2004–2015: The Emergence of the National Theatre of Scotland
By 2004 there was a real sense of simmering anticipation – and some apprehension – in Scottish theatre, as the National Theatre of Scotland project began to take shape. In July, Vicky Featherstone – then artistic director of the London-based new-writing theatre company, Paines Plough, and an admirer of many of the current generation of Scottish playwrights – was appointed as the NTS’s first artistic director, and began the job with literally nothing but an empty, unfurnished office in Glasgow and a mobile phone; she quickly recruited her close associate John Tiffany, who had left the Traverse to join her at Paines Plough, as the NTS’s associate director for new work.
There was plenty of energy around, though, from the Traverse to the Edinburgh Festival, which saw the premiere of Anthony Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia, a beautiful play which swept the board at the newly founded Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland, set up by Robert Dawson Scott and a group of critical colleagues in 2003. And the autumn of 2004 saw an initiative that was to prove almost as important as the coming of the NTS, as David MacLennan – formerly of the 7:84 sister company Wildcat Stage Productions, which had lost its grant in a bruising confrontation with the Scottish Arts Council half a decade earlier – set up a new lunchtime theatre venture called A Play, a Pie and a Pint, at the new Òran Mór pub and venue in the West End of Glasgow. Running entirely on the proceeds of its ticket sales, on a small amount of commercial sponsorship, and on the generous support of the venue owner, Colin Beattie, A Play, a Pie and a Pint set off on its mission – without help or hindrance from overweening funding bodies – to present a brand-new fifty-minute play every week for two seasons a year; and it soon became a runaway success, premiering more than thirty new plays a year, and imitated in cities from Pittsburgh to Moscow. A Play, a Pie and a Pint was to transform the opportunities for new playwriting in Scotland, and went on to form alliances, in supporting new work, both with the National Theatre of Scotland, and with the new Playwrights’ Studio Scotland, set up in 2001 to help support Scottish-based theatre writers. And although its short plays were often, in effect, works-in-progress, and rarely surfaced as ground-breaking productions in their own right, A Play, a Pie and a Pint at Òran Mór became an important new hub for Scotland’s theatre life, buzzing with energy, gossip, and ideas.
The years 2004–07 saw one of the richest periods ever in Scottish theatre, as the massive new NTS funding came on stream, and the whole scene began to respond. The Edinburgh Festival of 2005 saw another thrilling Scottish premiere, in David Harrower’s Blackbird; and the National Theatre of Scotland launched, in February 2006, with a stunningly radical, nontheatre-based, nationwide event called Home, followed within a few months both by Grid Iron’s amazing airport show Roam, and – during the Edinburgh Festival – by the company’s defining show Black Watch. Seizing the movement towards verbatim theatre that swept Britain’s stages in the mid-2000s, Black Watch was written by Gregory Burke, but based on a series of real interviews with Scottish soldiers who had served in the Iraq War in 2003–04; the staging and performances – directed by John Tiffany – were breathtaking, and the show became a massive global success, touring across the world for almost eight years after its first performance.
Other Scottish theatre companies seemed to raise their game to meet the moment. And in the vintage year of 2007 – with Alan Cumming at the Edinburgh Festival playing Dionysus in the NTS’s version of The Bacchae, theatre exploding out of its traditional spaces into the wild places of Scotland, and Dundee Rep’s brilliant ensemble, under its artistic director James Brining, creating one of the greatest tribute shows ever in Stephen Greenhorn’s Proclaimers musical Sunshine on Leith – it really seemed as though Scottish theatre had come of age, and had finally moved to take its full place – and a radical, boundary-busting, twenty-first-century place at that – in the life of the nation.
In a living room somewhere on the edge of a British city, a group of friends who were flatmates in their twenties meet again after a long separation. One of them is celebrating his forty-third birthday, and in the course of a long evening’s drinking and arguing, it emerges that some have done better than others in terms of wealth and career success, that youthful ideals have been betrayed or at least severely bent, and that a couple who were once in love are still obsessed with each other, but cannot quite find it in their hearts to start over.
Sound familiar? You bet it does; it’s the plot of every piece of self-indulgent thirty-something bourgeois drama that has tracked across our television screens in the last decade. But because this version of the story is set in a tower block in Cardonald, because the ideals the characters used to share were socialist ones, because it’s loosely based on the book of the same name by socialist stand-up Mark Steel, and above all, because it’s presented by the 7:84 Theatre Company under new artistic direction, we’re supposed to accept this flabby piece of midlife angst, badly scripted by Martin McCardie, as heralding a new beginning for Scottish radical theatre. I’m afraid it’s no dice, since the resulting play is about as radical as that old bore in the corner of your pub who knows that he doesn’t like New Labour, but hasn’t had a new thought about the reasons why since 1994.
Stuart Davids’ production opens with a video montage of the politics of the last forty years – Thatcher, Blair, Martin Luther King, the Miners’ Strike – and a filmed sequence of the central character, Bobby, making his way up to his tower-block flat with a pack of beer for his birthday party. This is a reasonable way into the story, but even after the onstage screen morphs neatly into Bobby’s living-room window, complete with live view of the motorway, it promises more than the script is able to deliver. The point about Bobby is that he is a socialist activist who, for political reasons, continues to live a comfortless solo existence in his council flat while spending most of his time out on demonstrations and actions; and when his old friend Michael, now a successful radical comedian, and Kate, now a New Labour politician, arrive to help him celebrate, predictable rows ensue about who betrayed whom, and in what way.
But the difficulty with all this is that it makes the elementary mistake, for any attempt at radical theatre, of talking about politics in the abstract, rather than actually showing politics in action. Apart from some vague chat about the fight to save a local community centre, we never get to know what Bobby has actually been doing in all his years of political campaigning, or whether anyone has been helped by his efforts. Worse than that, the standard of the banter among the three characters is lamentably poor, with tired old clichés about New Labour opportunism and American infamy emerging with such a clanking predictability that even the most loyal audience finds it hard to raise a spontaneous laugh.
None of this is the fault of Davids’ cast, who do the best they can with the material to hand. Frank Gallagher is a feisty and poignant Bobby, Maureen Carr adds a real touch of theatrical energy and passion in the difficult role of Kate, Neil McKinven walks his way through the role of Michael with reasonable poise, although he covered this territory more powerfully half a decade ago, in Stephen Greenhorn’s gloomy but prophetic Dissent. And no doubt there are audiences out there so starved of theatre that speaks in a Scottish popular voice, and that publicly reaffirms many of their own views about the Blair-Bush era, that any old show with those qualities will be taken to their hearts. But important though it is that 7:84 should survive as part of Scotland’s theatrical map, with its mission to create radical popular theatre that finds new audiences among the voiceless and under-represented, there’s no point in pretending that a show as unambitious as this does much to further that aim. Reasons to Be Cheerful is not radical, not funny, not original, and not even very dramatic; and 7:84’s loyal audience deserves better.
They’re outsiders, the six splendid sisters at the heart of this bruisingly hilarious comedy by prize-winning novelist Des Dillon, now enjoying its premiere at the Royal Lyceum after a six-year search for a theatrical home. The sisters are women in what was until recently a man’s world, they’re rebels by instinct, they’re west-of-Scotland Catholics still living out the legacy of the industrial revolution that swept their great-grandparents out of Ireland and into Lanarkshire; and if they also dabble in a bit of witchcraft – well, what better way to express their general dissent from the pious decencies of civic life, and from the rational Enlightenment values that Scotland once exported to the world, but which somehow never meant much on the mean streets of Coatbridge.
Dillon’s play – based, he says, on a true story of his own six sisters – describes an evening when all six women, plus their mother and old Irish granny, converge on the council flat of the eldest sister, Caroline, to perform the curse of the ‘six black candles’ on her estranged husband’s nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Stacie Gracie. It’s a great dramatic situation, in which the primitive Darwinian passions of lust, rage, vengeance, and fierce family loyalty come into conflict with the everyday scepticism of the sisters’ modern lives, the ferocious sibling rivalry between them, the timid pieties of respectable Catholicism as represented by the hapless local priest, and – most poignantly – with the depth of Caroline’s true love for her faithless man.
This is The Slab Boys meets Shameless meets Chewin’ the Fat, with a powerful female twist; and Dillon spins physical and verbal comedy out of his scenario with all the flair of a born playwright. The characters are drawn in tremendous, larger-than-life brushstrokes, the physical comedy is in the best tradition of pitch-black farce, and the script bristles with knock-’em-dead one-liners, which Mark Thomson’s terrific company could sometimes afford to deliver with just a shade more theatrical force.
In every other respect, though, Thomson’s gloriously robust production is almost impossible to fault. Rebecca Minto’s white-concrete set pays hilarious tribute both to modern west-of-Scotland Catholic church architecture, and to the worst kind of municipal housing development; and in terms of casting, Thomson has hoovered up most of the finest female comedy talent around, offering a brilliant, raunchy treasure-house of a company led by Eileen McCallum as Granny and Kathryn Howden as Caroline, with Gabriel Quigley, Jennifer Black, Wendy Seager, and Julie Duncanson. In the novelised version of Six Black Candles, published in 2002, Dillon writes of how respectable Scotland just doesn’t know about the raging, anarchic working-class counterculture that thrives in its schemes and cities. But thanks to writers like Dillon, and directors like Thomson with the guts and imagination to stage their work, Scotland is getting to know itself better every day. And in looking so deeply and sharply at ourselves, we of course learn more about those great undercurrents of twenty-first-century life that go far beyond Scotland: in this case, about a western world lurching from the long age of the first Enlightenment towards something both new and more ancient – frightening, anarchic, post-patriarchal, and bursting with its own life force.
‘I think the single most important thing in comedy is the target,’ wrote leading Scottish playwright Iain Heggie in last Saturday’s Scotsman. But the bitter truth is that where Six Black Candles chooses exactly the right comic target, and goes for it like a ferret out of a trap, Heggie’s own latest play selects the wrong victim at the outset, and spends a dismal two-and-a-half hours paying the price of that initial mistake. Set in a moth-eaten Scottish theatrical agency at the wrong end of Glasgow’s most famous thoroughfare, Sauchiehall Street is a leaden city comedy in seven scenes that plays like an extended piece of hate-mail directed against Scotland in general, and the idea of Scottish theatre in particular. Its central character, middle-aged agent Dorothy Darvel, is a barren monster of destructive possessiveness who spends her life sabotaging the careers of her young clients so as to prevent them from leaving for London; her would-be successor Maureen is a self-proclaimed halfwit, whose increasingly elaborate postmodern malapropisms provide the play with its few vintage moments of surreal Heggieesque brilliance.
Almost as soon as it hits the stage, though, the play runs into three fatal difficulties. The first is that this is another of those dreary plays about theatre itself, cluttered with luvvie in-jokes that have all the thespians in the audience guffawing self-consciously, and leave everyone else bored to tears. The second is that the specific image of Scotland and Scottish theatre that Heggie chooses to mock is at least two decades out of date, a kind of pre-Glasgow-1990 cultural provincialism that has now been replaced with other, if often equally laughable, dreams and delusions; the result is a long damp squib of a script that sets out to attack inward-looking Scottish provincialism, but somehow ends up embodying it in its least attractive form. And the third is Matthew Lenton’s wretched production, which for poor casting, limp pace, and chronic inability to evoke those extra layers of meaning that might lift the evening a little, has to take some kind of biscuit as the least inspired staging of the year.
Linda Duncan McLaughlin, as the addle-tongued Maureen, makes a spirited stab at the play’s most interesting role. But Dorothy Darvel and her actor husband Gerard, as played by Jo Cameron Brown and Peter Kelly, are as tired and unfunny a pair of stereotypes as the Scottish stage has seen in a while. ‘D’you not think you should be careful not to sound like an old fart?’ young actor Barry Barr asks his mentor Gerard at one point. After this lot, it’s a question many will be asking of Iain Heggie himself.
In the hall of a barracks in sixteenth-century Vienna, a woman artist paints, on a huge 100-foot canvas, a work that will make or break her career, and perhaps her life. Her name is Galactia, her subject is the Battle of Lepanto, a recent triumph over the Muslim forces of the Ottoman Empire, and the work has been commissioned by the Venetian state in celebration of its victory.
But Galactia paints the horror of war rather than its glory, in a terrifying avalanche of sliced and splintered flesh; and the question is whether the state will punish her, or accept and co-opt the painting which she imagines, on its journey up to St Mark’s, as ‘a giant bomb huddled under tarpaulins’, ready to shatter the state with its uncompromising truths.
This is the situation around which Howard Barker builds his superb 1985 drama Scenes from an Execution, perhaps the most accessible of all the works of this great contemporary poet of the English stage; and Dundee Rep could hardly have chosen a more timely play to end its spring season than this powerful study of the morality and statecraft of a Christian republic at war with the world of Islam, and of the role of the artist – and a passionate woman artist at that – in such a state.
Dominic Hill’s classic production is a shade too passive in the face of Barker’s mighty story to achieve the electrifying heights of Kenny Ireland’s 2002 Edinburgh production of Barker’s Victory. For that, it would need a more radical and risky engagement with the more poetic and symbolic levels of the text, and a fiercer sense of why this matters now.
But Neil Warmington’s transformation of the Dundee Rep space into a beautiful in-the-round cockpit of an arena is a stunning success in its own terms. And if the company – led by a brave, earthy and magnificent Ann Louise Ross as Galactia – never quite brings that final spark of creative danger to their performance, they carry their roles well enough to generate a beautiful, well-crafted and deeply satisfying production of one of the most significant plays of our time.
Summertime, and filling theatres is anything but easy. Except, that is, at the Pavilion in Glasgow, where – without a penny of subsidy in sight and on a purely commercial basis – a thousand people every night are piling through the doors to see eight Scottish actors, on an old-fashioned living-room set, bouncing and grimacing their way through a Glasgow comedy which is about as traditional as they come.
This year marks the Pavilion’s centenary as one of the city’s best-loved places of entertainment; and to celebrate the occasion, the theatre’s boss, Iain Gordon, has revived a series of three comedies by Glasgow writer James Barclay, all written especially for the Pavilion between the 1970s and ’90s. Even Gordon has been surprised by the scale of the season’s success, which has reached audiences in every age group from sixteen to ninety-six – including the notoriously hard-to-get thirty- and fortysomethings – and kept the theatre buzzing for the last two months and more. Something to do with weak summer television schedules, he speculates, or his television advertising campaign, or the relationship of trust that the Pavilion has built up with Glasgow audiences over the decades.
But it also must have a great deal to do with the content of the plays, one of which – Paras Over the Barras – celebrates the survival of Glasgow tenement life during the Second World War, while the other two recount the adventures of one Andra Thomson, a swaggering, middle-aged, work-shy, Rangers-supporting bigot of an anti-hero who is routinely made a fool of by all the other members of his family, and, for that matter, by history itself.
In Still a Bigot, the second Andra Thomson play, our hero has been moved from his old tenement to a new high-rise flat with – horror of horrors – a view of Celtic Park. His daughter has married a Jew; his son is set on becoming a priest; his new neighbours are Chinese; and his lovely wife, Annie, always a Catholic, is becoming more assertive about sticking her picture of the Pope on the wall alongside his King Billy.
On the upside, the one-liners in this play flow fast and furiously, and some of them are very funny. There’s a touch of pure Molière about Barclay’s image of the preposterous patriarch trying to impose his will on a household that holds him in well-deserved contempt; and Iain Gordon’s brightly lit, heavily amplified production is as vivid, accessible and cartoon-clear as a grown-up comic strip. On the downside, the whole show rambles on for far too long (Molière knew how to round things off in a crisp two hours), and it’s difficult not to flinch at oor Andra’s consistently racist language – he is Glasgow’s answer to Alf Garnett, with all that that implies – or Barclay’s affectionate but weird obsession with sending up Glasgow’s Jewish community, complete with mock beards and curls.
But although there’s always a question around characters such as Andra Thomson and Alf Garnett over whether they validate the prejudices they express every time they speak or simply encourage us to laugh at them, it’s difficult to deny the sense that this season of plays is giving Glasgow audiences a genuinely cathartic experience. One morning last week, I heard a sociologist on the radio holding forth about what he said was the sad psychological plight of London’s white working class. History, he argued, had deprived them of their old sense of imperial pride and patriotism and required them to live through wave after wave of ethnic and social change, without even according them the victim status available to every other ethnic group or giving them a chance to mourn their losses. Although it all sounded a shade self-pitying to me, I couldn’t help remembering the roars of relieved and delighted laughter in that Pavilion audience as they listened to Billy Armour’s powerful Andra belting out the prejudices that had until so recently been a routine part of their lives, and then receiving his due comeuppance. And I wondered whether things might have felt different, in London, if the city had held on to just one institution like Glasgow’s miraculously surviving Pavilion Theatre: a people’s palace of a theatre where locals can get together in public to acknowledge the social history they’ve lived through, to laugh and cry as if they’ve been to a good wake, and then, with a little luck, to let it go and move on.
There’s nothing remotely original about the idea behind this latest play by Anthony Neilson, the most challenging and disturbing of all the current generation of playwrights from Scotland: the image of the sane, everyday world as a prison house, from which only those we call ‘mad’ can escape, is almost as old as the idea of madness itself.
But what makes Neilson’s play – commissioned by the Edinburgh International Festival and the Drum Theatre, Plymouth, in association with Glasgow’s Tron – such a beautiful and thought-provoking experience is the rare boldness of its structure; and the wild rollercoaster of experience and imagery through which it leads us on the way to its quiet final act, a thirty-five-minute coda in which, through a clinical glass panel, we watch our heroine Lisa, in her bleach-bright hospital room, undergoing all the banal indignities, casual kindnesses and painful misunderstandings of ordinary treatment for mental illness in Britain today.
It’s the first ninety minutes of the play, though, that burn themselves on to the mind, and will divide audiences between the delighted and the terminally exasperated: for the play begins as Lisa snaps the guitar string of ordinary life, and sets off into the looking-glass world of Dissocia, the land of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Dissocia emerges as a wonderful, terrifying and sometimes brutal Narnia-cum-Alice’s-Wonderland of a place, where Lisa tumbles over scapegoats and magic polar bears, encounters weird, satirical government officials and lost-property offices disguised as hot-dog stalls, sings amazing songs to herself, and breathes the air of a faint, subversive awareness that the ‘real world’ is, in its way, at least as mad as this one, and not nearly so much fun.
There are echoes not only of C.S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll, but of Kafka, fantasy fiction, and the wilder reaches of sixties psychedelia. And although the play – directed by Neilson himself, and beautifully performed by a fine cast led by the stunning Christine Entwisle as Lisa – reaches no very exciting conclusion, it offers a powerful final insight into the culture clash between sixties-style open-ended creativity on one hand, and our control-obsessed post-nineties middle-class culture on the other, that has been one of the leading themes of this year’s Festival. And it also has the courage to end on a faint note of hope: the sense that love may after all be able to bridge the gap between the ‘sane’ and the ‘mad’, if only because it is a form of madness itself.
What’s striking about John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, almost half a century on from its explosive first performance in London, is how near it seems in spirit to some of the angry, ‘in-your-face’ British theatre of the last decade; and yet how far. On one hand, it has the same sense of young, raging male energy robbed of any kind of useful social role or purpose. In the absence of war – or any grand imperial plan – it seems Britain never knows what to do with that energy; so we tend to pathologise, marginalise and fear it, from Look Back in Anger in 1956, to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, forty years later.
But if Jimmy Porter’s furious, destructive anger seems familiar, there’s nonetheless an edge to it that makes it seem – despite the play’s wordy, conventional structure – just a couple of mighty twists more radical than anything contemporary British theatre has to offer. For in the first place, Jimmy is not apolitical: he rages against the British ruling class – represented, in his world, by his fragile-looking wife Alison – in terms that are frankly shocking to contemporary audiences, inured as we are to the idea that class politics is dead and that the expression of so much envy and spite towards the better-off will get you precisely nowhere. And in the second place, he flatly refuses the idea of redemption through fatherhood that gives so much postmodern lad-literature its mushily sentimental conclusion.
Jimmy not only treats his wife like dirt in a way that post-feminist audiences can hardly bear; when he hears that she is pregnant with his child, he also makes it clear that he doesn’t give a damn, that the very idea of reproducing himself in such a world means nothing to him. If he is bound to Alison, it’s because they somehow recognise one another as mates, in the jungle of a decaying society. Ideas like hope, redemption and building a future just don’t come into it.
Richard Baron’s richly detailed new production at the Royal Lyceum is probably just a touch too passive and conventional, in the face of this colossal play, to do full justice to its radical energy. On an overwhelmingly naturalistic set by Trevor Coe – all rusty gas-rings and grubby skylights – David Tennant and Kelly Reilly give a pair of gorgeous, impassioned, and sometimes heart-rending performances as Jimmy and Alison, without ever moving much below the surface of Osborne’s glittering array of words. Beautiful actors born of the age of celebrity, they can describe the dreary collectivist Britain of the 1950s, but never quite evoke it; and it’s left to Steven McNicoll’s unobtrusively perfect performance as Jimmy’s quiet Welsh friend Cliff to bring a real sense of time, place and history to the stage.
The result is a show that takes the whole of a long first half to gather momentum, and that makes it slightly too easy for the audience to take refuge in a lightweight twenty-first-century feminism, siding with nicely spoken Alison and dismissing Jimmy as a working-class boor with the sexual politics of a caveman. It’s sometimes tantalising to imagine what could have been done with this play by a radical director more willing to stand at a rigorous Brechtian distance from his characters, and a designer less interested in the minute detail of the period, and more interested in its symbolism and style. But the sheer strength of the play, and the rich professional quality of the production, makes this a tremendously worthwhile evening, nonetheless. If the audience is likely to leave the theatre not much the wiser as to why the Lyceum wanted to present this play, it still provides a full-blooded experience of Osborne at his youthful best, which leaves plenty of room for our own response; for our own sense of how much this play still matters, forty-nine years on.
If you want to catch a sense of how much screen culture dominates our age – not only our politics, but all our lesser art forms – then you need only glance at the huge upsurge of media and public interest that suddenly sweeps through any theatre venue where a star of the small or large screen is about to make a personal appearance.
Robbie Coltrane has been a bit of a television face since the 1980s, when he appeared in John Byrne’s Tutti Frutti. He became a small-screen star a decade later, in the great days of Cracker. Lately he has reached the promised land of global big-screen fame, mainly by playing a character called Hagrid in the Harry Potter films. Yet now here he is, in a cellar bar on the Great Western Road, making six lunchtime appearances in a short half-hour play by the leading Scottish screenwriter Peter McDougall. Hence the seething crowd that packs the small downstairs space a full half-hour before the show is due to start, the queue at the door, and the row of press photographers camped on the pavement outside. It’s a measure of the sheer vitality and originality of McDougall’s emerging theatrical voice that, by the end of the performance, the focus of the event is beginning to shift decisively away again from the star performer, and back to the play in hand.
Like McDougall’s previous piece for the Òran Mór ‘A Play, a Pie and a Pint’ season, The Brother’s Suit looks deep into the bleak heart of a certain kind of Scottish working-class family life – the kind where violence against women and children was common, and the word ‘love’ did not feature. This time, the two characters are brothers divided by the pressures of sibling rivalry, and by their parents’ predictable preference for the elder son – Tam, who left for London – over the younger son, Junior, who stayed and did his duty. Now, twenty-five years on, Junior waits at Central Station for Tam’s long-delayed return while a lugubrious Greek chorus – or Grim Reaper – in the shape of a poetic newsvendor, superbly played by Stewart Porter, stands by and delivers his own commentary on family and death, and on the dark and bloody inner life of the city whose evening paper he sells.
Now, there’s no point in arguing that this second theatrical effort by McDougall doesn’t have its regrettable moments. Some of the detail of the two men’s middle-aged lives – the divorce, the problems with women, the exile from fatherhood – are achingly predictable and self-pitying; some of the old-fashioned Glasgow repartee sounds second hand; and Coltrane’s tremendous natural talent as an actor takes time to assert itself over both his visible self-consciousness at returning to the live stage, and his screen actor’s unwillingness to project his voice.
But with powerful support from Porter and from the excellent William MacBain as Junior, Coltrane gradually begins to sculpt Tam into a credible and tragic figure, a charismatic and talented man facing death in the knowledge that his life has somehow failed, despite his charm. As for the play itself – well, it may have its share of rough-edged moments and sudden lapses, but at the core of David MacLennan’s strong, good-looking production, it’s possible to glimpse a really thrilling sense of theatre – of Glasgow’s Central Station as a mythical location as potent as the banks of the Styx, or the Norwegian street where Peer Gynt meets his crossing-sweeper. There’s a huge tragic energy here, a wonderful ironic humour, and a passion for the high drama and deep poetry of ordinary Glasgow lives; and if McDougall can express all that in just under thirty minutes, then there’s no knowing what he might produce, given the chance to write a full-length stage play.
