score for female voices, created for the Guild of Lillians. In this new incarnation it became something more than a play; it turned into a lyrical, almost elegiac poem. The play's story is simple: sixteen-year-old Molly wants to see the world, not spend her life gutting fish on the Eyemouth coast. She must learn to tie her fingers to protect them from the gutting knife; but the real struggle is about another tie - that between mother and daughter. When should we let our children go? Only when a hurricane hits the fleet, do the three women - Molly, her mother Jean and friend Janet - find out. Coburn's script was performed by a cast of three supported by a choir of the Customs' Voices group singing a score composed by Karen Wimhurst, directed by Fiona MacPherson.