{"id":220,"date":"2019-05-04T13:53:33","date_gmt":"2019-05-04T13:53:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/19\/?p=220"},"modified":"2022-02-06T19:43:49","modified_gmt":"2022-02-06T19:43:49","slug":"modernism-and-scottish-theatre-since-1969","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/19\/modernism-and-scottish-theatre-since-1969\/","title":{"rendered":"Modernism and Scottish Theatre Since 1969"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Mark Brown<\/strong>
254 pp. Palgrave Macmillan<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reviewed by Mark Fisher<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scottish\ntheatre gives the historian a dilemma. How do you shape a coherent narrative\nout of a disrupted story? In many theatre cultures, a line connects past and\npresent. Writing about the London stage, for example, you can get from medieval\nmystery plays to Harry Potter and the\nCursed Child<\/em> via Shakespeare, Sheridan and Shaw, in an apparently seamless\nchain of events. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Likewise,\na modern-day U.S. playwright will be aware of a lineage stretching back to\nO’Neill, Williams and Miller, while a twenty-first-century Irish dramatist\ncannot ignore the legacy of Synge, O’Casey and Beckett.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\nScotland, thanks largely to the heavy hand of the Calvinist church after the\nReformation, any such line is broken. Yes, there is the shining example of Sir\nDavid Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie\nEstaitis <\/em>(A Satire of the Three\nEstates<\/em>), first performed in its entirety in 1552, but, unless you count adaptations\nof the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the emergence of a “national\ndrama” in the 1800s, it was not until the twentieth century that anything\nlike a notable body of work began to appear. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even\nthen, the influence on successive generations is uncertain. J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan<\/em> is the most successful play by\na Scottish writer, but its 1904 debut was in London and, for all its\npopularity, it has had no more influence on the tradition of playwriting in\nScotland than anywhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This\nis the reason why the late Donald Campbell, despite being a playwright himself,\nchose to tell the story of Scottish theatre through its actors. In Playing for Scotland: A History of the\nScottish Stage 1715\u20131965 <\/em>(Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1996), he asserted that\nthe “history of Scottish Theatre, unlike that of its English counterpart,\ncannot be told in terms of institutions, dramatists or even plays.” There\nis some dispute about how much this is true (the academic Ian Brown has claimed\nScotland has a “hidden tradition”), but, either way, it would be hard\nto claim the Scottish playwrights who have flourished in the last 50 years had been\noverburdened by history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nhistorian’s dilemma can be put another way. What if we’ve only just got to the\nmeat of the story? What if everything that has gone before was but a preamble\nto the main event? What if the golden era is now? This, or something like it, is\nthe contention of Mark Brown in Modernism\nand Scottish Theatre Since 1969<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A\nformer member of the executive committee of the International Association of\nTheatre Critics, he chooses 1969 as his starting point not only because it gives\nhim a neat half century to focus on, but also because it was the year the\ntriumvirate of artistic directors, Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse and Robert\nDavid MacDonald began a lengthy reign at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre. After\ngaining notoriety for an iconoclastic all-male production of Hamlet<\/em>, shocking enough in 1970 to make\nfront-page news, the theatre went on to stage writers such as Genet, Brecht and\nB\u00fcchner, in a style that ignored the prevailing realism of theatre south of the\nborder in England in favour of something more flamboyant, irreverent and\nnon-naturalistic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mark Brown. Photo: Catarina Neves<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