There are plenty of shows in Edinburgh this year about the dark undercurrents of the thing we call ‘love’, but nowhere will you see them more chillingly exposed – and with a greater searing and healing power – than in this towering production by the great German director Peter Stein of David Harrower’s new play, Blackbird, the finest thing he has written since his debut with Knives in Hens a decade ago. Set on a King’s Theatre stage opened out into a wide modern space representing a bleak canteen area in a small factory somewhere in England, the play dives straight for the least acceptable face of erotic desire and obsession by showing us, in what feels like real time, a searing two-hour confrontation between fifty-six-year-old manager Ray, and twenty-seven-year-old Una, the girl with whom he had a sexual relationship fifteen years before, when she was only twelve.
In a dialogue that falls into four parts – introduction, central memory sequence, fractured resolution and a stunningly theatrical conclusion – we see both Ray’s desperate need to convince himself that the relationship was nothing to do with paedophilia, that Una was mature, that he never meant to hurt and abandon her as he did; and her damaged inability to reconcile her bitter avenging rage with undeniable memories of a sweetness and intensity that she, like him, has never been able to recapture.
The play never leaves us in any doubt that Ray’s actions were criminal and wrong, but its greatness lies in the way it uses this terrible confrontation as both reality and metaphor, to show us what we all know to be true: that desire is fundamentally selfish, that it always contains within it the possibilities of exploitation and abandonment, and that an erotic relationship brutally ended always inflicts unequal damage, one walking away to start afresh, the other wounded for life.
Jodhi May and Roger Allam give performances of astonishing integrity and power as Una and Ray, with May achieving almost operatic levels of intensity during the play’s long central memory sequence. Peter Stein’s production is an unforgettable demonstration of what a truly great director can do with a new text full of its own living, breathing energy. Ferocious in its attention to the value of every word – and profoundly musical in its piecing-together of text, movement and sound – it builds towards a conclusion that is almost breathtaking in its visual and physical eloquence and sense of tragedy: a mighty and timeless reminder that some relationships unleash demons which – with all the care and counselling in the world – can never again be fully laid to rest.
The curtain rises on the dark figure of a woman, standing at a simple table against a high, rough cottage wall, poised in the timeless act of kneading dough to make bread. It’s an image that speaks volumes about the Druid Theatre Company of Galway’s historic production of all six of the dramas of John Millington Synge; about the willingness of director Garry Hynes and her company to embrace the archetypal images of Synge’s drama as well as to play against them from time to time; about the central role and power of strong female figures throughout the cycle; and about the impressive simplicity of Francis O’Connor’s single set, beautifully lit by Davy Cunningham, against which the whole cycle is played out.
As Hynes’s company has learned during more than eighteen months of work on the cycle, the story of the life of J.M. Synge is short and poignant enough to make a brief drama in itself. He lived for only thirty-eight years, dying of cancer at the height of his fame in 1909. If his life was short, though, it takes just a glance at any page of his writing to demonstrate that he lived it with a sensual and emotional intensity and a driving sweetness of spirit that often takes the breath away, and, if he did not survive to father children of his own, by the time of his death he had done enough, in six short years as a playwright, to make himself one of the key founding fathers not only of Ireland’s national drama, but also of the whole imaginative landscape of twentieth-century literature and theatre.
It’s this colossal achievement that is celebrated in this wonderful presentation of the entire cycle of Synge’s work; a success that has as much to do with director Garry Hynes’s ability to stand back and let a mainly youthful company of actors forge their own living relationship with Synge, as with any dominating directorial concept. Over almost nine hours, with generous pauses, the cycle leads us through the great arc of Synge’s work, from the severe and rugged early tragedy Riders to the Sea – in which a mother figure mourns her six sons lost by drowning – through the bounce and ripple of Synge’s four muscular comedies, to a final revisiting of the tragic mood in the unfinished Deirdre of the Sorrows, a reworking of the ancient Celtic myth in which a young queen embraces the death and destruction that is her fate, rather than live more safely and less intensely.
And the overwhelming impression created by the cycle is of the huge tension throughout Synge’s work between a passionate, often deeply erotic sense of the beauty and energy of life, and a profound awareness of death and its pervasive presence. In the two tragedies, this tension expresses itself through the passionate rebellion against death, or argument with it, through which the characters must pass before they reach the final peace that comes with absolute loss. In the comedies, by contrast, Synge soars into a bold and brilliant teasing relationship with the idea of decay and death, the coffin-boards in the corner of the stage always on the point of being pressed into service, but never quite claiming their victims. And, in all of Synge’s plays, the tension is played out in his magnificent language, that leaping synthesis of Irish rhythms and English vocabulary in which every sentence, stuffed with image and metaphor, has the power to ripple from darkness to light like sunlight and cloud-shadow chasing across a hillside.
All of this is beautifully captured by Hynes’s nineteen-strong acting company, whose sustained commitment to and passion for the work is a real joy to experience – and there is more besides. In these plays, we can see a powerful popular and mythic challenge to the overwhelmingly bourgeois voice of late nineteenth-century theatre that was to inspire generations of twentieth-century playwrights. We can see a willingness to place women and their experience centre-stage, as the main bearers of life through and into death, that remains exceptional even today. And we can see the creation of a whole mythic and imaginative world – a kind of Ireland beyond Ireland – through which drama could begin to soar to new twentieth-century heights of symbolism and surrealism.
Unexpectedly, Hynes’s cycle is perhaps at its strongest in the two lesser-known comedies, The Tinker’s Wedding and The Well of the Saints, where she detaches Synge’s drama from its traditional turn-of-the-century setting – giving it a kind of crusty punk-traveller flavour in the first play, and an Ireland-in-the-1960s feel in the second – to allow our imaginations to soar around the timeless qualities and possibilities of the plays, particularly the prefiguring of Beckett in The Well of the Saints. The two closing productions, The Playboy of the Western World and the strange, grave and beautiful experiment that is Deirdre of the Sorrows, can seem a little passive by comparison.
But, taken as a whole, the beauty, energy and complexity of this Synge Cycle is formidable. In the work of Marie Mullen – who plays the older female figure in five of the six plays, from a magnificently lustful and winning Widow Quin in Playboy, to the mighty female sage Lavarcham in Deirdre of the Sorrows – it boasts one of the richest and most powerful evocations of the many faces of womanhood I have ever seen in theatre. And it leaves us so much enriched – in our sense of the wonder of life, its terror, sweetness, dark humour and the huge power of language and storytelling to make it bearable – that it becomes one of those mighty experiences that defines a great arts festival at its best, and engraves itself on the memory.
It’s half-past six on a chill February evening in Aberdeen, and a new era in Scottish theatre begins, not with a bang, but with the familiar rattle of a small hopper bus, carrying an audience of excited theatregoers out to the edge of the city. Waiting for us in the Middlefield estate are twenty actors, young and old, professional and community; and six unoccupied flats on the same low-rise staircase, each with a nameplate on the door featuring the word ‘Home’.
For ‘home’ was the theme chosen by the National Theatre of Scotland for its unique launch event, featuring ten site-specific shows in ten locations all over Scotland. In Aberdeen, director Alison Peebles and writer Rona Munro – together with designer Martin McNee – put together a vivid, edgy, and moving meditation, in six flats and ten parts, on what ‘home’ means today. To the left, as we crowded into the cold staircase, a door was labelled ‘home is where the heart is’; behind it, in a room full of old photographs and nostalgic decor, an old lady was living out a life of crushing loneliness, haunted by the ghosts of her long-gone family. In the top flat, an ageing fisherman thrown on the economic scrapheap wondered who was suffering the more painful slide towards extinction – himself, or the cod he once fished. What the Aberdeen show achieved was a bringing-together of all the strands of meaning in the word ‘home’, from nostalgia to the quest for new places to call our own.
Across the rest of Scotland, it was as if different aspects of the theme slid in and out of focus, although never again in a show quite so rich in texture, and so clearly and confidently theatrical. In Shetland, in a beautifully finished installation show staged aboard the Northlink Ferry by director Wils Wilson, a haunting poetic text by Jackie Kay – delivered through personal guided-tour handsets – led us through a story of deeply buried female experience, and of the perennial island tension between leaving and staying, as ghostly actors dressed in 1940s or ’50s costume drifted through the lounges and saloons of the ship. There was 1940s nostalgia in Dundee too, as director Kenny Miller decked out the hallway of the McManus Gallery in the glamorous glitterball pink and black of a wartime ballroom; although here almost nothing happened in terms of live theatre, as the audience sat passively watching a history film of humorous old Dundonians remembering their wartime youth.
In this context, Anthony Neilson’s short, sharp Edinburgh show – a surreal thirty-five-minute session of the Scottish Parliament, written by seven primary-school children – came as a welcome shift of tone, a show which seemed genuinely more interested in our crazy present and possible futures than in the past. The problem, though, was that for local Edinburgh audiences seeing only this show, the piece was too short, slight and daft to look like the launch of anything substantial. It was also a drastic underuse of the talents of a stellar cast, including Dawn Steele, Joe McFadden, Tam Dean Burn and Daniela Nardini.
Nor was there much nostalgia in the high flats at Cranhill in Glasgow, where director John Tiffany told the ultra-dramatic story of hero Murdo’s return from London to his old high-rise home, where his seventeen-year-old brother Tam is under surveillance by the state. The brilliance of Tiffany’s concept was to combine live theatre – faces in windows, dark figures abseiling down the building – with intimate screen drama, transmitted live from inside the flats via surveillance cameras held to the windows by the abseilers in black. The script was often weak, but something about Tam’s quest for a reunion with his dead dad – a victim of Gulf War syndrome – touched the heart, and all six professional performers on camera, led by Billy Boyd, Blythe Duff, and Colette O’Neil, acted their hearts out.
So is it possible to draw up a tentative balance sheet for the achievement of the National Theatre’s first event? On the downside, I would say – on the evidence of the five shows I saw – that it has been a shade too artistically uneven for comfort; and sometimes, too, ominously short of faith in the power of live theatre, as opposed to the screen images on which many shows depended.
On the upside, though, the new company has achieved a dazzling geographical reach, and a real sense of connection with local communities that has both enabled those communities to re-examine their own story, and given them a new voice on the national stage. It’s been a start, in other words; and, taken as a whole, a brave and imaginative one, designed to smash and rearrange many hostile Scottish preconceptions about theatre. But there are still many miles to travel before Scotland can begin to take this long-neglected art form back into its heart, and into its sense of what home is, and what it might become.
The new National Theatre of Scotland is all over the place, which, given its remit, is just where it should be. Back in February, it opened with ten different site-specific performances in locations from Shetland to Dumfries. Last month in Glasgow, it launched its hugely successful main-stage children’s show, The Wolves in the Walls. And now, it’s not only appearing in towns across Scotland with a youth-and-community version of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, but astonishing travellers arriving at Edinburgh Airport with scenes of drama and magic never seen before in those bland and functional spaces.
‘What’s that?’ the travellers seem to ask, as a red-coated cleaning worker with large angelic wings flits through the departure lounge. ‘It’s the National Theatre of Scotland,’ comes the reply, along with a welcome to a nation that may not yet be ‘the best small country in the world’, but has had the nerve to produce a truly twenty-first-century vision of a National Theatre. In truth, though, there’s a great deal more than fun, and the brief shock of the unfamiliar, to Grid Iron’s airport show Roam, commissioned by the National Theatre from the company who have become Scotland’s leading exponents of site-specific drama. At first, of course, it’s the playful attention to detail that charms and seduces the audience: there’s the ticket that comes in an airline-style wallet with a distinctive ‘roamair’ logo; the passport check as we leave the Traverse Theatre for the late-evening bus trip to the airport; the ‘roamair’ logo repeated on the screens of the three dedicated check-in desks that await us when we arrive there. On the bus, though, the power and energy of Philip Pinsky’s troubling, world-music-influenced score has already warned us that there’s serious business ahead. The screens at the check-in feature not only the ‘roamair’ logo, but the output of an increasingly frantic twenty-four-hour news channel reporting civil disturbances across Scotland.
And what emerges, over the next 100 minutes, is essentially a show in three strands, superbly performed by a team of eight professional actors, and a group of ten local pensioners and children, some recently arrived in Scotland from other countries. There’s a lyrical, poetic, erotic and sometimes comic meditation on the fate of a group of ordinary travellers trying to get home after a day’s business, and occasionally pausing to consider issues of home and identity. There’s a strand of surreal dance and comedy, featuring not only the angelic, red-coated cleaning workers, but also a blonde-wigged dance troupe of 1960s-style stewardesses and pilots. And there’s a nightmare drama evoking the desperate flight to the airport of a group of Edinburgh residents who suddenly find, in an unexplained civil conflict, that the airports represent their only chance of escaping alive. Bullied by a terrifyingly convincing soldier into revealing endless personal and family details in the frantic quest for a boarding pass, these people begin as ordinary Edinburgh folk, and end as the wretched of the earth we usually see only on television. The transition is terrifying, and – with its hints of nationalism or sectarianism run mad – all too credible.
There are aspects of Roam that occasionally disappoint. The final baggage-reclaim sequence is flabby and unnecessary, and the whole event, based on a devised script by director Ben Harrison and the company, is about ten minutes too long. But the superb quality of the performances, and of the music (performed live by Galo Ceron-Carrasco and Kerieva McCormick), goes a long way towards redeeming any flaws. And the sharpness with which this show identifies the airport as one of the key points where postmodern issues of identity, entitlement and belonging are played out – matched by Grid Iron’s sheer practical genius in weaving its drama through the structures and spaces of a working airport – makes this vital and important twenty-first-century theatre, which should perhaps be re-enacted in every international airport on earth.
It was a perfect July night, last Wednesday evening at Mull Little Theatre. The show was over, the volunteer staff were tidying the little foyer, people stood around chatting as the last rays of evening sun sliced through the woods around the building, and I couldn’t resist a last, nostalgic look back into the tiny cowshed auditorium before I walked away for the last time. It’s exactly forty years since Barrie and Marianne Hesketh, two professional actors who had fallen in love with Mull after being judges at a drama festival there, decided to open a professional theatre in the old byre beside their guesthouse at Dervaig, which was once the town manse. Incredibly – through a mixture of sheer hard work by generations of actors and directors, and dogged and passionate local support – their crazy little initiative survived and thrived, outliving Marianne Hesketh, who died in 1984, and surviving Barrie’s departure from the island a year later.
Now, though, it’s time for Mull Theatre Company to move on, to a fine new base in Aros Forest near the island metropolis of Tobermory; and so, some time in September, it will be curtains at last for this tiny forty-three-seat theatre space, with a stage so small that it can barely accommodate more than three actors. The company are not leaving without regrets – the Little Theatre is full of happy memories. For arcane reasons to do with Scottish Arts Council funding strategy, and the historic stinginess of Argyll and Bute Council towards the summer theatre season, their beautiful new building at Druimfin is not to be described or funded as a theatre, although it will contain a performance space. Instead, it will be known as a ‘production centre’, a base for the company’s Scotland-wide touring activity, which the Arts Council is happy to fund. It’s unlikely that there will ever again be a summer theatre season on Mull on the pattern pioneered by the Heskeths. Mull Theatre’s director Alasdair McCrone is delighted, though, that the company will continue to be able to produce theatre on Mull, and to perform not only across Scotland, but in venues around its home island. He hopes the move to Tobermory will bring the company’s work, and the creative and educational buzz it creates, even closer to the heart of island life.
It’s with a distinct nod to the past, though, and to the unique atmosphere of the Little Theatre, that Alasdair McCrone has chosen to build his final season there around a tiny, jewel-like production of Macbeth, adapted for a cast of five. A legendary puppet version of Macbeth was one of the greatest hits of the Hesketh era; and Alicia Hendrick’s remarkable design for this new stripped-down version of the play uses the full depth of the space behind the theatre’s little stage. She creates a dark, sinister double hall of mirrors, lit by lurid flashes of golden light, that perfectly reflects the terrible inner world of dreams, illusions and violent imaginings that grips Macbeth’s mind from his first encounter with the witches.
It has to be said that the effort to tell Shakespeare’s great story with only five actors, plus a couple of extras, sometimes leads McCrone to extreme measures. The porter appears only by way of a tiny video screen; the bloody soldier who reports Macbeth’s victory in the opening scene is a shivering filmed image on a bloodstained sheet; the show’s single presiding witch, played with terrific demonic force by Fiona Colliss, can only be multiplied into three with the clever use of distorting mirrors; and the acting is a shade uneven, sometimes matching the intensity of the production, sometimes losing focus a little. In the end, though, this is a production that makes a tremendous virtue of necessity, using its limited resources, and its need to range across different media, to plunge deep into the nightmarish and delusional landscape of Macbeth’s mind. The visual images are often breathtaking; Martin Low’s complex, eerie music and soundscape haunt the mind. And the Mull company can be proud of a closing production that exploits the rugged, claustrophobic potential of the Little Theatre as thoroughly and imaginatively as any show I’ve ever seen there.
When Vicky Featherstone was appointed director of the new National Theatre of Scotland two years ago, one of the first potential projects she announced was a new play by Gregory Burke based on the real-life experience of the Black Watch regiment in Iraq. Even she can hardly have dared hope, though, that the idea would finally come to birth in such a magnificent, moving and mind-blowing first night as the one that raised the roof of the old Forrest Road Drill Hall on Saturday evening. Based on dozens of interviews with present and former Black Watch soldiers, the play adopts a fairly simple flashback, flash-forward structure. On one hand, there is the tense encounter in a grubby bar somewhere in Fife or Dundee between the nervous playwright and the former Black Watch men whose experience he is about to mine and exploit for his next show. On the other hand, there is the fragmented story of the men during their time in Iraq, suffering, arguing, and in some cases dying, as they seek to replace a much larger American force in one of the most dangerous zones of a war about which many of them have doubts – and at a time when, back home, their 300-year-old regiment is facing dissolution. Woven through both stories there is the ‘golden thread’ of Black Watch history as it is passed on to each new recruit, represented here by a rich vein of soldiers’ songs, visual imagery, and stunning, sometimes heart-rending movement sequences by the associate director, Steven Hoggett.
People will argue, of course – or should – about the precise meaning of a play that pulls no punches in describing the discomfort, disillusion and suffering of the men of the Black Watch in Iraq, but has little to say about the suffering they inflict, or about the dark strain of colonial savagery in the regiment’s history. And the ending of the show is undoubtedly a shade too drawn out, too in love with its own gift for music and movement.
What’s undeniable, though, is the breathtaking theatrical brilliance with which the director, John Tiffany, and his team bring the main sequence of Burke’s story to life, in the great echoing space of the Drill Hall, blending sound, music, light, movement, and the occasional huge projected video image, with the tremendous live performances of a brilliantly chosen team of ten young Scottish actors, each of them apparently driven by an overwhelming sense of purpose and history, and of superbly disciplined physical energy. The technical quality of this production is flawless, soaring up to and beyond the gold standard we can expect from our National Theatre. Far more important, though, is the ground-shaking energy with which it announces the arrival of the National Theatre as a force that can reassert a strong, grassroots Scottish perspective on parts of our story which, until now, have been filtered mainly through institutions of the British state. Burke’s play does not represent the last word on the history of Scotland’s most famous regiment. But it does represent a massive step forward in our understanding and recognition of a vital part of our national story, and – potentially – of the relationship between Scottish theatre and the widest possible popular audience, both at home, and far beyond our shores.
If live theatre survives in the twenty-first century, it will be by playing to its own strengths, rather than trying to ape the achievements of other art forms. A hydraulic helicopter on stage is never going to look as good as a real helicopter on film, and theatre can never match the gritty daylight naturalism of an episode of EastEnders. One of the many things theatre can do, though, is to tell big, important stories with an economy of means that actually makes the narrative more sexy and gripping, rather than less so. David Greig’s new play, Yellow Moon, for the young people’s theatre company TAG, is exactly that kind of two-planks-and-a-passion show – brisk, simple and yet so full of imaginative energy that it leaves you feeling as though you’ve watched a full-length road movie, with added intimacy and intensity.
Played on a bare in-the-round stage furnished with just two chairs by four actors in jeans and T-shirts, Yellow Moon is subtitled ‘The Ballad of Leila and Lee’, and draws its mood and some of its rhythm from a sombre old blues song, ‘The Ballad of Stagger Lee’. It tells the story of a handsome, restless teenager from Inverkeithing, Stag Lee McAlinden, who, one dramatic night, finds himself stabbing his mum’s boyfriend in the local graveyard, and heading north on the Inverness train in search of his long-gone father. With him goes Leila, the silent, self-harming celebrity-obsessed daughter of a migrant family who fled some war zone in the 1990s and settled in Fife.
The story of their journey is beautifully acted by Andrew Scott-Ramsay and Nalini Chetty as Lee and Leila, and narrated by Beth Marshall and Keith MacPherson, who also play various older characters, and it emerges as a miraculous mixture of looming tragedy, wry social comedy, magical teenage romance, and profoundly serious redemption myth. In the far north, Leila and Lee find the father figure Lee was seeking, but not remotely in the form they imagined; they also find one another, a new friend, a new relationship with the land itself, and – in the end – a faint, glimmering hope for a better future for all the damaged children of our time. All of these elements are fabulously well balanced, and then powerfully drawn out, in Greig’s fine light-touch script, which involves elements of rhyme and epic adventure-narrative, as well as complex interior monologue and pure naturalistic dialogue. Nigel Dunn has contributed a beautiful blues-influenced score, with overtones of Ry Cooder and its own vein of pure lyricism. Guy Hollands’ production is almost impossible to fault, drawing four superb, high-energy performances from an outstanding cast, who give a master-class in how theatre can create whole worlds using only words, light, music and pure acting skill.
Christmas comes but once a year; and when it comes, it’s supposed to bring good cheer. It seems, though, that that single annual visit to the land of sparkly magic, happy endings and jolly audience participation is one too many for the team at the Royal Lyceum, whose 2006 children’s show Pinocchio seems inspired by the general assumption that all that Christmas joy and magic is a bit old-fashioned, and that it’s therefore more ‘interesting’ to turn out a show just as dark, disturbing, unmagical, self-mocking and full of moral ambivalence as the average bog-standard piece of non-Christmas theatre. That this lazy evasion of the whole idea of feast and celebration can still pass for radicalism in British theatre speaks volumes for the trashy quality of our public intellectual life; it’s dispiriting, but hardly surprising. And what we’re left with – once the cast have dispensed, in a smug opening chorus, with the idea that we’re going to see anything we might associate with Christmas – is a brisk and vaguely enjoyable low-budget show for children of primary-school age, with makeshift-looking sets that just about do the job of leading us through Pinocchio’s story, and a deluxe cast of ten who somehow manage to seem pretty thin on the ground.
Written by director Mark Thomson himself, and closely based on Carlo Collodi’s original 1883 story of the little puppet boy whose love for his ‘father’, the old carpenter Geppetto, finally gives him a beating human heart, this version prides itself on avoiding the lush sentimentalism that gave the famous Walt Disney film its moral glamour and narrative ease. Instead, it allows its charismatic star, the emerging film and stage actor James Anthony Pearson, to lead us on a close-up journey through Pinocchio’s inner tussle between heartless pleasure-seeking and loving kindness, exposing the audience to the full, uneasy sense of moral gloom that pervades Collodi’s tale, with its huge repertoire of nasty exploitative villains, and its weirdly unconvincing redemptive figures.
The show’s main comic strategy is to include such a strong strand of near-adult campery and send-up that there are moments when the whole cast seems about to burst into a chorus of ‘I Am What I Am’. But if this is Thomson’s postmodern take on the ancient festive tradition of gender-bending and cross-dressing, then it has to be said that in the absence of the true all-embracing panto form, it undermines the narrative far more than it enriches it. There are enjoyable moments in this Pinocchio: the train journey to the Land of Toys is particularly well realised, with Molly Innes in unforgettably sinister form as the fat controller of the magic train; and most of the older children in the audience seemed to be having a fine time.
There was one child present, though, who wasn’t happy at all. She was bored, disappointed and thoroughly depressed by the show’s lack of sparkle and beauty; she was my inner child, and she went home in a sulk, feeling as if Christmas had been indefinitely postponed.
If boldness in tackling themes from contemporary politics was enough to create great theatre, then Grae Cleugh’s new play The Patriot – which opens Gregory Thompson’s account as artistic director at the Tron – might be one of the finest shows of the year. Set in the Edinburgh New Town home of a Scottish Executive minister called Tom Gordon, it imagines a confrontation between this pillar of the post-devolution establishment, and a young SNP activist, Paul, who is enraged by the betrayals and brutalities of recent New Labour policy, and in particular by the death in Iraq of his younger brother, a soldier in the British army; the subject, in other words, could hardly be more timely.
