Photo: Murdo MacLeod via The Guardian
Fiona Allen was starstruck by the theater as a child but studied business and joined the civil service. When she retired in 2012, she went back to university to study theater and through a folk drama workshop, discovered mumming, in which male actors traveled through villages, performing simple plays, often for food or shelter. After she set up the Meadows Mummers for women only, its first performance was in 2015 in Edinburgh. Then, the group toured central Scotland and went to the International Mumming Symposium and Unconvention in Gloucestershire in 2016. In 2019, Allen went to Tuscany to perform in Barga, where many of Scotland’s Italian community originated. While recently, life circumstances have been difficult, she harks back to 30 years ago, when she saw a woman staring intently at an emerald green river in a national park in Yugoslavia. “She told me she was going blind and wanted the river to be the last beautiful thing she ever saw.”
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