Scottish literature has often been seen as significantly weakened by the lack of a strong native tradition of drama. Isolated works of great power, such as David Lindsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1554) point towards how much was lost when the Court of James VI moved to London to preside over the glories of English Jacobean theatre, leaving the Reformed Church seeking to suppress all dramatic performances in Scotland on the grounds that they were inherently evil. Theatrical art in Scotland long continued to struggle against the censures of Calvinism: formal theatre was often a private rather than a public event, and it was not until the eighteenth century that permanent playhouses were established. Even in the mid-eighteenth century the enormous success of John Home’s Douglas (1756) — which some believed had given Scotland an equivalent of Shakespeare’s work — was met with a torrent of criticism from the Church, especially since Home himself was a clergyman.
Douglas, however, did initiate a taste for Scottish historical drama further encouraged by Macpherson’s Ossian in the 1760s, and by the plays of Joanna Baillie in the 1790s. The Family Legend, her dark tale of Highland intrigue and violence was produced at the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh in 1811, under the guidance of Walter Scott, and it was Scott who went on to dominate nineteenth-century theatre through adaptations of his novels: plays based on his works formed the backbone of a flourishing theatrical culture in Scotland down to the 1880s. Adaptations of Guy Manneringy Rob Roy, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, and The Bride of Lammermoor, together with plays based on Ossian and on historical figures such as William Wallace and Bonnie Prince Charlie constituted a National Drama which exercised a powerful influence on nineteenth-century Scottish culture in general.
It was, however, a drama largely without dramatists. In the late nineteenth century, the music-hall and variety provided alternative forms of entertainment whose broader popularity encouraged the building of more and grander theatres, but still without much encouraging native drama. Any conventional dramatic performances mounted in the new theatres generally took the form of touring productions sent round the country by London-based managements: any Scottish component survived almost entirely in the form of pantomime. As Bill Findlay’s History of Scottish Theatre (1998) shows, traditions of Scottish theatre, before the twentieth century, were never as weak as some critics have suggested, yet it was often a theatre centred on spectacle and performance rather than on playwrights and developing dramatic styles. Scottish drama entered the early years of the twentieth century with no strong place in the Scottish culture which was beginning to reshape itself at this time. Significantly, the first major Scottish dramatist of the new century, J. M. Barrie, had all his plays produced in London and New York.
Until the Second World War, serious theatre in Scotland remained almost entirely a matter of short-lived professional organisations and long-running amateur groups. The example of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin encouraged both the Scottish Repertory Theatre in Glasgow in the years before the First World War — an early inspiration for James Bridie — and the establishment in the 1920s of the Scottish National Players, who organised regular seasons in Glasgow and tours of the Scottish regions. With work by Robert Bain, John Brandane and Joe Corrie, the Players did much to fulfil their commitment ‘to develop Scottish national drama through … plays of Scottish life and character’, their influence sometimes extended by the direct transfer of some productions for radio broadcasting in the early days of BBC Scotland. They remained, however, an amateur or at most semi-professional organisation. It was not until the establishment of the Citizens’ Theatre in 1943, under the guidance of O. H. Mavor (‘James Bridie’), and its move to a permanent site in the Gorbals in 1945, financed by the industrialist Sir Frederick Stewart, that a reliable stage was set up for the skills of Scottish dramatists and actors — ones further encouraged, in the latter case, by the foundation of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, also with Bridie’s help, in 1950.
Between the wars, Scottish theatre was dominated by the Scottish Community Drama Association and the various groups which it spawned. The SCDA’s annual festival of one-act plays — attracting over 300 entries in 1926, only four years after its foundation — was the highlight of the amateur season, and did allow Scottish dramatists to reach a wide audience. Yet the styles required for amateur performance could be destructive of serious talent. Writers such as Joe Come — whose plays sometimes came first, second and third in SCDA festivals — and T. M. Weston found that they could earn a living by turning out what David Hutchison has described as ‘amusing but empty Scottish comedies’, full of ‘facile humour and neat solutions’. Nevertheless, the amateur movement did provide a pool of actors accustomed to the presentation of Scots character: without it, great performers such as Roddy McMillan or Duncan Macrae (who played the lead role in the first, amateur production of Jamie the Saxt, 1937) might not have found a way onto the stage.
