Afterword

Philip Howard

On 17 September 2014, the day before Scotland’s Independence Referendum, the National Theatre of Scotland curated a twelve-hour event at the Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, entitled Blabbermouth – ‘a celebration of Scotland by Scotland’s most celebrated people’. Filled with live music, the day featured artists, politicians, journalists, actors and writers reading their favourite piece of writing about Scotland, the only proviso being that it had to have been written by a Scot.

McMillan knew that the result of the Referendum the next day would, most likely, leave Scotland divided roughly in half. So she chose and read the last chapter (‘Good-bye’) of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, adventure story but also fable of Scotland’s binary nature – in which young David Balfour, the rational Lowland Protestant, and Alan Breck Stewart, romantic Catholic Jacobite outlaw, part company after their Highland adventure at the spot known as Rest-and-be-Thankful, on Corstorphine Hill outside Edinburgh. David walks on, down into Edinburgh to the British Linen Company to pick up his papers – there’s a sense that, having learned so much about the other half of Scotland, he is now ready to begin his life as an adult under the Union of Parliaments, still relatively in its infancy. Entering the city, he is stunned by the height of the buildings, the finery and the foulness, but, more than that, he thinks of Alan, up there on Corstorphine Hill, still an outlaw, and feels a cold gnawing in his heart, ‘like a remorse for something wrong’.

McMillan tells me how important this piece of writing is about the ‘doubleness’ of Scotland, about how this is a creative thing, about the sense of walking alongside the opposing half. It strikes me how well this idea of trying always to hold the other side of the argument in your heart applies to her career as a theatre critic.