Theatre
Northern exposure
Published 24 April 2008
It’s not just Black Watch – new Scottish theatre is going through a golden age
Atten-shun! Black Watch finally marches into London this summer - the play, that is, not the eponymous Scottish regiment. The talismanic show for the National Theatre of Scotland, written by Gregory Burke and directed by John Tiffany, premiered on the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006 and has already achieved cult status on three continents. It was hailed as "the theatrical event of the year" by New York Magazine in 2007, and will be heading back to New York for a second run after the London dates.
Black Watch has captured the headlines, but it is not the only decent piece of theatre to come out of Scotland recently. The NTS has already had three other international hits: The Wolves in the Walls, Aalst and a pyromaniacal version of The Bacchae starring Alan Cumming - not bad, considering the company came into being only in 2004 and launched in 2006. Last year, Scottish theatres won five of the ten Theatrical Management Association regional theatre awards.
And now, in the "Brits off Broadway" season that runs in New York until late June, three of the eight shows on offer will be from Scotland. Two of them are by David Greig (who also wrote the translation of The Bacchae). Yellow Moon is aimed at that tricky 14-15 demographic, and is about a couple of kids who run away to the Highlands after an accidental killing. Guy Hollands directs it for his Glasgow-based Tag Citizens' Theatre using just four chairs. Damascus is an intelligent take on the Middle East, seen through the eyes of an English language teacher adrift in the Syrian capital. It was Philip Howard's final production at the Traverse before he quit late last year.
The third Scots play in Brits off Broadway is Torben Betts's nightmare vision of complacency, revolution and greed The Unconquered, commissioned and brilliantly directed by Muriel Romanes as a kind of expressionist cartoon for her all-female Stellar Quines company (quine is an old Scots word for "girl").
For a country where a particularly austere version of the Reformation deliberately squeezed theatre out of public life for more than 300 years, a country with no theatrical heritage to speak of - certainly no Shakespeare or Molière, Chekhov or Synge - this is all heady stuff. Theatre people in the boho quarters of Glasgow and Edinburgh have a spring in their step. Theatregoers are flocking in their tens of thousands to big, confident shows such as Dundee Rep's Sunshine on Leith, a jukebox musical using the Proclaimers' back catalogue, that could only have been produced here.
So what has brought about this remarkable renaissance? The arrival of a national theatre, a dream long held by many, but one that needed the imprimatur of a Scottish Parliament before it finally came to life, has certainly played its part. For a start, its £4.3m-a-year subsidy almost doubled the total amount of central government money going into the theatre. But the NTS could hardly be more different from national theatres elsewhere, especially the monolith on the South Bank in London. It has no building of its own, yet it is expected to reach every part of the country (the NTS official opening night, in a splendid gesture, took place in ten places at once, from Shetland to Dumfries) and must also work on both small and large scales and generally devise co-productions with existing organisations.
It has been bolstered, however, by a generation of talented writers, directors and actors who happened to emerge at the same time. "There's a sense of community, of being part of something called 'Scottish theatre'," says Dominic Hill, Howard's replacement at the Traverse, whose tremendous production of Peer Gynt at Dundee Rep last autumn reinforced that theatre's claim to be an essential theatrical destination. "It sets up an environment that feels creative, open. You can mix things up, talk to different people from different environments."
The arrival of the parliament nearly ten years ago has given new life to a whole range of Scottish institutions, not least cultural ones. Greig links the present burst of confidence directly to Scotland's changing political status. "All the other places that have strong devolutionary movements have brilliant drama," he says, citing Catalonia, Quebec and Flanders. "In order to get a bunch of good playwrights, you need a bit of history. For the first time in the 1990s we started to have that, and revivable work from the likes of Liz Lochhead and Iain Heggie and Chris Hannan. That built up into a confident voice which then coincided, like a surfer catching a wave, with the actual moment of devolution."
Vicky Featherstone, NTS artistic director, says that the very lack of an English-style tradition is "the starting point, philosophically, for the success of the NTS. It's incredibly liberating. We have no responsibility to a canon. We can do whatever we want to." She says audiences behave differently as a result. "They are hungry for a good experience. They aren't happy to go to the theatre for theatre's sake. They feel ownership of the work - it's very exciting."
Oddly enough, many of the people leading the charge - Featherstone, John Tiffany, Dominic Hill, James Brining (Hill's former colleague at Dundee Rep), Andy Arnold from the Arches in Glasgow, Neil Murray, executive producer of the NTS - are not from Scotland. Perhaps even more oddly, given the present political climate with support for a referendum on Scottish independence apparently growing by the day, everyone knows that and nobody seems to mind.
Things are not perfect - the Glasgow Citizens' has not yet recovered from the passing of the great triumvirate, led by Giles Havergal, that began in the 1970s and ran it for 30 years; hardly anything is produced north of Pitlochry; the NTS still has not yet nailed a classic text (from anywhere). The Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh, the biggest rep, rarely offers anything less than very good but never quite blows you away. And it is still incredibly hard to earn any kind of living as an actor, so the talent drain continues.
As Featherstone admits, it is all very well being dazzlingly modern and contemporary, but there is nothing to fall back on if it all goes wrong. Yet altogether, this seems like less of a false dawn than the one back in the Edinburgh of the 18th-century Enlightenment, where one theatregoer was so overwhelmed by a rare piece of Scottish theatre that he stood up in the stalls and yelled out: "Whaur's yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?"
Robert Dawson Scott writes about theatre in Scotland for the Times
"Black Watch" is currently touring. For details visit: http://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com
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