The most significant development from the amateur movement, however, was the Glasgow-based Unity Theatre company. Unity combined an amateur base with a small team of professionals — including Roddy McMillan — and encouraged Scottish drama dealing directly with contemporary urban society, rather than the rural life often favoured by the Scottish National Players. Plays such as Robert McLeish’s The Gorbals Story (1946), depicting the consequences of the post-war housing shortage, and Ena Lamont Stewart’s presentation of unemployment in Men Should Weep (1947) illustrated the belief emphasised in the company’s manifesto, drawn from the Russian writer Maxim Gorki: that ‘the theatre is the school of the people — it makes them think and it makes them feel’. Unity’s example both encouraged a long line of Scottish companies, such as 7:84 and Wildcat, combining theatrical innovation with a strong political message, and helped establish a style of realistic drama — including Roddy McMillan’s All in Good Faith (1954) and The Bevellers (1973) — depicting the harsh realities of working life, in the west of Scotland particularly. Like many of its successors, Unity was also to run foul of the Arts Council, which had provided some of its early funding, and the company had to cease work in the early 1950s. By then, however, it had helped initiate the Edinburgh Festival Fringe by putting on plays without official support at the first Edinburgh Festival in 1947.
Begun with the intention of helping international relations in the aftermath of the war, the Edinburgh International Festival was to have a key role in the development both of theatre in Scotland and of the work of Scottish playwrights, one sustained throughout the latter half of the century. The Festival brought the new theatrical styles of post-war Europe and the United States to Scotland, allowing dramatists and actors access to an international culture from which Britain had been largely cut off since the Depression of the 1930s. It also provided a venue in which significant audiences and serious critical attention could sometimes be directed on Scottish drama — in particular, in the first festivals, through the ground-breaking production of Lindsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis by the American director Tyrone Guthrie. Regularly revived in the following half-century. Lindsay’s play was performed, in Guthrie’s staging, in the open theatrical space of the Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland. Given the Kirk’s centuries-old suspicion of drama, the setting was ironic: symbolic, too, of the extent to which theatre was to take the place of the church as an arena of public debate — or at any rate to benefit from a more liberated climate — in the years of declining religious faith which followed.
Practically, because it had been designed for debate rather than as an acting chamber, the Assembly Hall posed immediate theatrical problems, solved by Guthrie’s reinvention of the Elizabethan thrust stage, jutting out among the spectators so that the actors are surrounded by the audience. Involving the audience much more immediately than a proscenium stage, his tactics set a pattern regularly followed by later Scottish theatre, often drawing its spectators into close complicity with performers through shared outlooks or simple physical proximity. Such tactics were followed by 7:84 in their their ‘ceilidh house’ style of theatre. In other ways, they were also very influentially sustained by a new theatre spawned by the Edinburgh Festival and the ‘alternative’ styles of its Fringe — the Traverse, opened in a tiny room in a former brothel in the High Street in 1963, before moving on to more permanent bases in the Grassmarket and Cambridge Street. Virtually the first professional studio space in Britain, the Traverse quickly influenced theatre and theatre architecture throughout the world, while its commitment to staging new plays, local ones particularly, was crucial to the development of theatre within Scotland in the last decades of the century — of plays included in this volume, The Jesuit, Bondagers, and Shining Souls all received at the Traverse first productions which might not have been easily or so effectively available elsewhere.
