Drama is a collaborative art and on Sunday evening I joined in a great example of this when Citadel Arts Group held a rehearsed reading of Act One of their Work-in-Progress: Leith’s Hidden Treasure. The venue was upstairs in The Granary Bar on The shore – where their production will air in June.

Leith Hospital

The local hospital is way up there with the store, the school and the big employers as a source of long-held and deeply felt memories. Playwright, Laure C Paterson and Citadel Artistic Director, Liz Hare have taken these memories and woven an affecting tale of the early 1960s.

Janey is on the verge of being a big girl, eleven, and she shares with us the stories of her struggling family whose penury, if not poverty, is ever-present. We also meet young nurse, Nurse Williams, who is training in Leith hospital and fighting her youthful instincts to accept the strictures of the training regime. The play brings the two worlds together and human drama, comic and tragic, flows naturally from the collision.

The excellent cast of Citadel regular players held the audience entranced and at the end we were asked to give the company feedback. A really worthwhile evening, encouraging all of us to return to Leith Festival in June to see the finished work performed. Besides wanting to know how the hook at the end of Act one is resolved, there’s the prospect of your comment having being accepted. What more could an audience ask?