Theatre in Scotland

A Field of Dreams

Joyce McMillan, Philip Howard

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781780017884
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism

'She has, to my knowledge, an almost unblemished record in never having failed to spot a great new play…' Philip Howard, from his Foreword

Joyce McMillan has been writing about theatre in Scotland for more than three decades. As drama critic successively for The Guardian, Scotland on Sunday and The Scotsman, she has reviewed thousands of plays. During that time she has borne witness to an extraordinary cultural and political renaissance in Scotland, reflected in the newfound confidence of its playwrights, in the vibrancy of its theatre culture and in its recent outburst of new theatre companies.

Compiled by McMillan and the theatre director, Philip Howard, Theatre in Scotland is a panoramic history of modern Scottish theatre, reported from the frontline. It traces the remarkable journey of Scottish theatre towards its new self-confidence: the road to 1990, when Glasgow was European Capital of Culture; followed by the explosive expansion of the 1990s; culminating in the emergence of the National Theatre of Scotland and its drive to bring theatre culture right into the heart of the nation.

Gathered here are the leading Scottish playwrights, from John Byrne to Liz Lochhead, from David Greig to David Harrower, as well as the full breadth of English playwrights, from Shakespeare to Pinter. There are reflections on the great Scottish plays, classic – Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, Men Should Weep – and modern – Black Watch, The James Plays. There are reports not only from the urban theatre centres of Edinburgh and Glasgow but from all over Scotland; and from the feast that is the Edinburgh Festival, to the nourishing A Play, A Pie and A Pint.

A leading thinker and writer about Scotland, McMillan has an incomparable ability to detect the wider cultural resonances in Scottish theatre, and to reveal what it can tell us about Scotland as a whole. Her book serves as a portrait of a nation and a shared cultural life, where visions of 'what we have been, what we are, and what we might become' are played out in sharp focus on its stages.

'When Scottish theatre works [its] magic over the coming years, I will be there, to try to catch the moment in print, and to tell it as it was. And believe me, on the good nights and the bad ones, the privilege will be mine: to be paid to go looking for joy, and occasionally to find it.' Joyce McMillan

'Joyce has an unrivalled passion and hunger for theatre - to be surprised by it, challenged by it, moved by it. Her prose when describing something which has done just this is inspiring and affecting.' Vicky Featherstone

Part One

1982–1990: The Road to Glasgow City of Culture

In the first years of the 1980s, Scottish theatre was caught in a strange, subdued place, somewhere between hope and despair. The 1970s had been a time of huge, energetic change in Scotland’s theatre culture, as the post-war generation began to claim their place on the nation’s stages, and the generous arts funding of the 1960s and 1970s began to bear fruit. It was the decade when Giles Havergal and his co-directors Philip Prowse and Robert David MacDonald came to the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow, and within a few years made it one of the most famous and spectacular city theatres in Europe. It was the decade when John McGrath launched 7:84 Scotland, with his legendary ceilidh show The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil. And it was the decade when the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh – under Chris Parr’s directorship – opened its doors to Scottish writers as never before, making space for a whole new generation of groundbreaking playwrights, including John Byrne, Tom McGrath, Donald Campbell, Marcella Evaristi and many others.

In 1979, though, the process of political change that seemed to match and reflect this cultural shift came to a shuddering halt, as the campaign for Scottish home rule – or devolution within the UK – ended in a failed referendum: a majority of those taking part voted ‘yes’, but the numbers were not high enough to clear an extra hurdle set by the Westminster Parliament. Scotland berated itself as the ‘cowardly lion’ of UK politics, and Jim Callaghan’s Labour government fell, making way for Margaret Thatcher and her new Conservatives; and in the smaller world of Scottish theatre there was a minor earthquake, as many of the performing stars of the 1970s generation – Bill Paterson, Alex Norton, John Bett, Billy Connolly, Kenny Ireland – left Scotland to build their careers in London.

By 1982 there were signs of recovery, and of a kind of regrouping. Already, the fierce opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s government which was to shape Scottish politics for the next twenty years was beginning to generate new ideas about what kind of society Scotland could and should be, if it rejected this new right-wing form of Britishness, and strove again for self-government. As in most stories of European nation-building – think of Ireland or Norway, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – theatre had a vital role to play, as a place where ideas about the past, the future, the language, the ever-shifting identity of the nation could be tested, developed and enriched.