When it comes to transforming this brilliant idea into theatre, though, Cleugh’s play and Thompson’s production collapse into pretty comprehensive failure. In form, to begin with, the play is bafflingly old-fashioned, complete with posh drawing-room setting, endless visits to the drinks cabinet, and hopelessly stagey dialogue. In tone, the play is desperately unpleasant, full of a sneering presumption that Scotland is self-evidently a dump, full of weird, violent nationalists who get their sexual kicks by reciting William Wallace’s battle plans, and Labour folk who live like princes and stink of corruption. Both main characters are so unattractive that it’s genuinely difficult to care what happens to either of them, and the family drama into which they are drawn – triggered by Tom’s too-close relationship with his adored goddaughter Claire, Paul’s new fiancée – is as overpitched as it is unnecessary.
Worst of all, though, is Cleugh’s extraordinary tin ear for the reality of current Scottish politics, and for the mood of the times we live in. Politically this play gets absolutely everything wrong, from the social ethos of Scottish Labour to the current mood of the SNP; it plays as if it had been written by someone observing Scotland from a continent away, through a prism of scanty and inaccurate media coverage. Perhaps a more inventive production, less bogged down in the stylistic clichés of mid-twentieth-century establishment drama, might have flattered Cleugh’s script a little more. As it is, it makes a dire evening’s theatre. One of the characters complains, at one point, that Scottish theatre can be ‘pretty parochial’. That’s not true any more – except, alas, on the main stage of the Tron, over the next couple of weeks.
In the world of tribute shows, there are three strategies that writers and producers can traditionally embrace: one is the straightforward biography, in which the life story of the artist or artists is retold using the medium of the songs that made them famous; another is the shameless musical hoedown, with very little pretence at a plot; and the third – the hugely successful Mamma Mia! method – is the show built around a fictional plot that somehow expresses the essence of the music, and captures the cultural moment out of which it came.
This is the strategy adopted by Stephen Greenhorn in Sunshine on Leith, his much-anticipated musical based on the work of The Proclaimers, which has already – if advance sales are any guide – become one of the hottest tickets in recent Scottish theatre. After a roaring success of a first night in Dundee last weekend, it’s clear that James Brining’s fine Dundee Rep production is unlikely to disappoint the Reid brothers’ huge army of fans as it travels on to Edinburgh and Glasgow.
If subtlety of plot and dialogue is what you seek, mind you, then Sunshine on Leith might not be entirely your cup of tea. It tells the story of two former squaddies, Davy and Ally, who return from service in Afghanistan to try to take up the threads of civilian life in Leith; and of their families, struggling with all the tensions and ironies of life in postmodern working-class Scotland. Davy’s mum and dad have been forced into a classic post-industrial role-reversal: he no longer works, since the docks were mechanised; she brings home the bacon as a cleaner and waitress on the Royal Yacht Britannia at Ocean Terminal. His sister Lizzie is a nurse, enraged by the new PFI ethos of the Blairite health service, and his new girlfriend Yvonne, one of Lizzie’s colleagues, is torn by the classic family dilemma of an English girl who loves Edinburgh – despite a steady drip-drip of anti-English banter – but feels too far away from her ageing mother.
Sometimes, the plot is so blatantly contrived to accommodate the great songs that the audience can almost hear the pieces clanking into place. Lizzie is considering a move to the States (‘Letter from America’); Ally just can’t help loving her, even though she’s not so keen (‘Hate My Love for You’); Yvonne might want Davy to move back to England with her (‘500 Miles’). The dramatic situations, likewise, are sometimes so obvious and clichéd as to make Greenhorn’s own River City – which he originally wanted to set in Leith – look like King Lear. There’s the blind date that comes good, the old infidelity revealed, the warring middle-aged couple brought back together by a sudden heart attack.
If the plot sometimes seems more than a little cheesy, though – and the anti-war, anti-PFI politics are pure old-fashioned agitprop, except when the relative subtlety of the songs intervenes – the show also has a huge raft of compensating virtues. There’s the music, brilliantly belted out by every member of the cast, and a nine-piece band in electrifying form. There’s Neil Warmington’s slick, ingenious set, recreating almost a dozen familiar city settings – at home, in the pub, on top of Blackford Hill – with extraordinary speed and fluency, and creating a rich panorama of primary colours across the stage. There’s some fine choreography (by Lizzie Gee), in which this superbly practised ensemble move as one into routines brisk, tender, or just plain exhilarating. There are a series of lovely, straightforward performances from Keith Fleming and Kevin Lennon as Davy and Ally, John Buick and Ann Louise Ross as Davy’s parents, and the lovely Gail Watson and Emily Winter as their strong-minded girlfriends.
And, above all, there’s the spirit of the show, with its terrific sense of place (it must be the first true Edinburgh musical of the postmodern age) and the passion with which it evokes the powerful link between the music of The Proclaimers – with all its sense of political and economic struggle combined with a rich gratitude for the sweetness of life – and the reality of ordinary Scottish life from the 1980s to the present day. If I were Craig and Charlie Reid, I would be thrilled by the tremendous tribute to their music implied in this heart-lifting show. And I would also be moved by the tremendous energy everyone involved has clearly drawn from their special genius for giving a voice to modern Scotland; and by the huge popular success that the show, and everyone involved with it, now seems certain to enjoy.
The skirl of the pipes at the door, the tumbling waters of the River Tummel below, and the May sky still bright at the nine o’clock interval. Yes, it’s another new season at Pitlochry Festival Theatre and, last weekend, the theatre launched its 2007 programme with a play that might have been written for the occasion, so perfectly does it combine the picturesque costume drama Pitlochry audiences love with a sharp political awareness of the very issues of culture, identity and English-Scottish Union highlighted by the election result which emerged just two hours before curtain-up. Robert McLellan’s The Flouers o Edinburgh is not, of course, a modern play. It was written in the late 1940s, at the height of the post-war ferment of debate about Scotland’s political future which led, over the next two years, to some 2.5 million Scots signing a petition for home rule.
Yet if campaigning for home rule was vigorous at the time, voters remained unpersuaded: the British state – fresh from its victory over fascism – had probably never been stronger or more widely trusted. And it was out of this passionate but contradictory period in Scottish politics that McLellan’s graceful comedy emerged, part vigorous satire on the idea of ‘Britishness’ as it appeared in eighteenth-century Scotland, part warm and persuasive tribute to the old Scots tongue, and part sentimental homage – in a time of domestic austerity – to the beauty and poetry of the past, not a million miles in impulse from Christopher Fry’s English costume dramas of the same period.
So the curtain rises on a traditional, beautifully made Pitlochry set representing the parlour of Lady Girzie Carmichael’s residence, on the top floor of a tenement in Edinburgh’s Canongate, on a sunlit afternoon some time around 1760. Her servant Jock, played with something close to genius by Martyn James, is baking scones in the nearby kitchen, and giving his mistress as good as he gets in the way of cheeky backchat. Instantly, McLellan evokes the ideal of an egalitarian Scottish society, where masters and servants relate more as family or clan than as members of different social classes.
Girzie – played with terrific energy and charm by Carol Ann Crawford – is a woman of immense kindly common sense, beautifully dressed in the kind of gorgeous period costume at which Pitlochry excels, and perfectly certain that whatever fashion or politics now dictates after fifty years of Union with England, she will keep a good Scots tongue in her head. Her lovely niece Kate is of the same mind; and so both are reduced to tears of mirth when Charlie Gilchrist, the son of Girzie’s old friend Lord Stanebyres, returns from London full of posh English manners and sporting a would-be English accent mangled through a hilarious mouthful of plums, along with a new ambition to enter politics as MP for a local constituency.
And so it goes, over three acts, as a fashion for English language lessons takes hold in Edinburgh, and Charlie finds his ambitions thwarted by a range of dour local bailies and wealthy nabobs returned from the Indies, as well as by his father’s stubborn conservatism. Richard Baron’s fine and lavish production thoroughly enjoys the joke of McLellan’s play, and its rich contemporary resonances, without perhaps fully grasping the depth of McLellan’s writing around the idea of economic development, and its cultural and social consequences.
As a result, the production loses energy in the second act, which revolves more around Charlie’s business dealings than his affairs of the heart. The show boasts an excellent central performance, though, from Grant O’Rourke as Charlie, the man on whose strangled vowels the whole comic impact of the play depends. And, so long as Crawford and Suzanne Donaldson are on stage with their servant Jock, delivering a perfect female double act of charm, smeddum and drive as Girzie and Kate, it’s difficult to resist the energy of this most high-spirited of Scots comedies; difficult, too, not to admire the way McLellan finally avoids romantic cliché by driving Kate and Charlie into a cross-cultural row so fierce that anyone can see that, together or apart, they were made for each other. Just like Scotland and England, perhaps.
He is a special saint, St Magnus of Orkney: a martyr not for the Christian faith in general, but for his specific belief in the possibility of peace and forgiveness after bitter conflict and injury – a belief that led to his untimely death, but that left behind an undying legend of kindly and radiant love. It’s a spirit that flowed through the life of the late Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, who, with his friend Peter Maxwell Davies, conceived the idea of the St Magnus Festival back in the 1970s; it is, in a sense, the spirit of the Festival itself. And it’s a measure of how far the writer Luke Sutherland is himself a son of Orkney – brought up in the islands in the 1970s and ’80s, as the only black boy on South Ronaldsay – that his beautiful and controversial 2004 novella, Venus as a Boy, itself glows with a rich strand of mystical realism, and with a profound belief in the healing, redeeming and forgiving power of love.
The only difficulty – for some, at least – is that, for Sutherland’s hero, a richly bisexual young man known as Cupid, love mainly means sex, the physical ecstasy that, at its most powerful, opens doors to richly spiritual visions of angels and apple orchards, and the opening of mighty golden gates. It also provides an escape route from a small Orkney community that Cupid often finds cruel, bigoted and repressive. And so it was a brave move for the St Magnus Festival, which generally celebrates the quality of Orkney life, to join with the National Theatre of Scotland Workshop in presenting Tam Dean Burn’s new stage version of Sutherland’s novel, which played in Hoy, Kirkwall and Stromness this week before starting the long journey south that mirrors the short, ecstatic life of its hero, from little boy in Orkney to dying transvestite in a Soho attic, gradually and mysteriously turning to gold.
Tam Dean Burn’s ninety-minute solo version of the story – co-directed by Christine Devaney, and with Sutherland himself, a gifted rock guitarist and violinist, providing live music on stage – attempts no fancy tricks with the narrative, but does three things quite brilliantly: first, in a brief preamble, it places the story as an account of a real life, told by a real human being of an actor, in a way that disarms the audience, and helps this remarkable story to bridge all possible gaps between the close-knit community of Orkney, and the squalid and glittering postmodern metropolis where Cupid meets his fate. Second, it shows a powerful political grasp of Sutherland’s story as an exploration of the fascist impulse, both as a symptom of emotional damage, and as a phenomenon painfully well understood by all those social ‘outsiders’ who tend to be its victims. And finally, with the help of Sutherland’s haunting mix of live and recorded music, it sustains, through the whole show, that ecstatic note of shimmering mysticism that is the special hallmark of Sutherland’s writing in Venus as a Boy. It’s wild, extreme, sometimes close to madness; but Tam Dean Burn’s performance is a tour de force, a brilliantly pitched piece of theatrical craftmanship that keeps all these explosive elements powerfully bent towards a higher purpose, and a glittering challenge to every kind of bigotry.
It was perhaps the most glittering first night ever in Scottish theatre, as the blisteringly high-profile National Theatre of Scotland/Edinburgh Festival co-production of Euripides’ The Bacchae opened at the King’s Theatre on Saturday evening. In the programme for the show, there was a quote and a challenge, from the company to itself: ‘For centuries people have spoken of the Greek myths as something to be rediscovered and reawakened,’ says the Italian writer Roberto Calasso. ‘But the truth is that the myths are still out there, waiting to awaken us…’
And whatever else is said about John Tiffany’s new version of The Bacchae, in a contemporary translation by Ian Ruffell and David Greig, it certainly comes as a disturbing and often rude awakening to a culture that has often been lulled, over the centuries, into thinking of the great dramas of ancient Greece as dusty pieces of literature, performed – if at all – with an air of sonorous reverence. First seen in 407 BC, The Bacchae is, to begin with, perhaps the most strange and unsettling of all the great Greek dramas. It tells the story of the god Dionysus, the son of Zeus and of the Theban princess Semele, who has lived in exile in the countries of the East since his birth, but now returns to Thebes, with his band of wild dancing women, the Bacchae, to claim his status as a god.
At one level, the play is therefore a classic human drama about the illegitimate child returning to claim his own, and wreaking revenge when he finds only mockery and rejection. But it is also a great political parable about the terrible fate that awaits a state which cannot acknowledge, and find a balance between, all the different aspects of human nature, including the Dionysian impulse to drink, dance, play and play-act, to lose the self in rituals of sensual pleasure and transformation. And in the powerful confrontation between the show’s playful, dangerous star Alan Cumming as Dionysus, and a superbly grey and controlled Tony Curran as his cousin, the Theban king Pentheus, it’s possible to sense a whole rich vein of resonance for our own political culture, torn as it is between a growing binge-culture of uncontrolled excess on one hand, and, on the other, a new authoritarian obsession with law and order, and the suppression of ‘anti-social’ behaviour.
Now it should be said that in trying to find a full theatrical expression of that confrontation, John Tiiffany’s production makes legions of errors, some of them as baffling as they are disappointing. Its visual imagery, to begin with, is more intermittently spectacular than consistently dramatic and telling. Dionysus, for example, is supposed to be a physically gorgeous shape-changer, beautiful and dazzling; here, he is confined to one little golden outfit with a messy wig, and is never allowed to look fabulous at all.
Beyond the visual, the production suffers from strange lapses of pace and vocal energy: the final long, elegiac scene between Pentheus’s mother and grandfather, for example, limps along at a snail’s pace, despite a superbly moving performance from Ewan Hooper as old Cadmus. And most disappointingly of all, Tim Sutton’s lightweight soul-based score – for Dionysus’s mighty chorus of Bacchae, played by ten terrific black female actor-singers in glittering shades of red – only rarely rises to the occasion. At the height of the narrative, it never begins to achieve the kind of volume, rhythm and power that would really express the mighty ecstasy of the Dionysian rite; and sometimes, the ear aches for a few shuddering bars of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which comes so much nearer the mark.
For all these weaknesses, though, in the end Tiffany’s production carries three strands of brave, ground-breaking energy that make it infinitely worth seeing. First, it achieves some astonishing visual coups de théâtre, blazing exhibitions of fire and light that are as witty as they are thrilling. Secondly, in the great 7:84 tradition to which he belongs, Tiffany recognises the plain didactic simplicity of Euripides’ drama – recognise all the gods, or suffer the consequences – and its place in popular culture. He uses popular forms freely throughout, from the opening pop-soul numbers in which the Bacchae become Dionysus’s backing singers, to the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy sequence in which Dionysus seduces Pentheus into women’s clothes; and in every case, the popular form fits the drama better than more solemn and archaic forms of presentation.
And above all, Alan Cumming’s central performance as Dionysus – alternating with a terrifying swiftness between light-hearted, ultra-camp charm and raging, all-powerful fury – represents a real, if still uncertain, landmark in marrying the new strength of queer culture to one of the oldest stories of our civilisation. For when societies grow rigid, authoritarian and blinkered, the control of the sexuality of men who challenge and transgress traditional models of masculinity always becomes a central obsession, often expressed with a terrifying brutality. In the last generation, our Western culture has taken some steps towards a true civic recognition of those aspects of Dionysian energy that were repressed for so long. But the danger of backlash, and the advance of new kinds of control freakery, still stalks our civilisation. Euripides’ warning is that we may pay a heavy price for that mood of reaction; and this strange, uneven show represents a tentative but thrilling first step towards making that warning real, for a twenty-first century audience.
In the far westlands of Argyll, something is stirring. Urban types in well-zipped jackets and husky boots wander along rough forestry trails, clutching soggy maps and an enigmatic guidebook. Here and there – in a handful of hidden places, thinly spread across the vast landscape of Kilmartin Glen and Crinan Moss – they find the sites they visit subtly changed. Here, the trees leading uphill to some ancient markings in earthfast rock are singed in strange patterns, or peeled so that their bark releases a heady smell of sap. There, in a deep valley near the sea, a new chapel-like roof of arched pine branches rises over a flat stone scored with deep cups and channels; in the ruin of an old mill cottage, someone has created a living image of the old northern legend of the world ground out between two millstones of heaven and hell. In many of these chosen places, small, sculpted sounds emerge from the rock and trees: the groaning, singing, roaring and twittering of the land itself, amplified a thousand times. And at night, in a clearing at Achnabreck, light gleams and flashes through the tall pillars of the trees, as a team of five actors and two musicians strive to bind the whole event together in a one-hour outdoor performance.
This is Half Life: Journey into the Neolithic, the first-ever collaboration between the National Theatre of Scotland and Angus Farquhar’s great landscape art company NVA, most famous for creating The Path at Glen Lyon in 2000, and The Storr, last year in Skye. The aim is partly to open up this astonishing landscape at Kilmartin to a nation still largely unaware of its presence, and of the huge historic and archaeological importance of a cluster of burial and ritual sites dating back almost five thousand years. At the same time, though, Farquhar and his company are anxious to raise questions about how we relate to the past and to the dead, using the intense neolithic burial-culture of this area to remind us of humankind’s epic struggle, over countless millennia, to make sense of our own lives and deaths, and to place ourselves and our fate within some pattern that gives it shape and meaning. Hence the two-part character of Half Life, which combines an evening show, experienced collectively, with an opportunity to spend a day or two travelling independently around the Kilmartin area, experiencing the scattered pattern of sites and monuments at our own pace; there are likely, in other words, to be as many responses to this event as there are audience members.
What seems generally true, though, is that as a total experience, Half Life never quite resolves the problem of trying to deconstruct and re-examine a historical narrative that most of the audience members will never have heard in the first place. If you spend a day before Half Life reading Rachel Butter’s beautiful standard guidebook to the glen, and the Half Life book itself, then you may become absorbed in NVA’s conversation with the place, and begin to appreciate the carefully crafted modesty of its interventions. If not, you may well find the experience disappointingly minimal and uninformative, and the size of the organisation and crew involved completely out of proportion to the effect. Either way, you will almost certainly find the evening show a shade disappointing, despite the stunning visual impact of James Johnson’s beautifully made forest performance site, a great double stage within a mighty radiating crown of felled pine logs. In the effort to find a point of contact with the burial culture of Kilmartin, writer Thomas Legendre and movement genius Mark Murphy reach for a story of a modern couple with a lost child that never fully escapes the television-drama cliché and New Age self-absorption of our modern grief-culture, despite some fine acting, and superb movement-based imagery.
Yet for all these failures, Half Life as a whole is an infinitely enriching experience. Angus Farquhar is the leading conceptual artist of Scottish landscape and theatre, and like all conceptual artists, he faces the criticism that his work represents a minimal jolting or reframing of reality, something that looks as though anyone could have done it; in this case, he certainly could have used a stronger writer, to provide texts with a sharper intellectual and poetic edge. But in the end, as with all great conceptual artists, his critics have to concede that although anyone might have done it, no one else did. No one else had the idea, raised the cash, put together the project, and cared enough about the mighty heritage of Kilmartin Glen to lure audiences there, and to bring them into a dialogue with a vital part of their own heritage. The results are debatable, even flawed. The impact, though, is unforgettable; and the whole event is exactly the kind of project in which Scotland’s National Theatre should be investing, not in a quest for perfection, but in the search for new horizons, and for a constant shifting and deepening of Scotland’s vision of itself.
On the pier at Ellenabeich, on Saturday afternoon, Mull Theatre Company are halfway through unloading their van when the weather changes, and great salty swathes of West Highland rain begin to sweep in from the sea. Mull’s latest show, Bright Water, is a reflection on the life of Gavin Maxwell, mid-twentieth-century author, conservationist, upper-class adventurer, and author of the much-loved otter book Ring of Bright Water. The set for the short two-handed drama is not a complicated one: apart from some basic lighting equipment, there are a couple of upholstered chairs, a lightweight blue gauze backdrop, eight pieces of plywood flooring, a carpet, a box, a tiny side table, and a fragile-looking standard lamp.
But long before a little flat-bottomed boat arrives to ferry the company and its show across the harbour to Easdale, the chairs are drenched, and the paintwork on the flooring is being tested to its limit. On the grey sea, as the boat chugs across the narrow sound, the teetering pile of furniture and people looks comically vulnerable, like an image out of an ancient 1940s movie, and by the time the whole show has been carted up the long, slate-lined slipway into Easdale Hall, wet is the hardly the word for everyone involved, from the unflappable boatman, through the three-strong stage-management team, to the company’s tour manager Mick Andrew, and the actor Richard Conlon, gallantly lending a hand.
Ever since the days of 7:84 – and even before that, with companies like Glasgow Rep and Theatre Workshop – this kind of ‘extreme’ Highland touring has enjoyed a special place in the hearts of Scottish audiences. But no other company maintains that tradition with such passion – and on such a relatively modest funding base – as Alasdair McCrone’s Mull Theatre, which will visit a record-breaking nineteen Scottish islands on this current tour; and just a few hours after that rain-drenched arrival on Easdale, I walked into the village hall to find Alicia Hendrick’s set looking exactly as it had the night before on Iona, a calm, melancholy, slightly shabby evocation of Gavin Maxwell’s last home at Eilean Bàn off Skye, enlivened only by a faintly audible squelch whenever the actors sat down on one of the padded chairs.
When it comes to the show itself, Jon Pope’s interesting script is framed as a dialogue between Richard Addison as the older Maxwell, holed up at Eilean Bàn in the months before his death in 1969, and his much smoother and more genial younger self, played with a fine, glowing poise by Richard Conlon; the difficulty is that the play seems unclear, particularly in the early scenes, about where the main tension lies between these two figures. Sometimes, the younger man accuses the older of being a ‘hippy’, the first Highland dropout, fleeing the pressures of urban life on an impulse that is bound to strike a chord with many of those who choose to live in the Highlands and Islands today. At other times, though, the play seems more deeply focused on Maxwell’s distinctive history as a compulsive loner, whose failure in human relationships both appalls and disappoints his younger self.
The result is a show that takes a long time to find a convincing narrative thread. But there are flashes of rare beauty and eloquence in Alasdair McCrone’s production, notably in the moments – beautifully illustrated by Martin Low’s music – when Maxwell’s reserve breaks down in the face of his passion for the beautiful animals that became his life. And by bringing Highland and Island communities together not only for entertainment or practical business, but for a couple of hours of complex, grown-up drama on the life of this fascinating local anti-hero, this is the kind of show that plays a valuable part in developing the life of those communities, as places not only of retreat from the urban world, but also of real change, reflection, and renewal.
It’s in the street outside Dundee Rep, five minutes before the start of the show, that I begin to suspect we’re about to see something special. One of those vast, white party limousines is nosing through the Tay Street traffic, adding to the general crush. Then suddenly it swerves into the theatre forecourt, pulls up at the door, and spills out a screaming, singing, fighting car-load of drop-dead-vulgar wedding guests, who swarm into the theatre and up to the bar, where they begin to karaoke the punters to death with a series of ear-splitting country-and-western torchsongs.
This is Dominic Hill’s Peer Gynt, his final production at Dundee Rep as he leaves to become artistic director of the Traverse, and the Rep’s first major co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland. And it’s a show to shout about from the rooftops, not only the finest piece of classic theatre Scotland has produced in half a decade, but also a final, dazzling counterblast to the idea this mighty epic – written in 1867, when Ibsen was not yet forty – is somehow unstageable. The secret of Hill’s success is twofold: first, there’s the sheer, practised richness of his long-term relationship with the Rep’s permanent ensemble of actors, which gives this show the depth and sheen of a production that has been in preparation for years, rather than weeks.
Then secondly there is his understated but absolute assumption that Ibsen’s great, archetypal story about the male quest for freedom and fame, and about Peer’s ambiguous relationship with the ties of true love that would bind him, is not some archaic Norwegian folktale, but a hilarious, beautiful and hard-hitting story for our own age, crazed as it is by the same dream of perfect individual freedom that drives Peer’s quest. Colin Teevan’s new version of the text is superb, as fresh, frank, hard-edged and occasionally obscene as if he had just picked up the story on the streets of Glasgow or Manchester. Naomi Wilkinson’s inspired design clears the stage back to its walls and gantries to allow full play to the imagination, deftly evoking Peer Gynt’s rural background with a cigarette-advert-style image on a city hoarding, that can turn on a sixpence to conjure up ordinary walls and houses.