That early Festival production of Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis established proximities between stage and audience which were not only physical, but above all linguistic, reminding its audiences — and a generation of writers, actors and directors — of the continuing vitality of Scots as a dramatic medium. Guthrie’s production helped consolidate for the drama particular powers of writing in Scots which authors of Scottish Renaissance movement had developed in other ways for poetry and the novel in the 1920s, and to establish in the theatre a kind of unique and naturally political performative space for Scots language and identity. In the theatre, the Scottish voice could be heard, live and direct, and not silent on the page as in poetry, or interpreted and masked by the ‘standard’ speech of a narrator. While poets such as Hugh MacDiarmid had tried to remake the possibility of poetry written in a literary Scots going back to the Middle Ages, dramatists such as Joe Corrie and Ena Lamont Stewart were providing, by the very requirements of their stage realism, a liberating sense of the contemporary Scottish voice as a theatrical experience. From the 1920s to the 1940s, in a period of profound economic and political crisis, it was in drama that the experiences of the working classes and the urban world of industrial Scotland — barely registered in fiction at the time — were most directly captured, with the liberating voice of the stage symbolically enacting a kind of freedom characters were so often denied in their lives. Characters and audiences in an often divided society were united in mutual recognition of shared accent, shared experience, shared outlook.
Such possibilities were even more significant after the Second World War. In the mid-twentieth century, after the end of Empire, Scotland was a country engaged in a fundamental redefinition of its identity, yet the media in which Scottish life and experience could be represented — film, radio, television — were all organised within a British society still rigidly hierarchical and deeply marked by the centralisation which had been required by government control of broadcasting during the Second World War. There was little space in any of the mass media for serious engagement with Scottish experience. An agenda designed in London for a British audience could only allow Scots to address themselves in stereotypical forms such as the BBC’s Doctor Finlay’s Casebook, offering Scottish actors only a limited range of parts, while Received Pronunciation — ironically, sometimes imposed by Scots such as Lord Reith at the BBC — was still used to censor class and regional expression. Audiences found live theatre, on the other hand, readily able to speak their own language, metaphorically as well as literally — able to communicate, immediately and intimately, new representations of Scottish experience and new ways of understanding it. From the 1960s to the 1980s, concurrently with the expansion of nationalism in the 1970s and the increasing momentum of political debate in the lead-up to the Devolution Referendum of 1979, theatre became a driving force for Scottish cultural change.
Paradoxically, in the later twentieth century, what had been, apparently, the weakest of Scotland’s literary traditions came to have the most profound impact on Scottish cultural affairs, with a whole new generation of dramatists emerging to build on earlier successes and develop the new accents of a liberated Scottish voice, suddenly imbued again with a sense both of its history and its contemporary significance. This encouraged further concentration on working-class experience, homes and workplaces, where voices were most distinctively Scottish, with playwrights such as George Munro, Bill Bryden, C. P. Taylor, Stewart Conn, and John Byrne — in his Slab Boys Trilogy (1978–82) — extending along with Roddy McMillan the idiom established by Joe Come and Glasgow Unity. It also encouraged further concentration — as in Robert McLellan’s Jamie the Saxt (1937) — on periods of history before English became the dominant language in Scottish life and affairs. The Scottish voice became the real protagonist in some of these plays — in Donald Campbell’s The Jesuit (1976), for example, in which audiences’ sympathies are shaped by contrasts between the standard English of the wilful martyr Ogilvie and the rough tones of the Scots soldiery obliged to look after him. For other dramatists such as Sidney Goodsir Smith in The Wallace (1960) or Hector McMillan in The Rising (1973), Scottish history provided contexts — rather like those W. B. Yeats created for the Irish theatre — around which nationalist sentiments could be focused and directed. By no means all of Scottish historical drama, of course, was nationalist in orientation. John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973), probably the most successful Scottish play of the 1970s (not included in this volume as it is widely available elsewhere) used past events to warn of the contemporary threat of a multi-national capitalism: whether it was better resisted by socialism or nationalism was an issue on which dramatist and audience were often to disagree. For other historical dramatists such as Liz Lochhead in Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987) and Sue Glover in Bondagers (1991), the politics of gender rather than party became a primary interest. All these writers nevertheless continued to demonstrate some form of Robert McLellan’s conviction that — especially given the thinness of surviving Scottish dramatic tradition in early centuries — a return to the past was necessary in order to create for Scottish history a coherence and significance of the kind long established for England by Shakespeare; and to show, as Lochhead does in the last scene of her play, how heavily the Scottish past bears on the present.
Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, however, marks a kind of terminus in this project, and a change of direction for Scottish theatre. A new generation of playwrights entered the limelight in the late 1980s and 1990s, including Chris Hannan, David Greig, Simon Donald, Rona Munro, Duncan McLean, Ann Man di Mambro. For these writers — even for Lochhead herself in Perfect Days (1998) — Scottish history, identity and experience no longer demanded the kind of direct interrogation which shapes the opening scene of Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. Instead, they had become a matter of shared assumption with audiences — a familiar, immediately recognisable base for the investigation of wider issues or forces — such as the ‘thrones dominions, powers, virtues, principalities, archangels, angels’ that Chris Hannan shows brooding over a Glasgow otherwise entirely recognisable, in language and behaviour, in Shining Souls (1996). This new, relaxed mood in Scottish drama was also in evidence in Your Cheatin’ Heart (1990), employing the once inaccessible medium of television in confident expectation that a mass audience would follow the accents of the west of Scotland, and the kind of frictions between stylishness — verbal, musical and sartorial — and the urban squalor it seeks to disguise which John Byrne had first explored in The Slab Boys. Scottish drama had good reason for such confidence, given how far the dynamic it had generated has passed into other genres by the end of the century. Novels such as those of James Kelman or Irvine Welsh had translated into prose narrative some of the accents and vocal effects explored by dramatists, and these passed on in due course into the wave of Scottish film-making of the 1990s, from Trainspotting to The Rat Catcher (1999).
Scottish drama also gained in confidence from the expansion in resources and performance spaces throughout the country in the latter part of the century. Strongly supported by the Scottish Arts Council, repertory companies continued to work in Edinburgh, Dundee, Glasgow and Perth. Increasing numbers of civic spaces throughout the country provided venues for touring companies, encouraging groups such as 7:84 who set out to take theatre to the people, and to create audiences in areas, especially in the Highlands, often starved of live theatre in the past. New theatres were constructed in Dundee and Pitlochry, with many refurbished elsewhere, and the new Tron and Tramway spaces, alongside the continuing unique success of the Citizens’, contributing substantially to Glasgow’s shifting cultural profile and its adoption as European City of Culture in 1990. New theatrical spaces and new dramatic energies also produced a generation of outstanding directors: Clive Perry and Bill Bryden in the early 1970s at the Edinburgh Lyceum, venue for The Bevellers as well as Bryden’s own plays; Max Stafford-Clark and Chris Parr, encouraging new Scottish writing at the Traverse; Giles Havergal, bringing with his associates Robert David MacDonald and Philip Prowse a huge range of the European repertoire to the Citizens’; Gerry Mulgrew, channelling with Communicado Theatre Company some of the energies of the European avant-garde into productions of plays such as Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off.
Even an anthology as large as this one cannot cover anything but a small sample of the achievements of the twentieth-century Scottish drama. We have chosen plays to illustrate both the historical development of Scottish drama during the century, and some of the different traditions and movements discussed above, with J. M. Barrie’s Mary Rose (1920) and James Bridie’s Mr Bolfry (1941) representing the mainstream, bourgeois theatre as it appeared in the earlier part of the century. Many other authors might have been included, and other plays by those who are; some of this work is in print in other editions, and some, we hope, may be included in future anthologies. Meanwhile, it should be a matter of congratulation as well as regret that twentieth-century Scottish drama so comprehensively transcends the bounds of what any single volume can contain.
Cairns Craig and Randall Stevenson