That,\ncontends Brown, introduced Scottish audiences to European modernism. Along with\nother influences, notably Gerry Mulgrew’s outward-looking Communicado theatre\ncompany and the cosmopolitan programmes of the Edinburgh International\nFestival, it helped pave the way for what he calls a “Scottish theatrical\nrenaissance.” In particular, he looks to the generation who came to the\nfore in the 1990s, and his book includes extended interviews with those he\nregards as key players: playwrights David Greig, Zinnie Harris, David Harrower\nand Anthony Neilson, and director Stewart Laing. Whether they are conscious of\nit or not, these theatremakers, he argues, are inheritors of a modernist\ntradition that has not only given the country a distinct theatrical identity\nbut has also created, since the 1970s, “the best period for theatre in\nScotland.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As\na way of making narrative sense of an unwieldy history, Brown’s thesis is\npretty robust. Inevitably, it frays around the edges, but in an intelligent and\nreadable survey, he is bold enough to interrogate his own assumptions and to question\nthe limits of his theory. Where it works is in the broad observation that many\nof the best productions of recent times, and most of the work of these\nparticular playwrights, has had a modernist sensibility. Theatremakers have succumbed\nneither to the literalness of naturalism nor the cool irony of postmodernism,\nbut found a mode that is playful, ahistorical and, for want of a better word,\ntheatrical. The international success of this generation, be it Greig’s Europe<\/em>, Harrower’s Knives in Hens<\/em> or Harris’s Further\nthan the Furthest Thing<\/em>, emboldens Brown in his contention that they are\nthe “finest Scottish playwrights, not only of their generation, but of any\ngeneration.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Look\nat the list of shows that have triumphed in the Critics’ Awards for Theatre in\nScotland (of which Brown and I are judges) and you’ll see further evidence in\nsupport of his argument. One director alone, Dominic Hill, has been associated\nwith winning productions of Howard Barker’s Scenes\nfrom an Execution<\/em>, Henrik Ibsen’s Peer\nGynt<\/em>, Chris Hannan’s adaptation of Crime\nand Punishment<\/em> and Harris’s This\nRestless House<\/em>, all of which were heightened, expansive and firmly in the\nEuropean modernist tradition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As\na rule of thumb, then, Brown’s thesis is illuminating and coherent. He does, though,\nhave to bend the evidence in his favour. He is up-front, for example, about\nneglecting Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, founded in 1963, which, many would\nargue, is an equally valid date to start such a survey. He admits the decision\nis “one of the most contentious stances taken by this book,” excusing\nhimself by pointing to the intimate connection between the Traverse and the\nplaywrights he interviews, and arguing that the theatre is better known for new\nplays than a directorial aesthetic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s\na lot of truth in that, but the effect is to lessen the importance of the\nTraverse’s international programming, especially in the 1980s and early 1990s.\nBrown could have bolstered his own argument by looking to work presented in the\nera of directors Steve Unwin and Jenny Killick, such as Losing Venice<\/em> by Jo Clifford in 1985 and Manfred Karge’s Man to Man<\/em>, starring Tilda Swinton, in\n1987.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None\nof that contradicts his position, however. It’s more a question of historical\nstorytelling. The scope of his survey does mean, though, that, at the same time\nas he overstates the influence of the English playwright Howard Barker (whom he\nhas written about extensively elsewhere), he understates the significance of an\nearlier generation of playwrights and, notably, of Scotland’s popular theatre\ntradition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He\nskirts round the working-class theatre of John McGrath’s 7:84 (Scotland) and\npays lip service to the variety tradition, but makes no mention of pantomime, a\nform that influences the direct actor-audience relationship of Scottish theatre\njust as certainly as European modernism does. He seems thrown when former\nNational Theatre of Scotland artistic director Vicky Featherstone suggests\n“plays became more middle class” in the 1990s, and manages only to\nfield selective evidence to contest her claim. You could, however, make a case\nthat the exportability of those plays was for this very reason; less anchored\nin a specific working-class experience, they became mutable, ambiguous and open\nto interpretation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brown is, of course, well versed in\nthe other traditions, but in asserting that European modernism has\n“exerted a greater influence upon the aesthetics of Scottish contemporary\ntheatre than any other artistic tendency or movement,” he paints a picture that is as valuable as it is partial. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n\"\"\n\n\n\n

*<\/a>Mark Fisher<\/strong> is the Scottish theatre critic for the Guardian, a former editor of the List<\/em> magazine and a freelance contributor to Variety<\/em>, The<\/em> Scotsman<\/em> and many other\u00a0publications. He is the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide<\/em> and How to Write about Theatre<\/em>, both published by Bloomsbury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2019 Mark Fisher
Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Creative<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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