In this magical space, an augmented, eighteen-strong Dundee company – led by a wonderful Keith Fleming as the young Peer, and an equally fine Gerry Mulgrew as the older one – give a series of brilliant, funny, inspired, and completely purposeful performances, moving without missing a beat from the simple escape narrative of the first half to the difficult, episodic satire on earthly wealth and power that dominates the second. And what they show us is Ibsen’s masterpiece reborn as a piece of world-class popular theatre for our time: not only hilarious, earthy and true, but also as full of beauty, poetry, and sorrow as Ibsen could have hoped, when he first brought together folktale and epic to tell this magnificent story of a man’s struggle to be fully himself, and finally to accept the paradox that in failing to give himself to others, he has lost his own best chance of fulfilment.
Rich times – but within a year, the 2008 economic crash brought a new sense of uncertainty to publicly funded theatres everywhere. And although Scotland’s new SNP government, first elected in 2007, proved a doughty defender of the general level of arts funding in tough times, the Scottish arts world was deeply shaken, at the end of the decade, by the launch in 2010 of its new funding body, known as Creative Scotland. Many leading Scottish theatre artists became heavily involved in a campaign to change the style and leadership of Creative Scotland, which initially seemed determined to play a much more strategic and directive role in deciding what artists should do and make than the old Scottish Arts Council. And although the campaign was at least partly successful in reasserting the right of artists to determine their own ‘strategies’, rather than having them mapped out by a government agency that addressed them in increasingly unbearable management jargon, the drain on their energy was palpable.
So it’s perhaps no accident that the twin powerhouses of Scottish theatre, in these troubled years, seemed to lie in the National Theatre of Scotland – directly funded by the Scottish Government, along with the other national companies – and in David MacLennan’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint seasons, which were likewise free of any entanglement with Creative Scotland. In 2008 Philip Howard left the Traverse, after a decade of outstanding success in developing a whole generation of Scottish writers; he was replaced by Dominic Hill, who moved on in 2011 to become an inspired new director of the Citizens’ Theatre, and then by Orla O’Loughlin. And over the years 2008–11, theatre continued to happen in an ever more thrilling variety of places, from the ancient backstage spaces of the Citizens’ Theatre, to the dreamlike eighteenth-century salon full of immaculately dressed audience members conjured up by Stewart Laing’s Untitled Projects; and the wide-open virtual spaces of the internet itself.
In the spring of 1845, young Henry Thoreau – the son of a comfortably off Massachusetts family – went into the woods at Walden Pond, near Concord, and stayed there for more than two years. He did it, he said, ‘not to live cheaply or dearly, but to live deliberately’; and in this age of rapid urbanisation and environmental stress, it feels as though we have never needed his wisdom more.
Nicholas Bone’s new stage version for Magnetic North of Thoreau’s great essay Walden is therefore a tremendously timely piece of theatre, an hour-long contemplative pool of stillness tucked into a corner of modern city life. In the cool white space of the gallery, the atmosphere created by designers Sans façon is almost too bare for comfort. There’s just a simple oval performance space surrounded by a bench and coat-pegs, and a pool of white sand.
In the end, though, this bold strategy works beautifully, with nothing to distract us from a finely pitched performance by Ewan Donald that perfectly captures Thoreau’s profoundly American combination of high idealism and shirt-sleeve practicality. In the end, what Thoreau learned at Walden was how a whole universe exists in each glorious drop of time and experience, and how little of our frenzied activity, from day to day, really carries us any distance at all. And it’s a lesson we perhaps need to relearn, if what Thoreau called our ‘soft, impressible earth’ is to survive the tramp of our six billion feet.
It’s summertime, it’s Stewarton, and the kids are hanging around the wall that is – well – their favourite hangout. Tall, skinny Barry is waiting for the results from his second try at Highers. His wee sister Norma has nicked some of their dad’s hash, and has had it stolen in turn by Barry’s wide-boy friend Rab. And lovely goth-styled Michelle has one eye on Barry, and the other on her Mum’s relationship with live-in ‘Auntie’ Alice, about which she’s beginning to realise a few things.
It’s a simple set-up, in other words, for this first full-length play by emerging Scottish playwright D C Jackson. But right from the opening moments, in Gregory Thompson’s immaculate production for Borderline and the Tron, The Wall roars out of the starting blocks on a surge of fierce comic and dramatic energy that never lets up, through two hours of solid-gold banter and perfectly structured narrative development. In terms of content, the play draws its energy from a gorgeous, continuing dissonance between the small-town parochialism of the community Jackson describes, and the growing fragmentation and New Age weirdness of the world in which it sits: this is a place where the local ‘neds’ (a term to which Rab takes grave exception) can be found in the health food shop, nicking some Rescue Remedy.
And in terms of style, Jackson’s play combines the force and vocabulary of a post-nineties ‘in-yer-face’ playwright with the genial popular-comedy tone always embraced by Borderline. The result is a rite-of-passage comedy of the highest quality, beautifully delivered by one of those superb four-strong casts – Scott Hoatson, Kirstin McLean, Finn den Hertog, and a magnificent Sally Reid as wee Norma – that make the audience feel as if they’ve watched a whole generation pass by; and touched with the kind of deceptive lightness and simplicity that is only achieved by real masters of the playwright’s craft.
As any teacher will tell you, a classroom full of rampaging fifteen-year-olds is a prime arena for the study of the animal aspects of human nature, and the primitive forces of aggression, competition and lust. Almost from the first moments of Sam Holcroft’s Cockroach, though, it becomes clear that this searing debut play – the first of four in the current Traverse/National Theatre of Scotland series – is something much more than another routine social comedy about a harassed teacher trying to impose some elements of civilisation on a roomful of roaring teenage hormones.
The play begins with a bang, as wild girl Leah locks herself into the classroom, fleeing from her boyfriend Lee, who is angry with her because she has caught him having sex with lonely, disorientated Mmoma, the only black girl in the class. Then there’s Leah’s pretty best friend Danielle, already exhausted at fifteen by more predatory male attention than she can bear, and her nice admirer Davey, whose passion for her takes a frighteningly possessive turn; and bringing up the rear is the teacher, Beth, permanently linked by radio to the school’s referral base for out-of-control kids.
Inside the classroom, though, Beth’s efforts to impose order, and encourage intellectual endeavour, are strangely contradicted by the content of her classes about Darwinian evolution, hormones and natural selection. And outside the classroom, war rages ever closer to the school gates, a war half-heartedly condoned by the teacher as part of her role as a state employee, while boys begin to disappear into the armed forces, and to die. The play builds, in other words, into a nightmare vision of the collapse of civilisation, in which the teacher, Beth, is often oddly and helplessly complicit with the process of disintegration that is devastating the lives of her pupils; and in which the all-too-familiar confrontation between the codes of conduct which the school tries to enforce, and those which are rife in the world outside, is hurtling towards crisis point.
In the end, Holcroft’s play loses track of itself slightly, wandering off once too often into Mmoma’s strange fantasy life – a ten-minute cut in the second half would do this demanding play no harm. But Vicky Featherstone’s direction is immaculate, and the performances by a young, mainly Scottish cast stunningly clear and subtle, with Meg Fraser’s inspired turn as the teacher only the best of a breathtakingly fine bunch. And in the end, it’s hard to forget the terrible force of Holcroft’s vision of a society gradually and unwittingly eating away at the theoretical base on which its whole peaceful existence rests; and finally flipping in an instant – as in the chilling second half of Sarah Kane’s Blasted – from our recognisable, everyday reality, into a new world in which every kind of primitive fundamentalism and raging brutality becomes not only possible, but likely.
There are plenty of primitive forces at work, too, in David Greig and Gordon McIntyre’s Midsummer, the first in the informal Traverse Too season of off-the-cuff studio shows; it begins, after all, with a couple propelled into bed in a Marchmont flat by naked, drunken, Friday-night lust. Here, though, the tone is one of warm-hearted, beautifully sculpted musical romantic comedy, as Greig and McIntyre (of top Edinburgh band Ballboy) shape the tale of unlikely couple Bob and Helena, a pair of tired thirty-five-year-olds on the loose in a city-centre wine bar, into a lost-weekend love story that somehow succeeds in being romantic and often moving, without losing a sharp, perceptive edge of satirical comment on the way we live now.
Like a good Ian Rankin novel, the play conducts the kind of intense, almost poetic love affair with the city of Edinburgh, its light and its fabric, that Greig hasn’t indulged in since his lovely devolution drama Caledonia Dreaming, a decade ago. And its use of McIntyre’s songs is fascinating, as both Bob and Helena – the heartbreakingly beautiful and talented Cora Bissett, and the equally lovely Matthew Pidgeon – pick up their battered guitars and sing. The music, in other words, seems like something that belongs to them, domestic, unpretentious, from the heart, rather than big ‘production numbers’, the music from elsewhere that once used to sweep stage-musical lovers up in its current, but is now – perhaps – being replaced by something less grandiose, more empowering, and more true.
As we are now learning – fast, painfully and all over again – economic depressions leave scars that last for generations; and it’s perhaps significant that this year’s spring theatre season opens with two major plays set in the aftermath of crushing economic disaster.
It’s the collapse of British heavy industry in the 1980s, for instance, which shapes the imaginary community of Dalgarnock in Ayrshire, where the hero of Andrew O’Hagan’s fine novel Be Near Me – now adapted for the National Theatre of Scotland by the actor and writer Ian McDiarmid – works as a Catholic priest. As his parishioners are not slow to tell him, the place is an ‘unemployment black spot’, and many of the people have little left in their lives beyond the old, sectarian tribalism of a community thrown roughly together by a traumatic industrial revolution, and then left and high and dry by economic change.
But Father Anderton is not the man to bring healing to this damaged place. Instead, he is himself in flight, using the church as a ‘beautiful refuge’ from a youthful tragedy in which, forty years ago at Oxford, he lost the love of his life, a beautiful working-class hero called Conor. Posh, anglicised, and full of high-camp preciousness about fine wines and fine music, he is both helplessly tempted by the faint echo of Conor he senses in a cheeky Dalgarnock boy called Mark, and constantly vulnerable to the rumbling class and cultural resentment of the town – and so the scene is set for something of a tragedy.
McDiarmid’s version of Be Near Me is nothing like a perfect stage version of the story. The whole cadence of the novel represents a falling-off from the brief glimpse of joy and completeness contained in Anderton’s youthful relationship with Conor; yet that relationship is neither conjured up on stage, nor fully described in the script. Instead, what we see is a high-class, two-act illustrated monologue, in which McDiarmid’s pinched, camp and self-mocking Anderton often stands musing centre-stage, while the other characters move around his troubled mind; and – in the background – the townsfolk sing their way through a series of republican or loyalist chants.
If there’s a sense that the book is not fully developed into a play, though, there’s also some terrific acting on view, not least from a superb Blythe Duff as Anderton’s clever and disappointed housekeeper Mrs Poole. Director John Tiffany and his designer Peter McKintosh create some bleak and memorable stage pictures, notably in the climactic courtroom scene. And although it’s difficult to see what audiences in England will gain from this show, it’s the kind of work that Scotland itself urgently needs to see and debate; if only because it seeks, at last, to create some real movement and dynamism around the discussion of a wounded and damaged part of Scotland’s story that many, even today, would rather ignore.
At the Citizens’, meanwhile, the brilliant site-specific theatremaker David Leddy offers us a sharp, bitter and haunting reminder of a Victorian world in which human life was discarded as lightly as any other cheap commodity. Set in the Citizens’ Theatre when it first opened, at the turn of the 1880s, Sub Rosa makes brilliant use of the building’s backstage and hidden spaces – from the dusty places under the main stage to the shabby glamour of the old upper circle – to tell the story in five monologues of its unseen heroine, a music-hall singer called Flora McIvor, and her doomed bid to free the theatre’s artists from the rule of their sadistic manager, Hunter.
There’s a magnificent feast of Scottish acting on view here, as stars like Alison Peebles, Finlay Welsh and Louise Ludgate glitter like cracked diamonds against the dusty dark; the visual and aural effects are often stunning. And as for what it says – well, we are accustomed to the idea that human life is cheap. But it’s a reality with which most of us in this country no longer have to live, from day to day. And for that at least, in the flawed Scotland of 2009, we can perhaps be grateful.
It’s 7.15 on the night before Burns Night, and in the garden of Burns Cottage at Alloway, a quiet crowd of a thousand local people, chosen by ballot, are milling around enjoying cups of mulled wine doled out by actors in medieval costumes. There are fairy lights and flaming torches, and a young fiddler playing his heart out. Children in cosy bobble hats pose for photographs, hugging the big Burns bust on the lawn; and in the windows of the cottage, actors from Glasgow’s Mischief La-Bas street-theatre company act out a series of scenes from Burns’s family life – pursuit, pregnancy, parenthood – in a style that might be called crude, if Burns himself hadn’t been so fond of an earthy low-life joke.
Then somewhere up the street, there’s the sound of a pipe band, and the assembled street-theatre artists of Europe – or so it sounds, from the multilingual babble in the crew canteen across the road – emerge into the crowd, pulling the great glowing steel-wire sculpture that will be the centrepiece of the night’s event, an impressive twelve-foot-high image of Tam o’ Shanter on his grey mare Meg, leaping wildly over the keystone of the old bridge at Alloway to escape the pursuing witch Nannie. Nannie also features in the sculpture, arms outstretched, and little cutty sark flaring up behind to reveal a distinctly pert bottom. The procession moves on down through Alloway, through three floral arches bearing Homecoming 2009 messages that light up breathtakingly as the sculpture pauses beneath them, and past a funfair of vaguely Burns-related booths, also created by Mischief La-Bas.
Then, as we reach the Brig o’ Doon Hotel, the First Minister and his guests file out of their celebration Burns Supper, and we all stand gazing towards the old bridge, where the sculpture – looking spookily convincing against the darkness, like the very ghost of Tam and Meg – is set on the keystone at the stroke of nine, pipe bands play Burns songs, and fireworks light up the night with waterfalls, rockets, and a cameo of Burns himself, framed in the arch of the bridge.
So what was it, all this? It had elements of serious street theatre, no doubt, including a fine central image by designer and sculptor Graeme Gilmour, and world-class lighting by Phil Supple, which showed off the romantic good looks of the Alloway riverbank to terrific effect. It was in part a real cultural celebration: many people in the crowd were singing along with the Burns songs played by the bands, and seemed delighted to be in Alloway for the 250th anniversary of a poet truly loved in these parts. But it was also partly a product launch for the Burns Anniversary and the Homecoming Year, bought with £145,000 of public money from Events Scotland and South Ayrshire Council, and designed less to entertain the live audience on the night, than to provide a series of spectacular photo opportunities for images that will be circulated round the globe during Scotland’s Homecoming Year.
A hundred years ago – in a sharp reminder that strong collective identity always has its downside – the worldwide order of Freemasons, of which Burns (like his contemporary Mozart) was a member, is said to have organised the creation by local people of huge floral arches for Burns’s 150th anniversary, in a style once common across the west of Scotland, and drew 100,000 visitors to Alloway for the occasion. Last week’s event was good to look at, genuinely attentive to history, commendably free of kitsch, pleasant in atmosphere, and often artistically impressive, and there are hopes that Gilmour’s splendid sculpture will eventually be seen by a wider audience. At heart, though, Iconic Burns seemed like a top-down event driven by the needs of politics and tourism, with the audience in a walk-on role; rather than a grassroots, bottom-up popular celebration, of the kind Burns himself would have loved.
It’s late on Thursday night when I arrive in Damascus, the ancient city sprawling its way up the dramatic slopes of Mount Qasioun; and although their second performance in Syria is in full swing, at the municipal theatre in the middle-class suburb of Dummar, the Traverse company are still reeling from the shock of the ferociously mixed reception they received the previous evening.
As playwright David Greig and director Philip Howard are only too aware, bringing a play called Damascus to the city of Damascus was always going to be a high-risk enterprise. It was a play that Greig wrote reluctantly, for the Traverse’s Edinburgh Festival programme of 2007, after several years of work with young playwrights across the Arab world had made him acutely aware of their need to find their own voice, rather than see themselves and their society defined through Western eyes. And it was a play written almost entirely for British audiences: the story of a Scotsman who travels to Damascus to sell English-language textbooks for schools, and encounters three characters – the beautiful career woman Muna, the disillusioned academic Wasim, and the troubled hotel desk-clerk Zakaria – from whom he learns too much about the deadness of his own life, the depth of his ignorance of other cultures, the vagueness of his politics, and his lethal inability to hear others speak across the gulf of culture and power.
To audiences in the UK, in other words, Damascus looks like a searing piece of self-criticism directed against the well-meaning but ineffectual westerner abroad. To audiences in the Arab world, though, it inevitably looks like a thumbnail sketch of their entire culture, summed up in three troubled characters; and no one was more surprised than Greig and Howard when, following a positive response from an Arab delegation in Edinburgh, the British Council decided to take Damascus on a groundbreaking tour of its Near East and North African region, opening in Damascus itself, and travelling on to Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Tunis, and Ramallah in the Palestinian West Bank.
Nothing, though, had quite prepared the company for the explosive reaction to the play on its first night in Syria. First there was the performance, received with huge warmth and responsiveness, much laughter, and even a small standing ovation. Then there was the post-show discussion, in which a series of distinguished academics, and some younger commentators, queued up to accuse Greig, in particular, of everything from crass neocolonialism and insults to Arab womanhood, to grotesque stereotyping and sheer artistic incompetence.
Controversy swirled in particular around the character of the desk clerk Zakaria, who finally kills himself when Paul fails to help him achieve his last desperate hope of becoming a writer in the west. Some young Syrians saw him as an iconic figure; other voices condemned him as a hopeless stereotype of Arab victimhood. And these divisions were repeated at a major British Council seminar on Saturday, when some speakers expressed rage that a British playwright should be able to command such significant resources to caricature their culture on an international stage, while the leading Egyptian critic Mehna Al-Badawi, of Al-Ahram in Cairo, argued that if she had been given the script of Damascus in Arabic, she could well have believed that it was the work of a young Syrian writer, so clearly did it express the situation of many who are struggling for self-expression in societies full of cultural tension and political uncertainty.
After the seminar, David Greig headed off into the Old Town of Damascus, to spend a last evening with the young Syrian playwrights whose work he has already helped to present in London. And the rest of us climbed into a small bus, and rattled off over the mountains, through mist and rain and grubby border checkpoints, on the 100-mile drive to Beirut, down by the Mediterranean. It was a journey that seemed to take us from east to west, from a place still dominated by a combination of rich Islamic culture and old-style mid-twentieth-century socialism, to a war-scarred city once known as the Paris of the Middle East, where battered concrete tower blocks pierce the Mediterranean sky, and our hotel jostles branches of The Body Shop and La Senza.
Yet this, too, is a Middle Eastern city full of contrasts, where some of the women go modestly veiled, and others present spectacular displays of big hair and bling. And here, too, although the tone of the post-show discussion was more relaxed, the same tensions emerge, between those who are irritated and insulted by this apparent western attempt to sum up the Arab world, and those who feel Greig has perceived truths that need to be spoken.
Behind these debates, of course, lie some of the most profound questions facing our twenty-first-century world. There is the debate between former colonising powers, and the countries they once used and manipulated for their own ends, a debate still full of well-justified rage and resentment. There is the debate about how far the whole western model of civilisation – with its alluring dreams of freedom and self-fulfilment – can and should be extended across the globe. And there is the eternal dialogue between power and relative powerlessness, reflected in every struggle for self-determination the world has ever seen.
Sometimes, in these dialogues, there comes a moment – like Nora’s great slamming of the door in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House – when the less powerful partner has to walk away, and find his or her own voice, before dialogue can begin again. If the tour of Damascus to the Middle East and North Africa helps provoke young writers in the region to demand for themselves the same voice, the same resource, and the same national platform that Scottish playwriting has enjoyed, in finding its own voice, over the last generation, then it will have done much of its job. And whether it does that by arousing their fierce objection, or their passionate admiration, will finally hardly matter at all.
In these early years of the twenty-first century, most thinking theatre artists are all too aware that their art form faces a certain troubling contradiction, a creative catch-22. On one hand, any live performance that takes place in real time, over a fixed period, needs some kind of dynamic forward movement – a narrative structure, or something very like it – to hold the audience’s interest. Yet on the other hand, we live in an age when conventional narrative is often mistrusted, as providing too neat and comforting an account of a world in crisis; and it’s the effort to solve this conundrum that has produced some of the finest theatre of the postmodern age.
Matthew Lenton’s new production Interiors – made for his Glasgow-based touring company Vanishing Point, inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1895 symbolist classic Interior, and co-produced by the Napoli Teatro Festival Italia and the Traverse – is a strikingly fine example of this kind of work, full of the energy of conventional narrative, yet aware of its limitations in every physical detail. On a dark stage, we see the outer wall of a house, with a huge jagged hole or picture window through which we can watch the domestic action within. An elderly widower called Andrew (all the characters simply take the actor’s own first name) is giving a midwinter dinner party for a group of six friends, including his pretty teenage granddaughter Sarah, his middle-aged neighbour Myra, and a bright young couple, Barney and Aurora.
The world outside – evoked in the play of cold light on the outer wall, and in Alasdair Macrae’s bleak Arctic soundscape – is a place so threatening that all the guests arrive carrying guns. And as the party gradually deteriorates into a tragicomic evening from hell, we become aware of the presence of a narrator, at first invisible, then present, but always outside, looking in; someone who was once part of the beautiful and ridiculous hurly-burly of life, but is now an invisible wanderer, endowed with a sad knowledge of how each character will end.
Created with a mixed company of British and Italian actors, this show is unable to use language in any conventional way: we never hear the actors speak, only see them acting out their story. Yet this necessary separation between the audience and the actors is precisely what enables the show both to use narrative, and to stand apart from it – and the result is a hugely clever, rich and entertaining piece of theatre, that shifts effortlessly between farce and tragedy, laughter and dread, domestic familiarity and abstract mystery.
There are moments when the show seems to take easy, middle-of-the-road options rather than pushing its potential to the limit. The posh-estuary narrative voice begins by inviting an ugly, facile snobbish laughter at the characters’ pretensions and limitations, which is never really challenged. And given the strength and energy of the play’s structure, it could perhaps aim for a more original conclusion than a final sorrowful recognition of the transience of human life and longing. But the acting is immaculate, the production technically superb, the comedy sharp and funny, and the rhythm of the show both beautiful and compelling. In Interiors, Lenton has created a world-class piece of international theatre, that turns the limitations of the genre into genuine strengths; and in that achievement, everyone involved can take great pride.
In the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, this summer, there’s a deep, dark space given over to a magnificent piece of video art called Ascension, by US superstar Bill Viola. Filmed underwater, from a couple of feet below a sunlit surface, it shows in slow motion – and in the deepest blue and silver – a male figure plunging feet-first through that surface, and down past our gaze, into the depths; then for ages afterwards, we watch the backwash of tiny bubbles and sparkles rising from where he fell, up towards the sunlight, a billion particles disturbed and moving and reacting, almost to infinity, because of that single action, that single leap.
The Pier exhibition is not technically part of this year’s St Magnus Festival in Orkney, but all the same, the Bill Viola work seems to provide a central image for a festival built, as always, around the pull and surge of the sea that surrounds Orkney, and the mystical sense of the interrelatedness of all things – humanity, nature, the very stuff of earth and water – that forms a key part of Orkney culture. And it would have been easy for the National Theatre of Scotland, wading into the delicate balance of island life for a few months to create a Transform project with young people from Kirkwall Grammar School, to have failed to produce anything that truly reflected that special spirit of the place.
Instead, though, the Mixter Maxter project – directed by Davey Anderson and Liam Hurley, with a team of more than two dozen students in their early to mid-teens – has produced both a moving and memorable short show, and an outstanding installation, in an old warehouse in Bridge Street, that both complements and expands the performance to create what must be one of the finest pieces of youth project art work Scotland has ever produced.
The show is a deceptively simple-looking piece, played in a bare in-the-round setting in King Street Halls, which tells the story of a Kirkwall girl called Soley, who runs away from her own life, driven partly by the unkindness of her so-called schoolfriends, and partly by her widowed father’s inability to talk to her about her mother’s death, ten years ago. Played by a series of different girls identified simply by slipping on Soley’s little red hoodie, she runs first to an old warehouse where she keeps a little shrine to her mother, then to the pierhead, where she leaps aboard a ferry, looks out at the pattern of islands ahead and, like the Bill Viola figure, makes a leap from the deck into the ocean, towards what she hopes will be a new or changed life.
