Metagama & Marloch: An Atlantic Odyssey

Devised by musician Liza Mulholland and writer Donald S Murray, their centenary concert marking the mass Hebridean emigration to Canada in 1923/24 aboard the Metagama toured the Highlands & Islands in Spring 2023 to sell-out audiences and 5* reviews. Along with actor and writer Dolina MacLennan, Gaelic singer and piper Calum Alex Macmillan, fiddle player Charlie McKerron, singer-songwriter Willie Campbell, cellist Christine Hanson, and visual artist Doug Robertson, this stellar ensemble of performers and composers celebrate the lives and experiences of those young emigrants, in new and traditional song, music and story. Featured artists include special guest Laura Risk from Montreal, along with Gillebrìde MacMillan, Allan & Ewen Henderson and Seonaidh MacIntyre, with Wendy MacIsaac & Mac Morin from Cape Breton.

Presenting the show’s (condensed) Glasgow première, you are invited aboard the Metagama, to the plains and lakes of Canada, to 1920s Detroit and Prohibition, and through the ebb and flow of fortunes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Additionally, this concert will celebrate the Marloch, which set sail for St John, New Brunswick from Lochboisdale in Uist on the 15th of April 1923. On board were at least 50 families from Barra, Eriskay and North and South Uist on their way to the Clandonald colony in the Red Deer area of Alberta.