And by chance – or perhaps for reasons I barely understood at the time – it was around this moment of transition, at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, that I felt myself drawn, perhaps almost driven, to become a theatre critic in Scotland. I had already been reviewing for more than three years, mainly as a second- or third-string critic for The Scotsman, and an occasional reviewer on BBC Radio Scotland. But in 1981 the management of the Glasgow Herald launched a new Sunday paper, the Sunday Standard; and with an energy and focus that sometimes surprised me, I began to work my way into the role of the paper’s main theatre critic. I was already almost thirty, I had no history of interest in theatre beyond an academic one, and like many people who grew up in the 1960s, I saw theatre as an old-fashioned art form, already half-dead on its feet.

Yet in the late 1970s, I was suddenly gripped by the power of the shared experience of theatre, by the idea of it as a place where ideas could be made flesh, and could be tested against the real reactions of the audience. Perhaps it was a reaction to the repetitiveness, and frequent intellectual rigidity, of the left-wing and feminist politics in which I was vaguely involved. Perhaps it was an unconscious response to the coming of Thatcherism: an insistence that somewhere, even if only in a series of small darkened rooms, a serious collective life would continue through this age of individualism. Or perhaps it was something in Scottish theatre itself, evolving fast and freely after a long age of quiescence and marginalisation. If Scotland’s professional theatre tradition had been limited and interrupted by centuries of official Presbyterianism, that very history – or rather the lack of it – meant that it entered the late twentieth century with relatively little baggage, and an exhilarating freedom to reinvent itself, in forms that were both popular and experimental.

So, at the beginning of 1982, I began to set out my stall as the Sunday Standard’s main theatre critic. In the big world beyond theatre, there were three huge arguments in progress. There was one about the future of the British left, after Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979; in theatre, that was often articulated through my arguments with, and about, John McGrath’s 7:84 Company, and its sister company Wildcat Stage Productions. There was an argument about feminism, a fraught coming-to-terms with the huge revolution in consciousness that had taken place during the 1970s. And, of course, there was the argument about Scotland: rousing itself after the failed home-rule referendum of 1979, and once again setting out to redefine and reshape itself. At the time, the Scottish Arts Council was funding around fifteen major professional companies in Scotland, including the building-based ones in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Perth and Pitlochry; and, in 1981, it had also decided to fund an initiative by the actor Ewan Hooper to launch a new Scottish Theatre Company, dedicated to creating Scottish-made shows for mainstage theatres, and – in some respects at least – to pursuing a more traditional Scottish repertoire than could be found at the Traverse or the Citizens’. It was through the work of the STC, and my often sceptical reactions to it, that I began to evolve my own ideas about what the word ‘Scottish’ could and should mean, in the late twentieth century; and about our evolving relationship with the standard repertoire of English-language theatre.

At the beginning of 1982, though, I was still engaged in an angry young critic’s war against the kind of ‘dead’, conventional theatre that I felt was destroying the art form from within. The early reviews are full of harsh comparisons, for example between a super-conventional The Lady’s Not for Burning at Pitlochry, and the explosive radicalism of Giles Havergal’s groundbreaking 1982 revival of Men Should Weep. And so it was with a kind of vision of the future that I started the year in the Sunday Standard.

1982

Let All the World Be Our Stage

Sunday Standard, 3 January 1982

I sometimes think it would do Scottish theatre no harm if theatres were knocked flat, and companies consigned to school halls, car parks, and any other space that offered itself. As 1982 begins, almost all the clouds on the theatrical horizon seem to concern bricks and mortar. Dundee Rep have been awaiting completion of their new theatre for so long that the company’s harassed director, Robert Robertson, must be wondering whether he should have pitched a tent on the river front and had done with it.

The Traverse Theatre Club [in Edinburgh] seems on the point of beginning the long process of moving to new premises with a larger auditorium – although their present 100-seat premises are rarely full. The threatened implementation of the Stodart Report, which suggested that responsibility for the arts should be transferred from regional to district councils, places a particularly large question mark over the future of those municipally owned theatres which have no resident company to fight for them – the prime example being the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh, which now has a vigorous, if ungainly, competitor for funds in the shape of the elephantine Edinburgh Playhouse.

Inside the theatre companies, though, the atmosphere this New Year is far from gloomy. The threat of a standstill in Arts Council funding has been lifted, and, surveying the scene last week, I found it impossible not to admire the combination of optimism, determination and sheer nerve with which directors and administrators continue to plan for the future through continuing crises.

Only three companies – Borderline, the Byre and the Traverse – have been unable to announce plans for 1982, and none seems particularly downcast. The Byre, Scotland’s least heavily subsidised theatre in 1981 and 1982, offered a definite opening date for its season – 3 May.

The Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh presents a particularly striking example of skilful navigation in a tight corner this winter – the company has weathered the loss of its major Christmas production, and now finds itself with only two ‘dark’ weeks between now and the end of April. One of these gaps is likely to be filled by a visiting company, and during the other – the last week in January – the company will be in action at the Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, with its current production of Absurd Person Singular. The company’s spring season opens on 17 March, and will include productions of Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, and of Piaf, Pam Gems’s wildly successful play about the legendary French singer. 1982 will not be a year of major expansion for Scottish theatre, but it already seems likely to produce another, and possibly even more exciting, trend – a smashing of barriers, a rapid growth of ‘sideways’ contacts among theatres in Scotland, and between theatres in Scotland and elsewhere. In February, the new Scottish Theatre Company will present a four-week season at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh. Cathy Czerkawska’s Heroes and Others, which deals with the intensely contemporary subject of Poland and the rise of Solidarity, opens there on 4 February, and will be followed by a production of Charles Macklin’s The Man of the World, starring Iain Cuthbertson. In March, Wildcat will visit the Lyceum with their new production 1982, directed by Ian Wooldridge of Theatre About Glasgow.

The most interesting prospect for spring, though, is the series of four ‘Unity’ plays which 7:84 Scotland are to present at the Mitchell Theatre in Glasgow. This is a series of left-wing and broadly ‘social realist’ plays, dating from the 1930s and 1940s, and depicting Scottish working-class life at that time.

My plea to Scottish theatre companies in 1982 is this: have the confidence to give us the best that world theatre has to offer. Radical, talented companies like 7:84 and Wildcat ought to be cutting their teeth on the best material there is – on production, adaptations and modern versions of Brecht, Shakespeare, Molière, Chekhov. If Shakespeare was not too proud to borrow good, gripping plots wherever he could find one, I can hardly see why Scottish playwrights should not do the same.

The Screens

Citizens’, Glasgow

Sunday Standard, 21 March 1982

‘Has the revolution reached the whorehouse yet?’ says one prostitute to another towards the end of The Screens, thereby bringing the cycle of three Genet plays at Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre back full-circle to the question with which it began five weeks ago, amid the huge gilded pillars and strategically placed bidets of Madame Irma’s Paris brothel in The Balcony.

For Jean Genet, it seems, the answer to that question is always ‘no’. As he suggests in The Balcony – the first and perhaps the most powerful of the plays – the world itself is little more than a great eternal whorehouse; or, as Madame Irma would have it, a ‘house of illusions’, in which people satisfy their base bodily cravings by acting out vicious and deluded fantasies of power, as generals, bishops, judges, politicians.

Written in 1960 at the height of France’s Algerian crisis, The Screens brings this corrupt political and military system into conflict with the forces of Arab revolution; but even here, in a turbulent North African village, the winners are neither the deluded imperialists, nor those Arabs who are idealistic or careless enough to die in the revolutionary cause, but the ultimate realists – the whores, the thieves and the pimps who understand the crude price of everything, and set no store by ideas or ideals.

In an attempt to draw a contemporary parallel with the violent nationalism of the Arab terrorists, the cast of The Screens deliver their lines in distinctly Irish tones, and the resulting cacophony of silly, distorted Irish-Arab voices – mangling Robert David MacDonald’s fine, vigorous translation of the text – is sadly all too typical of director Philip Prowse’s general approach in this Genet season.

His designs – all based on the huge, breathtaking mirror image of the theatre auditorium created for The Balcony’s ‘house of illusions’ – have been predictably magnificent, but as a director, he seems unable to communicate to actors the dazzling insight reflected in his sets.

Only in The Blacks, the central play of the series, did the company’s performance reflect a real sense of the significance of the piece, which concerns the ritual murder of a group of absurd white power figures by a company of negro actors. Elsewhere, they rush at Genet’s dense, poetic text boldly but often uncomprehendingly, delivering the lines without the lucid awareness of underlying rhythms and meanings that would give the whole cycle a sense of pace, coherence and shape; and is absolutely essential if the audience’s interest is to be caught, held and nurtured through to the end of this vitally important tragedy.

Tomfoolery

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

Swan White

Theatre Alba

Sunday Standard, 23 March 1982

Heaven knows, Leslie Lawton’s regime at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh has never had any pretensions to intellectual respectability. Its aim – solidly backed by the theatre board – has been to turn out slick, professional entertainment, to put bottoms on seats, and to keep on giving the old razzle-dazzle for as long as the Arts Council and local authorities are prepared to finance it.

But last Monday, the august auditorium of the Lyceum witnessed a scene that would surely have astonished any visiting dignitary who happened to be under the impression that this was Edinburgh’s prime subsidised theatre.

In the seats, an audience of cheerful ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Part One: 1982-1990
• Part Two: 1991-2003
• Part Three: 2004-2015
• Afterword
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• About the Authors
• Copyright