At King Street, the story is told verbally and through movement, superbly coordinated by Simon Pittman to capture the running, darting movements, the wary walking, the intent faces and scanning eyes, of teenagers marking a way through potentially hostile streets and spaces. The show ends quietly, with a series of questions about the future, but as the young cast circle the hall, intently pressing little imaginary seeds of new life into the hands of mums and dads, old folks and tiny toddlers, the sense of empathy and almost of atonement towards a troubled generation of youngsters is overwhelming, and many in the audience are wiping away tears.
If the show is powerful, though, the installation down in the old Bridge Street rope warehouse is irresistible, a series of evocations of settings, images and ideas from Soley’s story – in video, sculpture, projected text, soundscapes and audio journeys, with elements of live performance – that is stewarded with palpable pride by the young people who helped create it, and by the artists (including Kim Beveridge, Alistair Peebles and Anne Bevan) who helped them. The sense of young people reconnecting with aspects of Orkney’s past as a seafaring and farming island, exploring its rich cultural heritage, and using it to make sense of their own lives today, is intense; and although the Warehouse 18 installation was dismantled on Monday, along with the rest of the project, the young people I spoke to expressed an intense hope that it could somehow live on, and be seen again.
If Scotland became independent, so we’re told, the border between Scotland and England would be one of those faint Euro-frontiers where traffic never stops, and they don’t even bother to glance at your passport. In this week’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint lunchtime drama, though – the last of the autumn season – the brilliant young Glasgow writer Kieran Lynn offers a fierce reminder of an alternative truth: the idea that borders tend to create their own divisions and conflicts, and to provide an excuse for some of humankind’s most brutal behaviour.
Young couple Olivia and Arthur are sitting in the park, you see, enjoying a bit of Sunday morning peace, when a man in uniform appears with a roll of tape, and places a border between them, right down the middle of the bench. Olivia, who tries to read the newspapers and keep up with events, has a suspicion that this may have something to do with the recently agreed ‘independence deal’; Arthur couldn’t care less about politics, and wishes he was a duck on the nearby pond.
No names of countries are mentioned; so that we could be anywhere from Bosnia to the Baltic, although the voices are Scottish and English. Reiver, the man with the tape, is a classic postmodern jobsworth: not exactly vicious, but neither bright nor brave enough to resist the culture of ridiculous security paranoia and knee-jerk authoritarianism in which he has been trained. And so the peaceful day in the park gradually dwindles into a militarised nightmare, with both men carrying machine-guns, Olivia an agonised and vulnerable bystander, and any idea of progressive gender politics dumped in the dustbin of history.
It’s a dystopian vision, of course, with many fine touches of absurdism, particularly in Keith Fleming’s masterly portrayal of Reiver as an ordinary man managed into a culture of crazed control freakery. But it comes as a sharp and timely reminder of the primitive forces that can be unleashed – particularly, Lynn suggests, in the male psyche – whenever human beings give themselves any new excuse for ‘us and them’ thinking. And in Selma Dimitrijević’s brilliant and heartfelt production, it achieves all this in a brief and vivid thirty-five minutes, with the help of fine performances not only from Fleming, but from a pitch-perfect Ashley Smith and Laurie Brown as the two young lovers, separated for good.
New Year’s Day on the Royal Mile, and as dusk begins to gather over a cold, clear afternoon with just a hint of a northerly breeze, the Edinburgh’s Hogmanay Ne’erday theme of Re:formation seems to be playing pretty well with an astonishing range of visitors, from what seems like every corner of the globe.
In John Knox’s House, the actor John Shedden is proving an unsettling dead ringer for the old provocateur of Scotland’s Protestant Reformation, celebrating its 450th anniversary this year. From ground-floor chamber, to tiny second-floor study overlooking the High Street, he harangues the visitors about sin and literacy, the evils of the mighty, the suffering of the poor, and the abomination of women in power, with an intensity that acts as a sharp reminder of the complexity of the man, and of the movement he led. Down at Holyrood Palace, meanwhile, people from all over the world are happily writing New Year resolutions on a temporary wall, resolving to fall in love, cook better, care more, work for peace; and over in the park, Edinburgh Puppet Lab’s famous Big Man Walking is stirring.
Seen all over Scotland this year, and renamed New Man Walking for this special day, the Big Man is a beautiful blue thirty-foot puppet figure dressed in a leather kilt, like some Scottish incarnation of the Green Man of legend. And as he emerges with aching slowness from a chrysalis-like shell, gradually flexes his great hands, blinks his eyes, shakes his gleaming red-gold hair, and begins his slow, slow walk out of the park, past the Scottish Parliament, and on up the High Street, meanings seem to gather and hover around his big, benign figure in a way that is almost unsettling. He might be a once and future king or chief, returning to claim his own. In an age of unimpressive leaders, he might meet some hidden yearning for a true ‘big man’ around whom to gather. He might be a spirit of the earth itself, returning to remind us of what we owe to the very landscape around us; or he might be a figure of childlike innocence, awakening our instincts for affection and care.
But whatever the reason for his appeal, the hairs on the back of the neck rise a little, at the sight of his great figure, surrounded by admiring crowds with heads all tilted back to gaze at him, moving inexorably up past the ancient Canongate Kirk towards the Tron. Something’s coming, murmur the people hurrying down the pavements or waiting in the crowd; the genius of the Big Man Walking, old or new, is that we can’t be quite sure what.
The story of Robert Kirk, the troubled minister of Aberfoyle, is not a new one in Scottish theatre. In the mid-1980s, Theatre Alba discovered and produced Netta Blair Reid’s two-act play The Shepherd Beguiled, about the strange story of the seventeenth-century man of God so fascinated by old tales of the ‘good people’ – the big, powerful faery folk said to live beneath the hills of his home country – that when Kirk disappeared one night among those hills, he was thought to have been taken by them, his restless spirit doomed to roam for ever in search of a way home.
Whatever the history of this strange story, though, Catherine Czerkawska’s new monologue makes a powerful job of retelling it, and marks a fine opening to this spring’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint season of lunchtime plays. Using the voice of the lost minister himself – played by Liam Brennan with a terrific combination of emotional commitment and sheer technical command – Czerkawska transforms the story into a lyrical yet driven fifty-minute lament over Scotland’s failure to integrate its dour Presbyterian faith and dogged Enlightenment rationalism with the wilder, more beautiful and more sensual aspects of its Gaelic heritage, represented by the eerily amplified voice of singer Deirdre Graham, crooning soft old songs.
Kirk, who was a fine scholar, might have been remembered as the first man to translate the Psalms into Gaelic. Instead, he seems to have been driven close to madness by the fierce binary oppositions – rationalism or crazy superstition, respectability or sensual fulfilment – that dogged our national culture at the height of the Reformation, and still influence our thinking today. And between them, Czerkawska and Brennan come close to making him a real hero for our times, desperately struggling for ways to move on from an arid, over-rationalised modernism, without sinking back into the darkness of mindless superstition.
If ever there was a show for which any friend of Scottish theatre would have wished a glowing, unambiguous success, it’s John Tiffany’s massive new National Theatre of Scotland production of Peter Pan, which opened at the King’s Theatre in Glasgow this week after years of preparation, and a formidable investment of time and treasure. It’s not only that the NTS now urgently needs a new large-scale, mainstage hit, to match the triumph four years ago of the mighty Black Watch; it’s that the show itself, in its inspiration and substance, is freighted with so many ideas that matter, and so much powerful potential.
As writer David Greig and director John Tiffany have made clear in dozens of interviews over the last few weeks, the idea is to take J.M. Barrie’s mighty story of Wendy and the lost boys, and to repatriate it to late-Victorian Scotland, the land in which Barrie grew up, and in which he lived through the formative and tragic experiences – notably the death by drowning of his adored older brother – that shaped the story of Pan, the boy who never grows up. And in creating a version of Peter Pan that has nothing to do with Christmas good cheer – and is not aimed at children under eight – Greig and Tiffany seek to confront the darker aspects of this haunting story, while also reflecting its magical elements.
And it’s easy enough to see the traces of these ideas all over the stage, in the strange, uneasy version of the show that opened in Glasgow this week. They are present most obviously in Laura Hopkins’ set, a massively cluttered, heavyweight affair featuring three diamond-shaped cantilevers of an as yet uncompleted Forth Rail Bridge; the children’s father, Mr Darling, is re-imagined here as an Edinburgh engineer working on the construction of the bridge. They are present in Davey Anderson’s music, a fascinating and powerful collage of Gaelic work-songs and laments, traditional lowland tunes, and working navvies’ songs of the nineteenth century. And they are present in the whole mood and tone of the show, which avoids prettiness and whimsy, engages powerfully with Pan’s anger and emotional coldness, and features disturbing echoes of dark and threatening ideas about the supernatural; this is a Peter Pan with doppelgängers and avatars, and even hints of demonic possession.
The difficulty, though, is that despite the rich range of half-developed ideas that has gone into the making of the show, what emerges on stage is a royal mess, a dingy-looking voyage around the darker reaches of the Pan story that often lacks pace, always lacks clarity, and misses out completely on the exhilarating, magical sense of freedom that Pan brings into the lives of Wendy and her brothers.
The set, for example, is a brilliant idea that doesn’t work in practice, filling the stage with huge chunks of metal that constantly force the actors into the wrong dramatic positions, and often fail to reflect even the most basic elements of the story. The lighting is a pretentious disaster, often just plain inadequate to illuminate the actors’ faces in a large theatre. The flying is awkwardly dependent on huge, heavy black harnesses, as ugly as they are unconvincing. The casting – well, there’s a fine central performance from an impressive Kevin Guthrie as Pan, but the rest of the company are frankly forgettable, and look far less like a coherent national theatre troupe than some other companies currently playing on Scottish stages.
And beyond all that, the show is plagued by a chronic lack of simple, basic storytelling drive, perhaps because it boasts a creative team of no fewer than fourteen people, and therefore looks as if it had been designed by a committee. There’s one electrifying scene in which Kirsty Mackay’s attractive Wendy gathers her boys in a circle and tells them a story, provoking a confrontation with Pan; just for a moment, the positions are right, and the drama is clear. But soon, we’ve drifted off again into a version of Tinkerbell’s ‘death’ that not only doesn’t allow us to help save her, but doesn’t even tell us whether she lives or dies. And in that, it resembles far too many other moments in a Peter Pan that desperately needs a longer view, a clearer focus, and a ruthless visual simplification, if the brave ideas it carries are not to be lost for ever, in a sea of theatrical confusion.
After all that, it’s a blazing relief to turn to a forty-minute, three-handed show that focuses fiercely on a single aspect of Scotland’s myth-making about itself, tells its story with pace and economy, and delivers a real and frightening dramatic punch. This week’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint lunchtime show, written by rising star Alan Bissett, is the short and brilliant tale of a doomed visit by a touring Scottish singer-songwriter to a whisky bar in some Balkan town still riven by memories of war. In the great tradition of naive Scots abroad, the guileless Cameron – brilliantly played by Ryan Fletcher – thinks everyone abroad loves the Scots and hates the English; but to his minder Miko, and the heavyweight barman Vlad (Simon Donaldson and Steven McNicoll, both in magnificent form), he is just another Brit, blood brother of the ‘peacekeeping’ soldiers who recently occupied, patronised and brutalised their country.
As the evening veers from the embarrassing to the dangerous, Vlad goads Cameron into giving up his girly love songs, belting out ‘Bonnie Dundee’, and unleashing his inner demons of violent machismo: ‘These songs are not innocent.’ And the games Bissett plays with language are dazzling, as Vlad and Miko converse in an impenetrable Balkan tongue that reveals itself as a reinvented form of Scots; and then the linguistic tables are turned, in a final shift of power that ends Cameron’s innocence for ever.
The Darien Expedition of 1696 was Scotland’s first and only attempt to establish an overseas colony and trading post of its own, and the enterprise was such a comprehensive disaster – involving death, disease, and the outright loss of more than half of Scotland’s capital wealth – that it effectively finished Scotland as an independent nation, and left psychological scars that remain visible today, in the strange mixture of vainglory and self-contempt with which many Scots still view their national identity.
And it’s straight into this morass of unresolved patriotic feelings, as well as of roaring post-crash scepticism about the whole model of high-risk venture capitalism on which the Darien project was based, that this latest production from the National Theatre of Scotland and the Edinburgh International Festival boldly marches. Scripted by Alistair Beaton and directed by Anthony Neilson, Caledonia is both spectacular in staging and satirical in tone, and comes across almost as a comic-book linear narrative of the Darien disaster. Many of the characters – from Edinburgh MPs to English king – are presented as Viz-magazine grotesques of greed and venality; jokes about bankers abound, and while some of the show’s satirical comedy is effective, some is overpitched and cack-handed.
What’s increasingly clear, though, is that these uncertainties of tone reflect a deep ambivalence within the play itself about the story it tells. If it merely satirises Scotland as a backward dump with foolish delusions of grandeur, it does nothing but flatter familiar metropolitan prejudices; yet if it takes too seriously the evidence that Scotland’s legitimate attempt to join in the global trading boom was directly scuppered by the machinations of the English Government, it risks looking like a piece of nationalist agitprop, an outcome which Beaton and Neilson seem anxious to avoid.
It’s therefore a tribute to the skill of all those involved – including a fine cast, led by Paul Higgins as William Paterson, the visionary financier behind the project – that what Caledonia finally achieves, in its closing scenes, is a kind of profound elegiac lyricism about the sheer human cost of the enterprise, expressed in brilliantly theatrical terms. The play probably insists too much on making the link between crazed venture capitalism and Scottish national aspirations, a link which misrepresents the character of Scottish politics. But this new NTS show fits superbly, and revealingly, into the ‘new worlds’ theme of Jonathan Mills’ 2010 Festival. And three centuries on, it makes an interesting, debatable, and hugely theatrical start on the long collective process of coming to terms with a decisive national disaster; a process on which Scotland has perhaps only just begun.
He is Mat Fraser, the multi-talented singer, dancer, and stand-up raconteur who has made cutting-edge theatre out of his life as a man with the tiny, flipper-like hands of a 1960s thalidomide child. She is Julie Atlas Muz, gorgeously witty burlesque artist and stripper, and Miss Coney Island 2006.
Which of them is the freak, though, and which the showgirl, remains a more open question than you might think, as they steer their audience through an astonishing seventy-five minutes of disruptive comedy and burlesque, punctuated by ever-more gobsmacking scenes of cultural questioning, self-mocking hilarity, and politically pointed nudity. This show, which played at The Arches as part of the DaDaFest festival of theatre inspired by deafness and disability, is not for the faint-hearted, or for those inclined to blush at the sight of a bit of wedding tackle – both male and female – boldly exposed to the winter air.
In the case of Fraser and Muz, though, there’s never any doubt that this is rudeness with a purpose, as they trawl the history of ridiculous forms of oppression – from the freak-show display of people with deformities, to the ritual shaving of female body hair – in order to defy every cliché about the cosy sexlessness of the disabled (Fraser is one of the sexiest male performers around), or the passivity of women as sex objects: Miss Muz rounds off her cheekiest strip routine with a rousing political speech, delivered in the buff. ‘It’s satirical, postmodern, and littered with irony, so everything’s all right!’ yells Fraser self-mockingly, as he questions the audience’s motives for ogling Miss Muz. In this case, though, it happens to be true; and if it’s not all right, it’s certainly thought-provoking, as well as funny, human, and truly erotic, in a way the purveyors of mass-produced plastic porn could barely begin to understand.
As the devil points out halfway through the evening, there is no peace for the wicked. Down you go to your local pub, and who should be there but the National Theatre of Scotland, in the shape of a touring company of five terrific actor-musicians, led by the gorgeous Madeleine Worrall and an inspired Andy Clark. They start rearranging tables, playing daft games, getting you to rip up your paper napkins to create an impromptu snowstorm; and then we’re off, into the thrilling, shuddering gallop through the landscape of ancient and postmodern Scotland that is this new ballad drama by playwright David Greig, with director Wils Wilson.
The heroine of the story, Prudencia Hart, is a smart young academic at the School of Scottish Studies who specialises in the mighty, sexy, elemental tradition of the Border Ballads. Snowed in at a conference in Kelso with an annoying colleague called Colin Syme, she ends up in the local pub, where folk night morphs into a disturbing, booze-fuelled karaoke nightmare, and a strange, seductive man suddenly appears, to escort her to what turns out – literally – to be the bed and breakast from hell.
In a short review, there’s no decoding all the riches of David Greig’s rollicking text, and the mighty jokes and connections it spins around everything from the state of modern academic life to the music of Kylie Minogue. Let’s just say that the whole story is staged with a terrific, inventive sense of fun, and that even if some sequences are too long and the verse sometimes slides towards doggerel, it is, at its best, more vibrantly, sexily alive than any piece of theatre I’ve seen in Scotland for years. Some people don’t get it about our new National Theatre: they want it in a mausoleum, rather than down the pub. But if you want to understand in your flesh and blood what the NTS is all about, then this is the show to see; as it tours from Berwick to Ullapool, over the next few weeks.
Despite thirty years of talk about equal opportunities, the latest wave of feminism has failed to make much of a dent on the traditional gender balance in theatre; plays with all-male casts remain common, those with all-female casts vanishingly rare. So it’s both exciting and fascinating, this spring, to see one of Scotland’s main stages occupied by a new play by and about women, which scores a roaring success in getting straight to the historic heart of the ‘woman question’. Based on George Gissing’s 1893 novel The Odd Women, and co-produced by the Royal Lyceum and Stellar Quines, Linda Griffiths’s The Age of Arousal is set in London in the 1880s, in and around the school of typewriting run by ex-suffragette Mary Barfoot and her young lover Rhoda Nunn.
As part of their mission to save women from powerlessness and economic dependence, the two start to give lessons to the impoverished Madden sisters, two batty old spinsters and one twenty-year-old minx; but their plans are disrupted by the entrance of the one man in the story, Mary’s handsome nephew Everard. As good as his name in matters sexual, Everard seduces the young minx Monica, falls in love with Rhoda, and generally creates chaos in the hearts and minds of women who want equality and freedom, but who also want sex with men, and the babies men can give them.
All of this is tremendous fun, unleashing avalanches of witty dialogue – and even wittier private asides – about the state of gender relations, and the power of desire to upset the best-organised ideological apple cart. In terms of plot, The Age of Arousal is no textbook of feminist theory; in the best postmodern style, it sometimes comes close to rejecting the whole dream of equality as an unrealisable project.
In Muriel Romanes’ gloriously bold and inventive production, though, it emerges as a truly radical piece of theatre, presented in short, vivid, free-flowing episodes on a sparsely furnished stage backed by a screen against which each fraught tableau of characters is silhouetted. Janet Bird’s costumes represent a glorious stylisation of late-Victorian dress, with hoops and bustles bursting out of their fabric shells. And the performances, from Romanes’ six-strong company, are simply immaculate: from an inspired Ann Louise Ross as Mary Barfoot, to Hannah Donaldson as the youngest of the three sisters – the one who pays the old price of womanhood by dying in childbirth, leaving the others with a member of a new generation to raise, in their own highly debatable image.
In London, it all happened at Southwark Playhouse. In Bristol it was the Old Vic. In Edinburgh, the student-led Bedlam Theatre staged an all-day event featuring plays, music and debates; and wherever you were in the UK, on Saturday, someone was celebrating the event known as Theatre Uncut, the first of what I guess will be many theatrical protests against the current economic regime. The brainchild of London-based director Hannah Price, Theatre Uncut invited eight leading UK playwrights to contribute ten-minute plays on the theme of ‘the cuts’; and although the event I attended – at The Arches in Glasgow – covered only five of them, the intensity of the drama signalled an arts community already gearing up for protest on a scale not seen since the 1980s.
So Dennis Kelly’s three-hander Things That Don’t Make Sense is an only-slightly-surreal reflection on the growing disconnection between high-profile policing and actual justice. Anders Lustgarten’s Fat Man is an entertaining many-voiced rant against capitalism, in its twenty-first-century incarnation. Jack Thorne’s duologue Whiff Whaff is a chilling riff on the theory of self-sufficiency and not encouraging ‘dependency’. Clara Brennan’s Hi Vis is a frighteningly desperate account of the life of a mother whose daughter has special needs. And David Greig’s Fragile – the most powerful of the lot – uses Greig’s technique of making the audience play one of the parts to lead us through a thundering ten-minute drama in which impotent sadness over the closure of a vital support centre for people with mental problems becomes suicidal rage, and then a roaring call for political action.
In Glasgow, director Emma Callander assembled a superb scratch cast, drawing brilliant performances from actors including Anne Lacey, Garry Collins, Louise Ludgate, and Kieran Hurley, heart-stoppingly brilliant in Fragile. Now it’s time for these plays to be taken up by one of the major Scottish theatres, and presented again, in front of a much larger audience; and again and again until the message gets through – that nothing justifies wanton damage to the lives of vulnerable people, in a society as wealthy as ours.
If you want a glimpse of sheer perfection in current Scottish playwriting, head for the Tron in Glasgow, where David Harrower – one of the leaders of the generation of Scottish playwrights who emerged in the 1990s – has directed his own production of his latest play, A Slow Air. The play takes the form of a ninety-minute double monologue for a middle-aged brother and sister who have been estranged for the past fourteen years. Athol lives in Houston, near Glasgow Airport, with his wife and his floor-tiling business, proud of his middle-class home and achievements; Morna has stayed in Edinburgh, and survived a wild youth to become a cleaner in the houses of the rich.
From this simple situation, Harrower spins two strands of storytelling and poetry so profound that by the end of the play, it seems as if we have seen a complete, disturbing panorama of ordinary life in Scotland’s central belt today: from the universal western effort to maintain a comfortable middle-class way of life in a new age of terror, to the divisions of class and income that corrode our society, the strands of culture and music that still sometimes unite it, and the strange persistence of the seemingly fragile bonds of family. Real-life brother and sister Lewis Howden and Kathryn Howden give superbly moving performances as Athol and Morna; and this short, magnificent play – so profound in its local sense of place, so global in its reach and its humanity – will leave your sense of the country we live in subtly shaken and changed, for good.
It’s eight o’clock on Midsummer’s Night, and I am standing in Greyfriars Churchyard, Edinburgh, under a downpour that can only be called biblical. The National Theatre of Scotland’s twenty-four-hour online epic of 235 five-minute plays, performed in front of live audiences and beamed from all over Scotland and beyond, is three hours old; and on top of a tombstone at Greyfriars, the actor, writer, musician and tour guide John Kielty is haranguing the usual rain-soaked team of tourists, out on a ghost walk around the city.
Tonight, though, things are different, because the NTS cameras are here, and Kielty has written a five-minute play in which his spiel is interrupted by a pair of pallid ghosts who loom from behind the gravestones, furious with the tour guide for perpetuating myths about Greyfriars Bobby. Meanwhile, back at Adam House, the event’s Edinburgh ‘hub’, the big screens are showing an experiment steadily gathering weight and momentum. It’s not that every show is excellent. Some are vague, some are pretentious, some are badly shot. There are plenty of technical hitches to disrupt the experience of viewing them online; and at any given moment, there are only about three hundred people watching.
Three or four times in each hour, though, there comes a flash of brilliance that – combined with the other shows on view, and the huge range of locations where they have been filmed – begins to contribute to a truly powerful and moving cumulative portrait of the Scotland we live in, right now. There’s a magnificent short drama from Dundee Rep Ensemble, written by Douglas Maxwell, about the idea of public apology; there’s an exquisite, neighbourly moment of storytelling from a house in Melvich, Sutherland, about the Portskerra fishing disaster that devastated that community in 1918; there’s the actress and writer Michelle Gallagher, in the back court of the Glasgow tenement where she grew up, regaling an appreciative audience of neighbours with a hilarious five-minute story of how the Pope’s visit to Glasgow in 1982, when she was five, nearly drove her to run away from home.
And as show follows tiny show, I find myself more and more moved: partly by the existence of a national theatre which has worked so hard to build the grassroots relationships across all of Scotland on which this project is built; and partly by the sight and sound of the people who live in Scotland now, finding so many different kinds of voices, glorying in their diversity, and seizing the chance to exercise their imaginations, in ways that are sad and funny, down-to-earth and surreal, and rarely less than memorable.
At the height of their power and pomp, civilisations often indulge in a brief age of denial about the inevitability of change and decay. Over the last thirty years, though, among thinking people, that arrogance has melted away from our once-proud Western civilisation, with its unshakeable belief in progress through reason and science; and we have begun to confront all sorts of unpalatable truths, both about the fragility of the world we have made for ourselves, and about the inevitability of our own personal extinction.
Stewart Laing’s astonishing The Salon Project, at the Traverse, is principally concerned with decline and decay; but as one of the most complete immersive theatre experiences ever conceived, it compels us – the audience – to think about these themes from a completely new angle, by making each of us take the time and the risk involved in dressing in full period costume – gorgeous Victorian, Edwardian or 1920s ball dresses for the women, smart tailcoats or military uniforms for the men. Once we are ready – and it takes a large wardrobe team a full half-hour, including make-up and jewellery – we are escorted through high double doors into a large, fragile white drawing room with chandeliers, like a deliberately provisional version of an eighteenth-century salon: here, we drift around and sip champagne, listen to music on piano and wind-up gramophone, and hear provocative thoughts about life, dress, and the future, not bound to any period, but ranging across the centuries.
The effect of this experience is astonishingly complex and rich. At first, we only exclaim and point; then we walk differently, feel differently, marvel at the extraordinary richness of centuries when each aristocratic dress was a small work of art in itself. We feel, in the end, like the privileged guests at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo; or like the Russian royal family, a few months before the revolution; or like characters in an Oscar Wilde play, a shade too smart and witty, courting some unnamed disaster. Before we leave, Laing and his amazing team make us watch that disaster on screen, a wrecked twenty-first-century vision of the room we stand in. Yet The Salon Project invites us to consider the future before us, as well as the past we have lost, to recall how much of the history of our civilisation was really the story of a tiny, aristocratic few, dressed and tended to by unsung millions. And as the finest theatre always does, it changes us a little, for good.
In May 2012 Vicky Featherstone announced her departure from the National Theatre of Scotland, after a ‘life-changing’ eight years, for the Royal Court Theatre in London. Her only reservation, she said, was that despite a huge welcome from almost everyone she met and worked with in Scotland, she had on one or two occasions felt ‘bullied’ by people pointing out that she is not Scottish; the allegations triggered another round in Scotland’s ongoing furious debate about why such a high proportion of our leading cultural institutions are run by people from outside Scotland. She was replaced, early in 2013, by Laurie Sansom, former artistic director of the Royal & Derngate in Northampton, but her brave, dynamic and radical presence at the centre of Scottish theatre, during this vital period in the nation’s life, had transformed Scotland’s cultural landscape for ever, and was much missed.
And in 2012 too, I began to record my first reviews from a new venue in Edinburgh called Summerhall, the old Royal Dick Veterinary College on the Meadows, a great rambling place – owned and funded by Edinburgh philanthropist Robert McDowell – that had fallen heir to the huge archive collection of Richard Demarco, one of the men who founded the Traverse Theatre in 1963; and which had emerged, not only as a Fringe venue, but as a new year-round twenty-first-century arts lab, full of magnificent exhibitions and strange, wild events. According to the old Mayan calendar, the world was supposed to end on the night of 21 December 2012. And if it had, I would have been happy to mark the moment drifting through the strange, richly layered spaces of Summerhall, another powerful new centre for theatre and performance in Scotland.
If you want to glimpse the outlines of a possible twenty-first-century revolution, then Òran Mór is the place to be, this week. To celebrate their 250th lunchtime show since 2004, David MacLennan’s astonishing A Play, a Pie and a Pint team googled ‘250’, and came up with the fact that it is 250 years since the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract, one of the founding texts of the French Revolution of 1789.
Their new Jean-Jacques Rousseau Show – a political cabaret co-written by a team of eleven writers, including Wildcat veterans David MacLennan and Dave Anderson, and a dazzling range of younger voices – is naturally much preoccupied with Scotland’s current situation, riven by economic inequalities, and faced with a constitutional choice that may or may not be relevant to the greater cause of social justice.
Yet the show succeeds in setting that contemporary debate in a deep historic context, thanks to some razor-sharp scriptwriting, a fine eighteenth-century-style pamphleteering design by Patrick McGurn, and a few terrific songs. There are excellent, witty performances from a five-strong cast, featuring young stars Julia Taudevin, Kirstin McLean and Brian James, with Dave Anderson and George Drennan.
And there is one spine-shuddering moment when, after a hilarious spoof interview between Alex Salmond and Jeremy Paxman, Paxman’s chair is suddenly occupied by the spirit of revolution herself, who asks Salmond a few chilling questions about the real meaning of independence. It’s enough to make you want to sign up immediately to the little Social Contract printed on the back of your programme; and to accept its invitation to draw a picture, of the kind of Scotland you really want.
In the spring of 1990, at the height of Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture, I sat with hundreds of others in a great former engine shed in Govan watching the show called The Ship, Bill Bryden’s passionate elegy for a dying shipbuilding industry.
It wasn’t the greatest show I had ever seen: it offered more emotion than deep insight, more helpless anger than real empowerment. Yet it marked a vital moment in Glasgow’s coming-to-terms with the end of the industrial age; and twenty-two years on, I find myself experiencing very similar feelings, as I stand just a few hundred yards upriver from Govan, on the top floor of a vacant riverside office-block, watching the National Theatre of Scotland’s twenty-first century elegy for the print-newspaper industry, now reeling under the challenge of instant electronic news.
This story is closer to home for journalists, of course, so much so that I have to declare a small interest in Enquirer: I was one of the forty-three journalists interviewed in the compilation of the show. And in style, this show is aeons away from the scripted high emotion of The Ship; Enquirer is another example of the twenty-first century trend towards verbatim theatre, in which documentary material is presented to the audience in relatively raw form. It’s also a promenade production, staged to a small audience who perch on desks or on piles of unsold newspapers, as a brilliantly cast team of six Scottish actors lead them through the newspaper day, and through some set-piece interviews with named contributors, including former Scottish Sun boss Jack Irvine.
What emerges from this show, Ship-like, is a profound sense of loss – and of anger at the undervaluing of the loss – combined with a slightly frustrating lack of analytical firepower in teasing out the underlying strands of argument, and hinting at possible ways forward. Yet the NTS’s show is so shockingly timely, in its seizing of this Leveson Inquiry moment in the history of journalism, that it can hardly fail to make a major impact. Its compiled text, pulled together by Andrew O’Hagan with directors Vicky Featherstone and John Tiffany, draws a magnificent ensemble performance from a cast who seem completely seized by the paradox of journalism, by its nobility, its grubbiness, and the extent to which it finds itself under ethical attack at its moment of greatest economic weakness. And unexpectedly, this is also a beautiful show, with subtly powerful design and a fine soundscape; and evening light pouring in over the river like a final blessing, on an industry that has helped shape our political and municipal life through most of the modern age, and may soon be with us no more.
Loss is also the theme of Zinnie Harris’s great debut play Further Than the Furthest Thing, first seen at the Traverse in 2000, and now given a stunning new production at Dundee Rep by outgoing artistic director James Brining. Inspired by the volcanic eruption on the island of Tristan da Cunha in 1961, Harris’s play takes the loss of that homeland, and the displacement of its people to Britain, as a metaphor for the whole experience of modernity, with its fierce disruption of our relationship with the land, and its replacement of organic human relationships with the machine-like culture of contract that is one of the bedrocks of capitalism.
Twelve years on from its premiere, Further Than the Furthest Thing still strikes me as a play that has never quite had the dramaturgical attention it deserves; its dramatic impact would be even greater if it used fewer words, and trusted more in its own action. James Brining’s final Dundee production, though – staged on a chill and magnificent watery set by Neil Warmington and consultant artist Elizabeth Ogilvie – is of breathtaking quality. John Harris’s shuddering high soprano soundscape is unforgettable, and, among a fine five-strong ensemble, Ann Louise Ross gives the performance of a lifetime as Zinnie Harris’s great island heroine Mill, a woman never humbled into forgetting where she came from, or giving up her right to return.
The box-office manager at the Citizens’ smiled kindly, as she handed me my ticket. ‘We’ve put you near the front,’ she said, ‘because the show is very quiet.’ In truth, though, there’s absolutely nothing small, or incapable of commanding the big space, about the two mighty Samuel Beckett fragments currently playing as a double bill at the Citizens’ Theatre. Despite their extreme austerity and restraint, and their simple framing of a single human figure against a dense field of darkness, these plays are brave, beautiful and masterly theatrical poems about the brief pain and joy of human life, born of the high modernist age in which Sam Beckett wrote, but so perfectly sculpted that they seem timeless. And Dominic Hill’s superb Citizens’ production – the last in his acclaimed first season as artistic director – shapes them into one of those rare theatrical events that will leave no one who sees it completely unchanged.
So in the great fifty-five-minute monologue Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), a shambling yet immensely charismatic Gerard Murphy takes to the stage as Krapp, a solitary man in his late sixties who, throughout his life, has made a habit of recording a tape on his birthday. Clattering and banging painfully around the dark outer reaches of his room, Krapp gradually puts together his ancient reel-to-reel tape recorder, and the tape he wants to hear before he records this year’s offering. It’s the one from thirty years before, when he was a ‘young fool’ of thirty-nine; the year when his mother died, and when he broke – for reasons he can no longer recall – with a woman he seems to have loved.
The play is essentially a duet for two versions of the same voice. There’s the younger, more arrogant, more pretentious Krapp; and the one we see before us, not far from death, often disgusted by his own youthful foolishness, but still wryly humorous enough to reduce the audience to helpless laughter with the acid wit of his self-mockery. And in Gerard Murphy, this great play finds a near-perfect voice and stage presence, full of that dark relish for language, and for the absurdity of life, that is – for all of us – part of our essential human armoury against the dying of the light.
And if this version of Krapp’s Last Tape is an almost flawless theatrical experience, it is equalled by the shuddering power of Hill’s staging of the twenty-five-minute fragment Footfalls: a dialogue between a woman – or the wraith of a woman – who paces to and fro along the front of the stage, and the voice of her unseen aged mother, which haunts her every step. Swathed in a sheath of silver-grey rags and in her own long hair, magnificently lit by Lizzie Powell, Kathryn Howden creates an unforgettable figure of human pain and isolation, without end; while Kay Gallie is magnificent as the voice of the mother, who somehow seems both the absolute source of her daughter’s pain, and the one person in or out of the world who cares enough to wish for its end.
For all its blood and horror, and its dark dealings with the supernatural, Shakespeare’s Macbeth is often a tragedy that lacks a real sense of human sorrow. Its hero begins as a warrior, and ends as a monstrous tyrant; and often, only his victims truly touch the heart.
There’s no chance of failing to feel overwhelmed by pity and sorrow, though, in the course of Alan Cumming’s astonishing 100-minute performance of Macbeth, which won a standing ovation at its premiere performance in the Tramway last night. Set by directors John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg in the bleak spaces of a psychiatric isolation unit, this Macbeth is performed by Cumming as a monologue, with occasional beautifully pitched interventions from Myra McFadyen and Ali Craig as two medical attendants. The shifting of this medieval story of war and rebellion into the antiseptic spaces of a twentieth-century asylum – all towering walls of bleached turquoise tiles, surveillance cameras and flickering screens – is undoubtedly disorientating: there’s no sense of explanation here, and no systematic attempt to link the imagery of Macbeth’s story to this new location.
Yet from the first moment of the show, when we see Cumming’s small, vulnerable figure being gently stripped of his street clothes, we catch the sense that this is a study of almost intolerable human suffering; of a ‘mind diseased’, haunted by images or memories of terrible violence, and constantly fragmenting into different voices and perspectives, as Cumming plays witches and lords, the old king, Macbeth himself, and his lady. The action is punctuated by the surging, passionate music of Max Richter, full of sorrow and compassion, and often this Macbeth seems locked in a dialogue with different versions or images of himself, captured on the big screens that dominate Merle Hensel’s memorable set.
There are moments when the intensity of Cumming’s interaction with the text seems to flag a little, and the huge stage looks briefly like an arena too large for a single solo performer, however gifted. For most of the show’s length, though, Cumming’s grasp of the poetry is so complete, and his raw emotional immersion in it so total, that the audience remains absolutely gripped by the narrative; and unable to resist the sense of being pulled by the story towards the very brink of hell – but a hell redefined for our individualistic age as a place of infinite loneliness and sorrow, where inner demons dog and destroy us, and will not be defeated.
Motherhood and apple pie: it’s the phrase we use to remind ourselves of the received wisdom about motherhood – that the mother-child bond is sacred, and that all mothers are kind and nurturing. Yet as Scotland’s rare autumn season of female-dominated theatre reaches its climax, here are two terrific plays sent to remind us that in the real world, things are much more complex.
Morna Pearson’s The Artist Man and the Mother Woman is Orla O’Loughlin’s first main-stage production as artistic director of the Traverse, and if its theatrical power, cultural boldness, and dark, skewed poetry are harbingers of things to come, then we can expect exciting times at Scotland’s new-play theatre. In this play, the apple pie of motherhood has decayed into something more like a rancid Forfar bridie, as timid thirty-something art teacher Geoffrey Buncher and his all-consuming mother Edie argue and bicker over their increasingly fraught domestic arrangements, in a small town somewhere in north-east Scotland.
Edie, played with showstopping power by Anne Lacey, is a strange monster of late-middle-aged sensuality and weird self-satisfaction, outwardly calm, yet demonic when thwarted; Geoffrey – an equally brilliant Garry Collins – is an innocent abroad, unacquainted with his own passions until the fateful day when he meets a pretty former pupil at the help desk in the local Sainsbury’s.
What’s most striking about this first full-length play by Pearson, though, is its stunning post-postmodern mix of grotesque comedy, heightened naturalism, lurid neo-Doric language, and sheer horror. It is one of the funniest plays the Traverse has staged in years, full of razor-sharp observation about a small-town world dominated by low-level domestic affluence, crime-obsessed junk media, and the battle for our allegiance between giant supermarket chains; the moment when Geoffrey returns from Lidl with random shopping that features a pair of pink earmuffs and a packet of bratwurst is a twenty-first-century comic gem.
Yet Pearson finally turns the tables on us with a savage reminder that what we are laughing at here is the stunting and destruction of human lives, in ways that can provoke a terrifying reaction – and the negotiation of this bold journey between comedy and nightmare has its rocky moments. In the end, though, O’Loughlin’s production is a triumph of brave, high-risk writing, magnificent acting and luridly heightened domestic design. And as we’re played out of the theatre to the strains of the late Michael Marra’s ‘Hermless’, we have the feeling of having witnessed a vital staging post in Scotland’s long journey towards greater self-knowledge, and a less sentimental view of its own inner life.
Rona Munro’s acclaimed play Iron was first seen at the Traverse a decade ago, but here, too, the image of the mother as nurturer and saint is taken apart piece by piece, in a mighty two-hour dialogue between Fay, imprisoned for life for killing her husband in a domestic row, and her daughter Josie, now in her early twenties, who returns to visit her in prison after fifteen years of silence. Meanwhile, in the background, two prison officers, George and Sheila, patrol and reflect, bouncing back some of society’s confused and disturbing attitudes to lifers like Fay.
At the heart of the play, though, is the figure of Fay herself, a passionate woman who is paying a terrible price for her crime. In this new touring production by young Borders-based company Firebrand – due at the Traverse next week – Fay is played by Blythe Duff with an intensity and depth that is simply heart-stopping. And director Richard Baron excels himself, in an austere but good-looking production that features fine music, light and sound; and immaculate supporting performances from both Irene Allan as the daughter who resembles her mother a little too much; and from Crawford Logan and Claire Dargo as the officers, as flawed and human as the woman they guard.
And meanwhile in Glasgow, seven mighty young women – mothers, if you like, of the city’s emerging future – are celebrated in the explosive energy and political passion of the National Theatre of Scotland/Citizens’ Theatre’s new musical Glasgow Girls. Co-produced with a whole range of partners, the show is an exuberant piece of popular theatre, direct, unsubtle, and sometimes sentimental in its retelling of the story of seven Drumchapel schoolgirls who, half a decade ago, launched a now-legendary campaign against the brutal UK immigration regime that was dragging their asylum-seeker schoolmates from their homes in dawn raids, and taking them away to imprisonment and worse.
In its more self-indulgent moments, Glasgow Girls plays up shamelessly to some of Glasgow’s favourite dreams about itself: battling grannies sing hymns to the city’s tradition of radical resistance, and teenage asylum-seekers fall in love with its rugged beauty, as glimpsed from the balcony of a high-rise flat. Yet David Greig’s script – and the score, by a team of five songwriters – also involves some moments of sharp political drama, comedy and excitement, as the girls travel to Edinburgh to lobby First Minister Jack McConnell. Natasha Gilmore’s choreography takes the stuff of the story, and turns it into thrilling bursts of dance and movement. And at the core of the show stand the radiant young actors who have taken on the roles of the Glasgow Girls: each one full of the same youthful passion for the fight against injustice that inspired the girls in the first place, and is now flowing out over the footlights every night, into the hearts of new generation of Glasgow theatregoers.
The end of the world was going well, when I had to tiptoe away and leave it. Much longer than advertised, this one-off winter solstice event designed to celebrate the Mayan prediction of the apocalypse emerged as a startlingly rich sequence of music and theatre, played out over the whole range of spaces in the thrilling, rambling arts lab that is Summerhall. When I left, the whole audience of 150 or so was gathered in the main hall, listening to a terminal concert of three new short pieces by young classical composers Hanna Tuulikki, Colin Broom and Gareth Williams; Broom’s piece ‘Post-human’, beautifully played by John Harris and the Red Note Ensemble, was weaving fragments of speech and surges of string music together to create a tremendously powerful meditation on the fragmentary evidence of our existence the human race may one day leave behind.
We had found our way there, though, in four or five smaller groups, each led in a different sequence through space after space, lecture theatre after library, where a cast of six actors – backed by a young ensemble of more than twenty – would each tell us a different story, set in Edinburgh on the day that the world ends. Shadowy figures fretted and moaned in corridors and courtyards, and in the rooms we heard stories of love and death, youth, old age, and mathematics, all interrupted by sudden oblivion, all written by Oliver Emanuel – from a concept by Gareth Williams – with the kind of sinewy linguistic strength that binds together all the best promenade shows. The whole event was directed by the Tron’s Andy Arnold, with his usual bold, exploratory energy. And in the end, it seemed like an explosion not only of creative invention, but of beauty; never to be repeated, maybe, but full of the kind of promise that makes the end of the world seem unlikely, after all.
As 2013 dawned, though, what was happening in Scotland was not the end of the world – although some felt as if it was – but a dramatic and unexpected new chapter in the nation’s story. In May 2011, the SNP government had been re-elected with an unprecedented overall majority in the proportionally elected Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, and that victory presented Scotland with an inevitable referendum on independence, a yes/no choice so stark and sudden that playwrights and other artists seemed, for a year or two, almost at a loss how to respond to it.
As the long referendum campaign rolled on, though – towards the Scottish Government’s chosen date of 18 September 2014 – something strange began to happen at the grassroots of Scottish public life, first a rustle, then a roar of passionate debate about the nation’s future, that drew crowds of hundreds to village halls and community centres across Scotland, and swept through social media, unleashing avalanches of comment, imagery, and argument. Not all of Scotland’s artists and creators lined up on the ‘Yes’ side of the argument; but most of those with stated opinions did, and as the debate began to explode into much more varied and imaginative forms, and to move out of the hands of mainstream political parties, playwrights like Liz Lochhead, David Greig, Peter Arnott and Jo Clifford began to emerge as key figures in the ‘Yes’ campaign, taking part in the Yestival tour of arts events that criss-crossed Scotland, and – in David Greig’s case – creating a brilliant year-long series of 140-character Twitter plays in the form of an increasingly surreal dialogue between two characters, ‘Yes’ and ‘No’.
Major full-length plays about the referendum were thin on the ground: the upsurge of debate was so rapid that it lent itself more to instant responses, short-form cabaret and satire. But the Lyceum in Edinburgh bravely staged Tim Barrow’s Union, a play about the events surrounding the Act of Union of 1707; and the National Theatre of Scotland, under Laurie Sansom, stepped up magnificently to the referendum challenge, seizing the chance – in partnership with the Edinburgh International Festival and the National Theatre in London – to premiere Rona Munro’s massive Scottish history cycle The James Plays at the Edinburgh Festival of 2014, and commissioning a special edition of its live-streamed Five Minute Theatre initiative, The Great Yes, No, Don’t Know Show, co-curated by the great David MacLennan of A Play, a Pie and a Pint (from the ‘No’ side) and David Greig (from the ‘Yes’).
David MacLennan died just a week before the Five Minute Theatre event, in June 2014, after a year-long struggle with motor neurone disease, but the short pieces he and David Greig wrote for the show, among hundreds of others from across Scotland, are among the finest theatre writing the referendum period produced. And on referendum night at the Traverse, Greig presented a script-in-hand stage version of his Yes/No Twitter plays, that had a packed audience roaring in recognition and delight.
Knitting, free-running, ballroom dancing, choral singing, songwriting – and telling your story to an enigmatic figure from Shetland legend, suddenly brought to life. These are just some of the means that have been used, over the past six months, to attract, seduce and encourage Shetlanders into involving themselves with the huge National Theatre of Scotland/Shetland Arts Ignition project, which reaches its climax this week, in a series of performances across the islands. And if the number of islanders cheerfully aware of the project is any guide, then it must have come close to fulfilling its aim of reaching every one of the archipelago’s 23,000 inhabitants.
What’s more interesting, though, is the question of what a project like Ignition can add, to the life of a community which already knows far more about convivial lifestyles and rich, shared cultural experience than most places in modern Britain. Originally conceived following the tragic death in a road accident of a young youth-theatre member, the project is supposed to reflect on the relationship between islanders and the car, in a place where the modern island economy is built around a huge petrol-driven oil boom. And it does feature some rich and remarkable car-related stories, an entire car body knitted by a ‘mak and yak’ group, and a gorgeous central character in the White Wife, exquisitely played by Manchester performance artist Lowri Evans, a legendary figure who haunts the long north-south road from Unst to Sumburgh, climbing into the passenger seats of lone male drivers, and asking searching questions.
In the end, though, what emerges from the complex and flexible project put together by director Wils Wilson and associate John Haswell is more like a rich reflection on the emotional texture of island life over the past generation, loosely structured around composer Hugh Nankivell’s musical journey down ‘da long road’, which is itself enriched by original songs written by those he met along the way. As for the show at the end of the journey, it’s impossible to make a final assessment of a strikingly diffuse and – in terms of creative synthesis – slightly hesitant and underpowered event, that takes each carload of audience members along a different route, and offers only a few glimpsed fragments from this huge project, including a gorgeous twenty-minute harbourside sequence featuring parkour around a wrecked Volvo, some beautiful, elegiac ballroom dancing across generations, and the voices of eighty- and ninety-year-old residents in an island care home, meticulously heard and recorded by choreographer Janice Parker.
Yet after we return from our night-time car journeys for the great Shetland ritual of tea in the hall, there’s a moment when the youngsters and volunteers pouring the tea suddenly turn towards the band on stage, raise their voices, and form themselves into a choir, singing songs of their own composing, about Shetland, their home. It’s one of those moments of transformation that makes a project like Ignition just slightly magical, and whose impact on the life of the islands, and on the next generation of Shetlanders, is both impossible to measure, and potentially limitless.
If there is one golden rule in the world of Scottish theatre, it is never, ever to underestimate the range, the depth, the vividness, the significance or the staying power of Sir David Lyndsay’s great mid-sixteenth-century morality play, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. Although it was written partly for performance at the court of King James V, by a man who was a courtier as well as a poet, its political boldness is breathtaking. It challenges the corrupt power of the church, the landlords and the burgesses who run Scotland; and it imagines a new political settlement, in which John Commonweal – the Common Man – is admitted into parliament, while the wealthy are brought back under the rule of law, and the corrupt drummed out of office.
So now, this mighty piece of early Renaissance political drama has been revived, in a new complete five-hour text put together by a team of academics working with Historic Scotland, and it is being staged, this weekend, in the stunning outdoor setting of Linlithgow Peel, with the great east wall of the palace standing against the sky as backdrop. The audience sits on the grass in a little, intimate oval arena ten yards across, with a main stage at the west end, and the frolics begin, as various cheerful vices set about tempting James Mackenzie’s wide-eyed young king away from the ways of wisdom, and into the arms of Ruth Milnes’ gorgeous Lady Sensualitie.
In the course of its rich, long and playfully indulgent five hours, Lyndsay’s play ranges from detailed contemporary social satire – full of long litanies of complaint about sharp trading and dodgy practices – to a kind of political and religious poetry that seems almost Miltonian in reach, as Tam Dean Burn’s mighty, winged Divine Correction enters the fray – flanked by Veritie, Chastitie and Gude Counsell – to win the young king back to virtue. Sometimes, Lyndsay’s obsession with the burning need for religious reformation makes the play seem like a voice from another world; yet seconds later, its complaints about an arrogant elite looting the nation’s wealth – superbly spoken by Keith Fleming as John Commonweal – seem as if they could have been written yesterday.
And although Gregory Thompson’s production is clad in traditional medieval costume, and sometimes seems a shade under-rehearsed as the forty-strong cast busk their way through the vast text, in the end there’s no denying the passion and understanding with which this all-star company of Scottish actors – including a live band, led by musical director John Kielty – seem to have taken the full political meaning of the play to their hearts, and made it their own. For in the end, in whatever form, The Thrie Estaitis remains what it always was: a play about good governance written in and for Scotland, but so powerful in its understanding of what good governance is, that it transcends not only the five centuries since Lyndsay was born, but also the place where it was made, to take its place in the canon of great European drama about the spirit of political reform itself – a spirit that is still with us today, wherever power is abused, and the ordinary citizen excluded from the councils of state.
Mother Glasgow, the dear green place. Yet as everyone who knows and loves the city can tell you, there’s an edge to Glasgow’s famous warmth, and to its chatty curiosity about strangers. For as David Harrower’s heroine Ciara observes, in the brilliant new solo play that bears her name, this is still a migrant city, full of competing tribes; a place where law and civic virtue can only take you so far, where family and group loyalties often matter more, and where a certain kind of crime is woven into the fabric of the city’s self-image.
So Ciara – played with magnificent passion, wit and quiet glamour by Blythe Duff, once the female star of the Glasgow cop show Taggart – is a gallery owner, a patron of the arts; we meet her in the space that will be her new warehouse gallery. Yet her wealth comes, as she well knows, from the lifetime of organised crime pursued first by her father, Mick – ‘a great man’, as drunks in pubs still tell her – and then by her husband, and she speaks to us now not because she thinks we will warm to her, after hearing her story, but because the pain and contradictions of her life have reached a point where they must be told.
So in a brief hour or so of wry humour, pure tragedy, and utterly compelling lyrical narrative – all immaculately directed by Traverse artistic director Orla O’Loughlin – Ciara offers us a glimpse of what it is to live a life where home and family are traditionally prized, but where, in the end, there is no law but force, and money, and the striking of the deal. She has to live with the truth that, as Mick’s daughter, she has been traded like a commodity all her life, just as she trades in artists’ lives now; and that even her brief, sweet, flaring midlife love for the artist Torrance, the crisis that makes her speak, was in some sense set up by the powerful men around her.
There’s something about gender here, and something about Glasgow – but also something about civilisation and law itself, its fragility, its myths, its endless vulnerability. In that sense, Ciara makes a vital companion piece to David Greig’s The Events, also playing at the Traverse. And it’s both moving and fascinating to see how these two great contemporary Scottish playwrights are taking very different routes through the civilisational endgames of our time, Greig working on a global and international canvas, Harrower delving ever deeper into the reality and everyday lies of life in Scotland now, to find the universal truths that lie buried there.
It’s Edinburgh, it’s 1988, and there’s been a murder. Indeed there have been four, horrible, ritualistic murders, of young girls in their teens. And ambitious young Detective Constable Isobel McArthur is on the case, determined – with her boss ‘Black’ Fergus McLintock, and her colleague and lover Frank Bowman – to find the killer, and put him away for life.
That’s the story that forms the backdrop to Dark Road, the first-ever stage play by Edinburgh’s renowned crime writer Ian Rankin, co-written with – and directed by – the Royal Lyceum’s artistic director, Mark Thomson, and the omens were good, as an excited audience gathered at the Lyceum for Saturday’s premiere performance. The play itself is set in the present, when McArthur – twenty-five years on, once Scotland’s first woman Chief Constable, and now facing retirement – finds herself beset by doubts about the conviction of the alleged murderer, Alfred Chalmers. The scene seems set for a fine, dark two-and-a-half-hours of classy genre fiction in the style pioneered by television cop shows from Prime Suspect to The Killing, featuring an impressive cast led by the wonderful Maureen Beattie as McArthur, with Robert Gwilym as Frank, and a fine Sara Vickers as McArthur’s teenage daughter, Alexandra.
So how to account, then, for the slow-motion car crash of theatrical bad taste, chaotic plotting, and sheer, pointless nastiness that eventually overtakes one of Scottish theatre’s most promising recent projects? The first sign of trouble comes with the set, a great concrete-look revolve – often enlivened by huge projected images of the dead girls – that jolts us from home to office to prison cell in the most literal manner, as if the play had given up early on the idea of creating a cop show for theatre, and was bent on mimicking the narrative structure of a television series, gussied up with the odd explosion of superficial ‘theatricality’.
And from that moment on, problems of genre seem to dog the show, as it lurches from the noirish heightened naturalism of good twenty-first-century television into a series of risible and grotesque dream sequences in which McArthur confronts the killer in her own living room, and then – towards the end – dives into an orgy of half-baked onstage violence that seems more like black farce than anything else. The play also boasts two staggeringly silly late plot twists, one of which undermines the whole preceding narrative; and in the last twenty minutes, it completely blows its own credentials as a potentially interesting drama, to become a sickening display of sadism for its own sake.
I suppose the final scenes of Dark Road might become a cult hit among those who enjoy horror in all its forms, including terrible dialogue and plenty of blood, and it can’t be said too clearly that Thomson’s fine cast, including Philip Whitchurch as Chalmers, do all they can with the characters around whom the story is built. In terms of narrative and style, though, this show gradually fades into a silly, sensational mess, with nothing to say, and a peculiarly graceless way of saying it. Time to lower the curtain, and move on.
A short quote from miner and playwright Joe Corrie, on the cover of the playtext, says what is most important about his great play In Time o’ Strife, written in the Fife coalfield in 1926, the year of the General Strike: ‘I must write about the world I know best,’ he wrote, ‘the world of the working man and woman, their trials, loves, hates, suspicions, generosities and loyalties. I feel that it’s a contribution – I am doing what I know best, for the class that needs it now.’
The question of why Corrie’s play has had only three professional productions in Scotland in almost ninety years – one in John McGrath’s 7:84 Clydebuilt season of 1982, another soon after, and now this new National Theatre of Scotland production – remains a troubling one. Yet although he was always wary of having his work adapted, it’s difficult to imagine that Corrie would not be delighted by the passion, the theatrical energy and the profound feeling for Scotland’s working-class history that informs this new music theatre version by director and designer Graham McLaren, staged in an old church hall at Pathhead in Kirk-caldy, and interwoven with many of Corrie’s powerful poems, as well as music and songs by composer Michael John McCarthy and a three-piece band.
Written to raise money for strikers’ soup kitchens, In Time o’ Strife is a big, full-blooded domestic drama, strikingly similar in style to Sean O’Casey’s great Dublin plays of the same period. It tells the story of middle-aged miner Jock Smith and his family, of their neighbours, and of young Jenny Smith’s fiancé Wull Baxter, an ambitious young man who becomes a strike-breaker, to Jenny’s despair. What’s perhaps most impressive about the play, apart from its powerful narrative drive, is its stubborn complexity: there’s hardly a man in the cast who does not harbour some degree of doubt about the strike and the terrible intensification of hardship it brings, often to the point of starvation.
Perhaps the only fault of McLaren’s production is that there’s something in its atmosphere – its references via a screen to the miners’ strike of the 1980s, the Clash-like stridency of some of the music, and the decision to end with a fierce singing of ‘The Red Flag’ – that slightly bypasses that subtlety; the play’s truthfulness about the double-edged quality of the strike weapon was courageous in 1926, and should be fully honoured now. What McLaren’s production unleashes, though – in a small hall perfectly laid out and lit to recall an old living-room party or church-hall social – is a memorably angry, vivid and theatrical retelling of a vital story in Scottish history, with fiercely choreographed dance interludes by Imogen Knight, and a range of fine performances, notably from Ewan Stewart, Anita Vettesse and Hannah Donaldson as the Smiths and their oldest daughter. It’s an exhilarating experience, this In Time o’ Strife, and not to be missed. Yet it also leaves behind a faint feeling of shame, that Scottish society once produced remarkable working-class writers like Corrie, with such a story to tell, and then allowed them to come so close to being completely forgotten.
If you took a deep breath, and stood a long way back from the mighty drama and spectacle of the National Theatre of Great Britain’s War Horse – at the Festival Theatre until 15 February – then you might, for a moment or two, raise questions about its message and meaning. It’s a passionate reiteration – one among thousands – of England’s great, endless mourning for its lost rural past, an imagined innocence finally blown to pieces in the mud and blood of Flanders. And then there’s something deeper, perhaps: a story for our time about how human and animal wellbeing are somehow bound together, and can never be fully separated.
You won’t want to stand back, however, nor will you be able to. For what directors Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris have made of Michael Morpurgo’s story – together with the Handspring Puppet Company, and perhaps the most powerful, subtle and beautiful stage animals ever seen – is a drama of peace and war so vast in its reach, so gripping in its dramatic structure, and so breathtaking in its physical evocation of the pure horror of the western front, that it’s literally impossible to look away from the stage, through two hours and twenty minutes of heart-shaking theatre. Every element of the art form comes together in a flash of brilliance to tell the story of young Albert Narracott and his horse Joey, a beautiful hunter, sent off to the front in 1914 – from the lighting, the sound, and the mighty horses themselves, to the music, great surging English folk songs magnificently sung by the company, with Songman Bob Fox. And when one of the lead horses finally collapses in death, there’s a second of utter hush, while we see the three puppeteers rise out of the body, and back away like a departing soul; in one of many moments of pure theatrical greatness, in this wholly unforgettable show.
The time is the winter of 1706/1707, and in Edinburgh and London, the grandees of Scotland are drinking, vomiting, whoring, arguing and swearing their way through the negotiations which will seal the Union between England and Scotland. Their costumes glow with colour, their wigs are as picturesque as they are grubby-looking, and their morals are grubbier still, as they pocket bagfuls of English gold; yet their political skill is not negligible, particularly in the case of Liam Brennan’s towering Duke of Queensberry. And in Mark Thomson’s visually thrilling production of Tim Barrow’s new play Union, these flawed men are surrounded by a surging symphony of images conjuring up taverns and palaces, rainy nights and drunken days, all projected – in Andrzej Gould-ing’s memorable design – on to whirling blank walls, and accompanied by Philip Pinsky’s insistent and haunting harpsichord music, always played a notch too loud for comfort.
Yet no description of this memorably rowdy and ambitious play can even begin to convey the extraordinary mixture of brilliance and incoherence it contains, the dizzying swoops from crass caricature and stereotype to sudden lyrical beauty. Somewhere at the core of Union, there is a play about what happens when things that should be priceless are sold for hard cash. The play’s twin stories involve the love affair between passionate young poet Allan Ramsay and a prostitute called Grace, who sells herself for the money she needs to live; and the parallel sell-off of Scotland’s sovereignty, as the people starve, and Scotland’s leaders strike a deal which will open up our economy to English markets, and an age of empire.
This could have been, in other words, a powerful and telling historical drama about a timeless conflict between what is right and self-respecting on one hand, and what is necessary for survival on the other. Instead, though, it emerges as a fierce giant puppet show with flashes of seriousness, and long detours into strange tales like the grotesque history of Queen Anne’s childless madness. It’s significant that the strongest and most interesting scenes are the ones in the Scottish Parliament itself; the weakest are those set in England, where the English negotiators are portrayed as absurd fops, and the Scots as a bunch of whisky-toping drunks with uncivilised manners. Josh Whitelaw yells his way through the role of Allan Ramsay, although he sometimes modulates to a touching lyricism; Sally Reid is subtle and heartbreaking as Grace the whore; and Liam Brennan’s unforgettable Queensberry is matched by Tony Cownie’s sinister Lord Stair, and Keith Fleming’s chilling English spymaster, Robert Harley.
In the end, the best efforts of Mark Thomson’s ten-strong cast go for less than they should have done, in a play that is a full twenty minutes too long, and contains whole tracts of material that should have been saved for another day. Yet Tim Barrow’s first-ever full-length play approaches the vivid history behind the choice Scotland now faces with such vigour and boldness, and such powerful flashes of poetry and insight, that everyone in Scotland who cares about the nation’s future should see it – and then argue about it, far into the night.
It’s five o’clock on Monday afternoon. The downstairs theatre at Òran Mór falls silent, Neil Murray of the National Theatre of Scotland makes a live introduction, and then we’re off on a twenty-four-hour rollercoaster ride around Scotland and beyond, peering into our laptops, watching 180 tiny five-minute plays live-streamed from beaches and living rooms and parks and halls all the way from Dumfries to Caithness, and also from Istanbul, Paris and East Timor, all inspired by the ‘Yes, No, Don’t Know’ theme that currently dominates Scottish life.
At ‘hubs’ like Òran Mór – and there are others in Aberdeen, Inverness, Dumfries and Edinburgh – audiences can watch some shows being performed live; here in Glasgow, the mood is rich with mourning for David MacLennan of A Play, a Pie and a Pint, who – before his death just over a week ago – co-curated this edition of Five Minute Theatre with David Greig, and left behind a series of powerful short plays of his own, presented here by a terrific scratch team of actors. Andy Clark’s beautiful performance of David Greig’s final Letter to David will become one of the key performances of the night: a reminder of the love that can survive the differences thrown up by the referendum campaign – MacLennan was a ‘No’ man, Greig is a ‘Yes’.
Elsewhere, though, the mood is almost dizzyingly varied, as groups of schoolchildren mourn what looks like a bitter fallout between parents, and ordinary citizens wrestle with the ‘disconnect’ between the rhetoric of politicians and the struggles of everyday life. There’s one quietly stunning filmed piece by Stephanie McCormack, in which a woman watches Alex Salmond’s fine keynote speech to the SNP conference while feeding her dog and worrying about her bills. Some superbly witty primary-school students at Craigowl Primary offer a fine Dundee take on the question, as Oor Wullie sets out to interview all the Broons about their referendum views; back at Òran Mór, ex-MSP turned cabaret star Rosie Kane performs Jen Muir’s Proud Backward Glance from Independence Day 2024, and the resident company raise the roof with David Greig’s short indecision rock opera, We’re Not Sure.
And are there conclusions? Maybe a few. The first is that three years on from its first edition, Five Minute Theatre needs to think harder about how it presents itself to the world. There’s no point in running ‘hubs’ where audiences can only see ‘their own’ shows, and get no sense of the wider event, and since online information remains scanty, perhaps the whole event needs a live online presenter, giving a one-sentence introduction to each show, its location and origin. And it certainly isn’t right for the National Theatre of Scotland to punctuate this most democratic of shows with long, flashy trailers for forthcoming productions.
In terms of content, though, The Great Yes, No, Don’t Know Show is as variable and rich as ever. The endless circling around the ‘divorce’ metaphor produces some predictably dire results, as well as one brilliant essay in separation, filmed with megaphones at Carter Bar. Three things finally emerge, though, that I have heard nowhere else in our independence debate. The first is something like a genuine grassroots ‘No’ voice, not impressed with our current UK leaders, but intensely wary of ideological nationalism. The second – in a recurring image – is a genuine fear of a UK ruled by ‘Prime Minister Farage’. And the third is the voice of deep political wisdom represented by the show’s two co-curators themselves: MacLennan’s farewell blast, On Our Own – a chorale for a young socialist Green MSP and three ‘pragmatic’ SNP colleagues – contains perhaps the sharpest political commentary of the night. As David Greig himself puts it, in the final lines of his Letter to David, ‘If I vote “Yes” on 18 September, I’ll be voting for a country you gave me.’ And in this endlessly diverse referendum debate, that’s perhaps the biggest paradox of all.
For the huge theatrical event that is the launch of The James Plays – the most ambitious project ever undertaken by the National Theatre of Scotland, and its first-ever co-production with the National Theatre in London – the auditorium at the Festival Theatre has been turned into a giant arena, with part of the packed audience sitting in tiers behind the stage. Close to centre-stage, in John Bausor’s design, stands a mighty sword many metres high, its blade half-buried in the ground; and it’s with a classic play about kingship, and the threat of violence that inevitably underpinned medieval kingly power, that the action begins, in Rona Munro’s hugely ambitious trilogy about the reigns of James I, James II and James III.
It’s not Shakespeare’s Henry IV, with its mighty poetry, and profound political commitment to the ideal of monarchy, but James I is a well-crafted, fast-moving and intelligent drama about a young king who spent twenty years in prison in England, and who returns to Scotland, in his late twenties, to try to forge his country into a modern state. The story of young James’s return, his marriage, and his mighty struggle to assert his authority, is told with fluency and energy, touching on differing Scottish and English attitudes to kingship, as well as on the traditional unruliness of the great Scottish families.
At the centre of the story stands a group of memorable characters, from James McArdle’s powerful and moving young King – a poet compelled to take up the sword – to his English wife Joan, their servant Meg, and the terrifying matriarch of the rebellious Murdoch Stewart clan, played with flair and cruelty by the great Blythe Duff. And the play is supported from the outset by Laurie Sansom’s hugely impressive and brilliantly choreographed production, in which an ensemble cast of twenty swirl across the stage, evoking banquets and battles, wedding nights and sessions of parliament, in a tense and gripping pageant of essential Scottish history.
If there are cheers at the end of James I, though, things take a more difficult turn in the first act of James II, a murky dream-play built around the recurring nightmares of the young King James II, crowned king at the age of six following his father’s brutal assassination. Often played by a ghost-like child puppet, as well as by an impressive Andrew Rothney, this king seems close to madness; but he survives to marry a brave young French queen played by a sweet and witty Stephanie Hyam. James II, though, seems like a play that never quite finds its centre: whether it lies in James’s battle with his own nightmares, in the growing rebellion of the Douglas clan, or – as the final scenes suggest – in the tragedy of James’s adoring friend William Douglas, bullied son and frustrated lover, played by Mark Rowley with a text-gulping intensity that commands attention, but does not fully repay it.
And then, with a final shift of style, it’s on to James III, a historic tragicomedy in the deliberately anachronistic style pioneered by plays like The Lion in Winter, and completely dominated by Sofie Gråbøl’s terrific, commanding performance as Margaret of Denmark, wife to Jamie Sives’s terrifyingly mercurial and unpredictable James III. This James is a bisexual joker who dislikes the labour of kingship so much that he actively wishes England would invade and take over; while his queen pores over the national accounts, and conducts the business of government. Set in a time of relative plenty, James III features touches of modern dress, and plenty of cheerful partying between scenes. Without the steely, witty seriousness of Gråbøl’s central performance, though, its relentless anachronisms and deliberately crude language would become a shade wearying, long before this eight-hour theatrical marathon reaches its end.
So what does it all amount to, this mighty trilogy in which so much time, cash and hope has been invested? On one hand, it offers an impressive vindication of the directing skills of the National Theatre of Scotland’s artistic director, Laurie Sansom. This is the first show he has staged himself, since he took on the huge task of running Scotland’s national theatre-without-walls, and the fluency and intelligence with which he drives his huge cast through these three very different stories is as formidable as it is entertaining.
The plays, though, are a mixed achievement, full of interesting incidents and insights – and with a commendable emphasis on the women of the royal household – but often depressingly flat and banal in language, written in a version of crude, everyday street Scots that provokes endless easy laughs from the audience, so incongruous does it seem.
As for the politics of The James Plays, in the run-up to 18 September – well, they sometimes grasp the central truth that relations with England always dominate Scotland’s fate; and there is a final plea for courage, in the face of an unknowable future. From the outset, though, the plays are full of the kinds of patronising cliché about Scotland that some hoped, a generation ago, never to see on Scottish stages again: all that predictable nonsense about how Scotland is cold, and barren, and very small, a place with no apple trees, swathed in smoky darkness, and, above all, uniquely rough, violent and ungovernable – this in plays set at a time when England itself was riven by murderous civil war.
And if you want to understand why Scotland is likely to vote ‘No’ on 18 September, then all you need do is listen to the obliging laughter with which the Festival audience responds to every one of these old chestnuts, and to Queen Margaret’s amazing final assertion that Scotland is a nation with ‘fuck-all except attitude’. Scotland, it seems, is a nation still willing to see itself mainly through the eyes of contemptuous others; and for all its ambition, and the sheer brilliance of its staging, the James trilogy never achieves the levels of vision and coherence that might begin to change all that.
Scotland’s referendum bubble is well and truly burst now, lying like a crushed balloon in the gutters of the capital. While it lasted, though, it was a shining, magical thing, full of rainbow colours. And of all the words and images that have emerged from it over the last two years, there has been nothing finer than David Greig’s Twitter series of miniature Yes/No Plays, tiny dramatic fragments in 140 characters, gathered together, this week, for two historic performances at the Traverse, on referendum day.
What’s striking about The Yes/No Plays – apart from the slightly surreal brilliance of the writing – is that although Greig is a high-profile ‘Yes’ supporter, the plays themselves say nothing unsubtle about the referendum debate. In building up a dialogue between two voices – a live-in pair called Yes and No, played brilliantly by Frances Thorburn and Richard Clements – it has its fun at the expense of both campaigns and delves much deeper into the referendum’s complex undercurrents of hope, possibility, fear, and desire.
And the plays also, perhaps surprisingly, make brilliant and hilariously funny live theatre, at least when performed by a superb six-strong Traverse cast, directed by Greig himself, and deftly divided into sequences punctuated by exquisite light-touch clàrsach music. This is a sad old weekend for many in Scotland. But if I had to be anywhere, during the last few hours of our great referendum debate, then I’m delighted to have been at the Traverse, revelling in David Greig’s wit, humanity, and absolute sympathy for all sides of the question.
The time seems to be the 1960s, or perhaps the early 1970s. When Brian Ferguson’s nervy, furious Hamlet wants to take notes about the evil he sees around him, he uses an old-fashioned BBC-style portable tape recorder, slung over his shoulder. Around the back of the stage sit more big reel-to-reel recorders, like the equipment in a pre-internet government surveillance centre; but in Tom Piper’s set and Nikola Kodjabashia’s sound design, there’s also a hint of an old radiophonic workshop, with musical instruments lying around to be picked up and played by cast members, occasional blasts of electronic sound, voices switching into amplification and out again.
And at one level, the references to this period in social history make perfect sense. Ever since the 1960s – as family breakdown and divorce have become more widespread across the west – directors have been casting Hamlet as a furious teenage boy appalled by his mother’s new relationship; very often, these sulky teenage princes completely unbalance the staging of a play which is not only about family and psychology, but also about kingship, and the ruin of a state.
Now, though, here comes a production, from Dominic Hill and the Citizens’ Theatre, that goes so boldly and directly for the family drama at the heart of Shakespeare’s play – even setting many of its scenes in an improvised palace living room with sofa and standard lamp – that it has the paradoxical effect of pulling the whole drama back into focus, in thrilling and fascinating style.
The secret of the production’s success is twofold. First, instead of simply assuming our sympathy for Hamlet’s rage and disgust, it concentrates fiercely on him, pulling apart and examining his horror to a depth that makes us fully aware of Hamlet’s weaknesses, but also increasingly, poignantly conscious of his courage, intelligence and honesty. It’s an interpretation that places a huge weight on the shoulders of Brian Ferguson’s frail-looking, bespectacled Hamlet, but he rises to the challenge with terrific emotional nerve, shaping Hamlet’s series of mighty soliloquies into fierce, dynamic waymarks on an unforgettable inner journey.
And then secondly, by linking the action to a time when the rebellion of youth itself had huge political resonances, the production offers a powerful insight into the enduring significance of Hamlet’s revolt, not only against his mother and uncle, but also – at a deeper level – against the stern instruction of his father’s spirit to complete an ancient ritual of revenge. The whole nine-strong cast of Hill’s production seem absolutely at one with the picture painted by the production, with Peter Guinness as a suave and tormented Claudius, and Cliff Burnett as a strange, effete and bullying Polonius, in particularly impressive form.
And when Meghan Tyler’s clever, complex and beautiful Ophelia transforms her ‘mad scene’ by coming to the microphone and roaring out her rage, grief, agony and sexual damage like some young Janis Joplin caught between blues and death metal, this Hamlet reaches a level of nerve-wrenching intensity and tragedy rarely achieved in more conventionally poetic productions; an intensity well earned by Brian Ferguson’s brave and groundbreaking central performance, and by a company who richly deserved their first-night standing ovation.
If you’re looking for a company with the nerve to take theatre for older children into the dark places of the mind and heart, then the work of Catherine Wheels – based in Musselburgh, acclaimed on the international stage – is for you. Last year, artists Shona Reppe and Andy Manley, with Catherine Wheels, produced the memorable installation-show Huff, a version of The Three Little Pigs that also touched on the horror of war.
And now, in the labyrinthine basements of Summerhall, the Catherine Wheels team – led by artistic director Gill Robertson – have created a promenade show that deals with nothing less than the chill hand of oppressive patriarchal power, robbing girls and young women of their voices, their anger, their individuality. Co-created by Robertson with designer Karen Tennant and performer Ian Cameron, The Voice Thief is a seventy-minute experience that occasionally struggles to match the strength of its central idea, as the audience are invited by a pair of spooky twin girl retainers into MIEVH, The Mackenzie Institute for the Encouragement of Vocal Harmony.
At first, all is sweetness and light. Cameron’s Dr Mackenzie is an endearing, singing Willie Wonka figure in a white coat and explosive wig, the walls lined with reassuring pictures of the celebrity speakers he has helped; and for rather too long – almost thirty-five minutes – we are led through a series of experiences that seem more like design ideas than dynamic contributions to the narrative, as we’re invited to don masks, pass through a human car wash, lie down in a soothing pink tent, and finally settle in a lecture theatre for an explanation of the doctor’s work.
It’s at this point, though, that the story darkens, as the doctor’s lovely daughter Beatrice, beautifully played by Jenny Hulse, begins to rebel against his increasingly controlling instructions, and to lead us into her own magical cave of secretly saved voices. The power of the metaphor in this final sequence is almost overwhelming, as Beatrice searches for the beautiful voice of her dead mother, and strives to make her escape. And if the slightly predictable text often seems to have been added as an afterthought to the rest of the drama, the central idea is magnificently realised both in Tennent’s superb design for the laboratory at the heart of Mackenzie’s darkness, and in Danny Krass’s unforgettable soundscape, which captures the full horror of oppression through a subtle symphony of half-muffled squeals and brief soaring notes, in a show that should be irrelevant to the world of 2014, but sadly still seems both timely and necessary.
The referendum result, when it came, was a ‘No’, although not by the overwhelming margin for which the British mainstream parties had hoped; but oddly, instead of collapsing in defeat, the grassroots debate about the possibility of a different future seemed to roar on regardless, towards the SNP landslide in the UK general election of 2015. In theatre, it was a strange time of rich achievement, and funding still reasonably well sustained, combined with a mood of deep anxiety among creative theatremakers.
In the autumn of 2014, the National Theatre of Scotland’s James Plays took London by storm; yet a few months later, The Arches in Glasgow – one of the venues which had driven the rapid evolution of Scottish theatre over the last twenty-five years – was abruptly closed down by the police and Glasgow Licensing Board, in a move that seemed to mark the end of the city’s great thirty-year age of experimentation in finding new creative uses for old industrial spaces. Dominic Hill’s Citizens’ Theatre went from strength to strength, in the company’s seventieth year, but faced a massive fundraising challenge to save the fabric of one of Scotland’s best-loved theatres. New money was made available for Scotland’s Highland Touring Network, and for organisations like Comar, the new Mull-based umbrella company that embraces Mull Theatre – but key creative staff were threatened with redundancy, triggering a wave of protest on the island. And in Edinburgh, Mark Thomson’s Lyceum Company began its fiftieth birthday year with one of the finest spring seasons in the company’s history, featuring magnificent productions of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and Goldoni’s The Venetian Twins – only to find itself, alongside the Traverse, facing a deep cut in its Creative Scotland grant; Thomson announced that he would leave the Lyceum in the summer of 2016, after fourteen years.
Then in July 2015, it was announced that the National Theatre of Scotland’s Executive Producer, Neil Murray, and its Associate Director, Graham McLaren, would move on in 2016 to become joint directors of Ireland’s national theatre, the Abbey in Dublin. The appointment was both a huge accolade for Scotland’s new national theatre, and also a profound challenge, given the key role Murray, in particular, had played at the NTS since its first months. And as the year in Scottish theatre unfolded – with new productions of John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil from 1973 and Jo Clifford’s Great Expectations from 1988, and a mighty new adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s 1981 novel Lanark – it became clear that this was a time of relatively few new plays, but of great revivals and adaptations, of coming to terms with the recent literary and theatrical past in Scotland and beyond, and of drawing rich contemporary inspiration from it.
Tears, cheers, and a completely spontaneous standing ovation; it’s rare to see that kind of response at an ordinary Saturday matinée in Glasgow. Yet after two hours and twenty minutes of passionate theatre, in this new staging of To Kill a Mockingbird first seen at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, there was no holding the Theatre Royal audience, as they cheered this mighty show on its way to Edinburgh this week, and Aberdeen next.
For a book first published fifty-five years ago – and set twenty-five years earlier, in the hot southern summer of 1935 – what was long thought to be Harper Lee’s only novel has a remarkable way of still hitting the headlines: only this week, it was announced that HarperCollins are about to publish the only other novel ever written by Lee, now a frail eighty-eight-year-old.
Yet it only takes a few moments, in Timothy Sheader’s beautiful, inventive production, for his fine sixteen-strong company – including three alternating teams of spellbindingly powerful child actors – to demonstrate exactly why this terrific story of the heroine and narrator, Scout, her brother Jem, and above all their widowed father Atticus Finch, a liberal lawyer in a racially divided southern town, occupies such a special place in the hearts and minds of readers. The adult cast enter, carrying copies of the book, and, at first, they read from it in their own British voices, Scottish or northern, posh or gritty. Then Phil King’s guitar music starts up, the children appear, and the actors simply merge into the narrative, like any readers becoming caught up in the world it creates.
And from there on, the story gathers speed like a mighty steam train, until it reaches its famous climax in the daylong trial of local black man Tom Robinson, for the alleged rape of a poor white girl. Daniel Betts is quietly magnificent as Atticus, blessed with the special magic that comes to those who cannot live with themselves unless they stand for what is right. And in the end, this magnificent story of civic courage in hard times still speaks uncomfortable truths about the links between power unjustly held, by force and denial, and other kinds of abuse, economic, physical and sexual. The standing ovation was well earned. But the biggest cheer of all came when the company picked up their battered copies of the book and held them high, in a tribute to the enduring power of the right words, at the right time, to change heart and minds for good.
2015 is the seventieth anniversary year of the Citizens’ Theatre Company, and it opened in glittering style, on Saturday night, with the premiere performance of the new Citizens’ production of John Byrne’s The Slab Boys. With a vintage rock’n’roll band playing in the foyer, both the playwright and the First Minister in attendance, and the entire theatre staff dressed up in superb fifties style, the Citizens’ seemed set for a brilliant celebration of Byrne’s great comedy, first seen at the Traverse in 1978, but set two decades before that, in the Slab Room of Stobo’s carpet factory, Paisley, in the winter of 1957.
Yet for all its simple, classic structure and workplace setting – it covers a single day, and takes place entirely in the Slab Room, meticulously realised here in John Byrne’s own magnificent set – The Slab Boys is a glitteringly complex piece of drama, full not only of hidden darknesses, and searing insights into the casual bigotry of post-war Scottish life, but of a language – a multilayered, hyperreal version of west of Scotland vernacular – that itself represents the human capacity for humour, irony, and self-reinvention that is the play’s theme. It therefore demands to be played like Shakespeare, every word given its full meaning and rhythm, each speech offered to the audience like a tiny aria.
And the truth about David Hayman’s new staging, thirty-seven years on, is that, like every other I have seen, it offers a tantalising mix of actors who understand this basic demand of Byrne’s great text, and actors who think they are dealing in some kind of naturalism. This time round, the glittering stars are Jamie Quinn as slab boy Spanky, Scott Fletcher as the much-bullied Hector, and a fabulously theatrical Kathryn Howden as the tea lady Sadie; elsewhere – even in Sammy Hayman’s pleasingly dangerous Phil McCann – the acting is often more introverted, the comic rhythm less secure.
In the end, this production gets away with it: the cast begin to overcome their first-half nerves, the pacing and rhythm grow more confident, the laughs come thick and fast. Frankly, though, it would be good, after nearly forty years, to see at least one revival of The Slab Boys that just gets this great play right first time, without excuse or apology. By the time it reaches Edinburgh next month, this may be the greatest Slab Boys ever seen. But at the moment, despite its occasional brilliance, it misses that mark in ways that seem unnecessary, and therefore all the more frustrating.
Theatre. It’s rough, it’s often pretentious, and it’s always a more risky bet than any form of screen entertainment. There are moments, though, when a play and a company come together in such an explosion of energy and passion that everyone who experiences it learns all over again, with every cell of their bodies, why people make live theatre, and always will. The new Royal Lyceum version of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle – written in 1944, now revived in a brilliant production by artistic director Mark Thomson – marks one of those moments, and everyone with a heartbeat should strive to see it, or be poorer for missing it.
The timeliness of the story is what seizes the attention first. The play famously begins with a village debate about land ownership, which is then put on pause while the local people perform a play based on a traditional story about justice – its usual failures, and one magic moment when it works. There’s plenty of onstage music, too, reminding us of the direct line of descent from Brecht’s work, through the touring Theatre Workshop of Ewan MacColl and Joan Littlewood, to our own 7:84 and Wildcat companies. As the village play begins, the musician and choreographer Sarah Swire (of Belle & Sebastian’s God Help the Girl) arrives in glamorous shades, and becomes the play’s chorus, leading the cast in Claire McKenzie’s bold, rock-based score with ever-increasing conviction and clarity.
And then the story begins, as the palace kitchen girl Grusha, a twenty-first-century refugee in bobble hat and backpack, flees the revolution that has killed her boss, but cannot resist taking with her the governor’s baby son, left behind in the chaos. ‘Terrible is the seductive temptation to do good!’ glows the great neon sign on stage, in the most famous of all Brecht quotes; but Amy Manson’s breathtakingly wonderful Grusha, and the little, growing puppet-baby she takes with her, already have our hearts in the palms of their hands, as they travel on through danger and deprivation, and painful compromise with the need to survive, to the decisive moment when they reach the court of the unconventional peasant judge, Azdak.
Mark Thomson’s thirteen-strong ensemble – including a superb Christopher Fairbank as Azdak – perform like a company possessed by the brilliance and significance of their story: they are funny, moving, compelling, unstoppable, right to the final fade to darkness. ‘Why did they kill all the governors, judges, landowners, bankers?’ roars Azdak. ‘Why do you think? Too much injustice, too much war.’ Some things, in other words, never change; and neither do the Grushas of this world, travelling, struggling, finding a space for the next generation to thrive, in spite of everything.
Leaving Planet Earth, seeking new worlds: as humankind circles helplessly around the issue of climate change, it’s an image that recurs ever more often in the work of the current generation of artists. It was there in Grid Iron’s 2013 Edinburgh Festival show Leaving Planet Earth; it’s at the Traverse this weekend, in Curious Directive’s Fringe First-winning Pioneer. And it’s the shaping force behind this beautiful and thoughtful new show by the Glasgow-based designer and theatremaker Kai Fischer, in association with the National Theatre of Scotland, which is set to tour on from Glasgow to St Andrews, Paisley, Lerwick and Inverness.
Not so much a play as a beautifully shaped one-hour meditation in words, music and occasional visual images, Last Dream (on Earth) takes the form of a sound-sculpture performed live by two musicians and three actors, to an audience wearing headphones for the full, intense effect. Fischer’s script – researched over many months of visits to key sites of the immigration crisis in the Mediterranean – brings together two narratives: one based on the personal stories of African migrants who risk their lives to reach an imagined new world in Europe, and the other following the cockpit recordings of the messages between ground controller Sergei Korolev and the world’s first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, as he became the first human being ever to see the earth from space.
Both texts are beautiful, full of an intense sense of humanity stretched to its limit, facing unimaginable extremes of danger and exhilaration in the quest for a new future. In Fischer’s own production, actors Ryan Gerald, Mercy Ojelade and Adura Onashile pitch their voices perfectly to the texture of the story, while musicians Gameli Tordzro and Tyler Collins produce an extraordinary range of music and sound, on guitar and percussion, as they bring to life Matt Padden’s extraordinary soundscape. And the whole show reminds us with terrific force of this truth about human history: that where we can go, some of us will always have the courage to go, particularly when crisis or oppression makes life at home intolerable – and the risk of oblivion a better option than inaction, as we head into the unknown.
It’s perhaps the greatest of all his great novels, a vast, swirling story of love and longing, class and money, set against the backdrop of explosive economic and social change that was England in the 1850s. And now, out of the darkness of Becky Minto’s towering set – all black picture frames and niches that double as grand interiors, the walls of city streets, and something beyond – comes a stage adaptation that takes the full measure of Charles Dickens’s mighty 1861 novel Great Expectations, and does it more than justice.
First seen in a small-scale TAG production in 1988, Jo Clifford’s great stage version focuses tightly on the story of Dickens’s iconic young hero, Pip, brought up by his hard-handed elder sister and her kindly husband Joe at a blacksmith’s forge in the Essex marshes, but destined to have his life transformed both by the intervention of the eccentric Miss Havisham – a wealthy and reclusive local lady who wants him as playmate for her beautiful ward Estella – and, later, by a strange anonymous bequest of money that transforms him into a young London ‘gentleman’.
And now, this beautifully clear and passionate version is revived in a co-production by Dundee Rep and Perth Theatre, directed by the Rep’s Jemima Levick, that simply ravishes audiences, over almost three hours, with a combination of storytelling, drama, light, music and movement so powerful that the emotional effect is sometimes almost overwhelming. Both David Paul Jones’s passionate and lyrical live piano score, and EJ Boyle’s fine choreography, make an outstanding contribution to the story, as the score sometimes swoops from the nineteenth into the twentieth century with songs of love and longing that bring Pip’s obsession with Estella frighteningly close to us, and as the movement – exquisitely delivered by a Dundee Ensemble cast of eight – echoes great recent Scottish shows like Black Watch and The Salon Project, using the ritual of clothing to trace Pip’s transformations from poor boy to gentleman.
Thomas Cotran is eloquent as Pip, Ann Louise Ross haunting and magnificent as Miss Havisham, Millie Turner a chilling and heartbreaking Estella. And if, in the final scenes, the pace flags slightly, it’s a minor flaw in a stunningly well-made show, that leaves the audience in no doubt about how the politics of wealth and class damages lives, distorts desire, makes a mockery of love; and ensures that traditional happy endings are hard to find, even in the world of great imaginative fiction.
In the beginning, there is water, or an image of water: light and darkness moving over the face of the deep. We see a man tumbling towards us, like some fallen angel moving through water rather than air; then we see that same man, apparently come to rest on the grubby first-floor balcony of an art-house cinema just a little like the Hillhead Salon. The balcony belongs to the cinema bar, the Elite; and our hero, or anti-hero, stands waiting for the faint glimmer of sun – just a couple of minutes a day – that occasionally lights the horizon of the city where he now dwells.
These are the opening moments of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, as re-imagined by writer David Greig and director Graham Eatough, for this mighty new four-hour stage version of the novel, which was first published in 1981 – although, since we are dealing here with a great postmodernist dedicated to the disruption of form, we begin not at the chronological beginning of the tale, but at the start of what the novel calls Book 3, and Greig calls Act 2, when our hero’s life as a young, asthmatic and eczema-ridden would-be artist called Duncan Thaw, in the relatively familiar setting of post-war Glasgow, has reached a crisis that leads to the transition – drowning, rebirth or shift to a parallel universe – that we have just glimpsed.
It’s this huge imaginative leap – from an all-too-recognisable mid-twentieth-century Glasgow of war and rationing, limited horizons and endless petty agonies and sexual humiliations, to the dystopian fantasy-vision of a future Glasgow called Unthank – that gives Alasdair Gray’s great novel its huge, transformative significance in late twentieth-century Scottish literature, not least because it so clearly links the conventional twentieth-century narratives of working-class Scottish life to some of the great emerging global genres of the twenty-first century – to science fiction and fantasy, to dystopian narratives of environmental collapse driven by monstrous corporate greed, and to the idea, less well established in 1981 than today, of parallel universes which are both familiar, and profoundly, strangely different.
And it’s because it embraces and explores all those genres with such confidence and flair, while never losing sight of the essential narrative of Lanark/Thaw/Gray’s astonishing journey, that Greig and Eatough’s new stage version – co-produced by the Edinburgh International Festival and the Citizens’ Theatre – comes so close to the impossible goal of doing full justice to this magnificent novel. The linchpin of the production is Sandy Grierson’s astonishing performance as Lanark himself: thoughtful, self-absorbed, sometimes childlike, yet sexually and creatively driven, and – crucially – possessed of a physical precision and athleticism that enables him to switch in an instant between naturalism, and a much more stylised, metaphorical sense of Lanark’s journey.
Grierson is supported every step of the way, though, by so many other strands of Eatough’s astonishing production. There’s Jessica Hardwick’s terrific matching performance as Rima, the Eve to Lanark’s Adam, and the defining woman of his life, often given the freedom completely to contradict Lanark’s version of his own narrative. There’s the superb ensemble work of a company of ten actors who are also great Scottish theatremakers, many of them deeply linked to the wave of unstoppable cultural change in Scotland that began in the early 198os: the company includes Gerry Mulgrew, George Drennan, Louise Ludgate, Paul Thomas Hickey and Andy Clark, alongside a trio of younger actors.
And there is the constant, inventive stream of shifting imagery, both visual and aural, delivered by designer Laura Hopkins, lighting designer Nigel Edwards, video artist Simon Wainwright, and composer and sound designer Nick Powell, who created a ‘supergroup’ of musicians influenced by Gray’s work to conjure up scenes like the unforgettable fifties-style ‘Unthank Jazz’ sequence, with superb choreography by EJ Boyle; there’s also an inspired use of video, and of the old song ‘Ca’ the Yowes Tae the Knowes’, to conjure up the vague remembered glimpses of Glasgow that haunt Lanark when he reaches the brave new world of The Institute, a hospital-like, pseudo-Utopian circle of hell that also features in Act 2 of the story.
Just here and there, there’s perhaps a slight sense of this huge scene-by-scene ingenuity acting as a substitute for a deep analysis of Gray’s themes; and then again, an understandable tendency to rely a little too heavily on Grierson’s charismatic central performance, in a way that slightly diminishes Gray’s intense scepticism about Thaw/Lanark’s voice, and its reliability.
In the final, apocalyptic scenes, though – where Greig plays boldly and theatrically with Gray’s questions about the shifting layers of fiction within the story, and even takes us, in a superb moment of graphic imagination, to visit Gray himself, before returning us to Lanark’s poignant final scene at the Unthank Necropolis – this brave adaptation seems wholly at one with the bold, mysterious and infinitely searching spirit of Gray’s novel. On Sunday night, after the premiere of Lanark, David Greig sent a Twitter message about Alasdair Gray, now eighty years old, and in intensive care in Glasgow: ‘Thinking of Mr G right now. Wishing him well and wishing he could be with us. He wrote an amazing transformative book. The rest is homage.’ What’s certain, though, is that if Alasdair Gray could see this version of Lanark, centre-stage at the Edinburgh International Festival, he would know that this story alone represents a great life’s work; and that its impact – not only in Scotland, but across the world of twenty-first-century imagination – has barely begun to be measured.
It’s been a mighty late-summer theatre season for Scots who care about the range and brilliance of their recent cultural inheritance, with new stage versions of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark and Alan Warner’s The Sopranos taking audiences by storm.
And now, at Dundee Rep, comes Joe Douglas’s glorious revival of what’s arguably the single most important show in the whole history of Scottish theatre: important not only because of its angry, hilarious, brilliantly researched political content, still almost frighteningly relevant today, but because its ceilidh form, and its passionate commitment to touring to communities large and small, galvanised an irreversible change in what Scotland thought theatre was, what it could do, and who its audience might be.
The task of reviving 7:84 Scotland’s great 1973 masterpiece The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil is therefore a hugely complex one, charged with cultural meaning. And what Joe Douglas and his Dundee company have done is to find a powerful, joyful and hugely effective middle way between a faithful revival of the original text and songs – which they certainly deliver – and the kind of full-scale updating that this show could certainly take, and may one day get.
There are moments when the sheer scale and luxury of the production seem slightly startling, compared with the rugged original. The stage at Dundee Rep is a comfortable and spacious place, opened out, in Graham McLaren’s design, into a warm, wooden-floored arena surrounded on three sides by café tables. The band – under the direction of MD Alasdair Macrae – features cello, clàrsach and double bass as well as the more traditional accordion and fiddle; the ten-strong cast is bigger, and includes a higher proportion of women.
If the staging is more lavish, though, the force of the material remains the same, as the show charts the story of the use and exploitation of Scottish land and resources from the clearances of the eighteenth century to the 1970s oil boom and beyond. The stage rings to the sound of Gaelic song, beautifully owned and sung by the women of the cast, Irene Macdougall, Jo Freer, Emily Winter and Christina Gordon. Young John Macaulay makes a superbly absurd Duke of Sutherland, Billy Mack is a fine top-hatted villain as the hated Sutherland factor Patrick Sellar.
And if the roars that greet Macaulay’s fleeting appearance as David Cameron, or the odd reference to the independence referendum, suggest an appetite for updating that this memorable production doesn’t quite fulfil, those responses only point the way to a great continuing future for this vital play. In the opening scene, the script points out that the story of Scotland’s land and people is one with a beginning, a middle and, as yet, no end; what this fine, dynamic revival achieves is to ensure that 7:84’s great play will reach out to a new generation, and continue to evolve, develop, and live, along with the story of Scotland itself.
Vladimir and Estragon, Didi and Gogo. The two old tramps who take the stage in Samuel Beckett’s groundbreaking minimalist masterpiece – first seen in Paris in 1953 – are perhaps the most significant characters in the whole of twentieth-century drama, the ones who, in the words of the play’s first British director, Peter Hall, ‘challenged and defeated a century of literal naturalism, and returned theatre to its metaphorical roots’.
Yet in all the productions I have seen and loved, over the years, I have never experienced one that lavishes so much care and genius on the development of the characters of Didi and Gogo – their different energies, and their contrasting responses to the situation in which they find themselves – as this 50th Anniversary staging by Mark Thomson of the Lyceum, featuring the magnificent pairing of Brian Cox and Bill Paterson as Vladimir and Estragon.
That these two actors are no longer young is no secret: Cox actually appeared, aged nineteen, in the very first production of the Lyceum Theatre Company, fifty years ago this month. Yet what’s extraordinary about their combined performance – as they wait and survive beside their shrivelled tree, in that empty landscape that soon comes to seem like a metaphor for human life itself – is how clearly we can see the little lads they once were, beneath the battered hats and thinning hair. Cox’s Didi is mercurial, restless, funny, always performing, the very image of the lively, energetic one who can never quite believe that there is now nothing more to be done; Paterson’s Gogo is much quieter and more poetic, more confused and defeated by their situation, yet also closer to a recognition of its reality.
In this infinitely rich evocation of character – absolutely Scottish, yet completely universal – the detailed quality of the acting is sometimes breathtaking: Cox’s body language and facial expressiveness a tragicomic revelation, Paterson’s presence more subdued, but perfectly pitched. I’ve seen productions that gave the two central characters more support, towards the play’s long-drawn-out end; that were more sharply paced, or that made more of this double act’s music-hall or fairground roots.
Yet given world-class support from John Bett as rich class-enemy Pozzo and Benny Young as his desperately ill-treated servant Lucky, and an exquisitely empty, luminous set by designer Michael Taylor and lighting man Mark Doubleday, Mark Thomson’s anniversary production offers a unique, austere, yet immensely rich insight into what may be the greatest play of the last century; and gives absolute primacy to two great creative actors, not young, but – enthrallingly and obviously – still in their prime.
The Golden Anniversary production of Waiting for Godot marked the climax of an exceptional year at the Royal Lyceum; and the excitement was all the more intense because the board had announced, early in September, that the theatre’s next artistic director – from the summer of 2016 – would be David Greig, the first playwright to take on the directorship of one of Scotland’s great building-based companies since James Bridie at the Citizens’ in the 1940s.
It was a great moment, for the playwrights whose sheer creative force has driven much of the recent story of Scottish theatre. Yet David Greig’s appointment to such a major public role also confirmed the feeling that we might have to wait a while for their full creative response to the latest phase in our shared experience. It seems to be a truth about theatre, evident from the whole of this story, that it often runs perhaps twenty years ahead of formal politics in its recognition of cultural change, and a few years behind in its response to unpredictable events.
And so, for the time being, Scotland remains the stateless nation it was in 1982, although one utterly transformed, and infinitely more self-aware. And like every other stateless nation, it remains a rich field of dreams, where ideas about identity, belonging, past and future are always in play; a place where the drama of our shared life has found an increasingly passionate and confident voice in the drama we present on stage, and where the dreaming we share in theatre plays a subtle but profound role in shaping our future, by transforming our sense of what we have been, what we are, and what we might become.