{"id":827,"date":"2019-12-29T08:55:25","date_gmt":"2019-12-29T08:55:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/?p=827"},"modified":"2023-03-15T11:38:54","modified_gmt":"2023-03-15T11:38:54","slug":"modern-scottish-theatre-emerging-from-the-shadow-of-the-reformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/modern-scottish-theatre-emerging-from-the-shadow-of-the-reformation\/","title":{"rendered":"Modern Scottish Theatre: Emerging from the Shadow of the Reformation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Mark Brown<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Scottish theatre has, arguably, enjoyed its richest period over the last half-century. This paper will seek to explain Scotland\u2019s relative lack of a historical theatre tradition and to explore the key elements in what the author proposes has been a \u201cEuropean modernist renaissance\u201d on the national stage since 1969.
Keywords:<\/strong> Reformation, prohibition, European modernism, Havergal, Citizens Theatre <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scotland\nis unusual, if not necessarily unique, in being a nation whose finest\ndramatists are, arguably, alive and working today. The country\u2019s theatre\nhistory is very different from that of England, its much larger, southern\nneighbour, to which it has been joined constitutionally for more than 300\nyears.[1]<\/sup><\/a>\nScotland has, for example, no Shakespeare; its national bard is Robert Burns,[2]<\/sup><\/a>\nwho was a poet, not a dramatist. Nor, for that matter, does it have an Aphra\nBehn,[3]<\/sup><\/a>\na Thomas Otway[4]<\/sup><\/a>\nor a Richard Brinsley Sheridan.[5]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

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Liz Lochhead, 2015. Photo: Youtube<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Liz Lochhead,[6]<\/sup><\/a> Scotland\u2019s former Makar (national poet) and one of the nation\u2019s leading playwrights, explains well the reason for the massive disparity between the theatre histories of the two countries:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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[Scotland\u2019s Calvinist Protestant] Reformation, early and thorough, stamped out all drama and dramatic writing for centuries. This means that the indigenous product seems to consist of Lyndsay\u2019s 1540 Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaites<\/em>[7]<\/sup><\/a> [sic]\u2014and \u201cane satire\u201d is definitely not enough. We have no Scottish Jacobean tragedies, no Scottish Restoration Comedies. Our greatest dramatist that never was, Burns, confined himself to the dramatic monologue purely in poetic form. . . . Holy Willie[8]<\/sup><\/a> and Tartuffe[9]<\/sup><\/a> may be brother archetypes, but only one had a full five-act play written about him.[10]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Lochhead\nis entirely correct to locate the central distinction between the theatre\ncultures of Scotland and England in the countries\u2019 very different\npolitico-religious histories. Whereas the English Reformation,[11]<\/sup><\/a>\nbegun under King Henry VIII, was\u2014broadly\u2014tolerant of theatre (the only period\nof absolute national prohibition of live drama being during Oliver Cromwell\u2019s\nPuritan republic, 1649\u201360), the Church of Scotland persecuted theatre so\nthoroughly that, it might be argued, the country did not begin to truly rebuild\na national theatre scene until the early-twentieth century.[12]<\/sup><\/a>\nIt is a peculiarity of Scottish history that in order to talk of the flourishing\nof the national theatre culture (which, I contend, has  been particularly notable in the last 50\nyears), one must begin in the sixteenth century. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although\nfollowing the creation of the British state in 1707 Scottish theatre began to\nstutter back to life,[13]<\/sup><\/a>\nfew experts would argue with the contention that Scotland\u2019s theatrical\nrenaissance truly begins in the early-twentieth century and sparks into life in\nthe decades after the Second World War. In the\nearly to mid-twentiethcentury, Scottish theatre witnessed the\nemergence of socialist playwrights such as Joe Corrie and C.P. Taylor and the\nhumanist dramatist Ena Lamont Stewart. However, whilst the working-class\norientation of these writers was radical in political terms (they might be\nconsidered the forebears of John McGrath and his socialist theatre company 7:84\nScotland, in the 1970s), artistically their work remained\u2014broadly\u2014in the\ntradition of English naturalism. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Citizens Theatre. Photo: Wikipedia<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The creation of the influential Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (which, today, is the single biggest performing arts programme in the world) in 1947 had a profound impact upon the aesthetic orientation of Scottish theatre. Scottish audiences and, crucially, theatremakers were introduced belatedly to the artistic methods of European modernism. In time, this led to the establishment of the Traverse Theatre Club in Edinburgh,[14]<\/sup><\/a> the inaugural year (1963) of which included plays by such leading modernists as Jean-Paul Sartre, Alfred Jarry and Eug\u00e8ne Ionesco. However, it was the appointment of a young, Scottish theatre director by the name of Giles Havergal as artistic director of the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow in 1969 that truly brought modernist aesthetics into the heart of Scottish theatre culture.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Giles Havergal in interview with critic Michael Coveney. Photo: Youtube<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Most of Havergal\u2019s extraordinary, 34-year reign (1969\u20132003) at \u201cthe Citz\u201d (as the Citizens Theatre is affectionately known in Scotland) was conducted as part of a directorial \u201ctriumvirate\u201d with the acclaimed stage designer and director Philip Prowse and the late Robert David Macdonald,[15]<\/sup><\/a> who was an extremely accomplished translator, playwright and director. They brought to the Citz an aesthetic that encompassed the ideas and practices of continental European modernism, the artistic liberties of the European auteur <\/em>director and the social and sexual radicalism unleashed by the political and countercultural movements of the 1960s. It was a measure of Havergal\u2019s radicalism or Scottish society\u2019s conservatism, according to one\u2019s taste, that the Citizens\u2019 outr\u00e9<\/em>, all-male production of Hamlet<\/em> (in 1970) led to such an outcry in the press and society that the new director\u2019s position was called into question. Thankfully, Havergal survived the backlash, enabling him, Prowse and MacDonald to establish the Citz as the finest theatre company in Scotland and, arguably, the most innovative and exciting in Britain. The leading English theatre critic Michael Coveney would later describe the company\u2019s aesthetic as: \u201c[a] theatre of visual delight and European orientation which [bore] no relationship whatsoever to the great upheavals in British theatre since the mid-1950s. . . . [They] renounced Scottishness, but renounced Englishness, too.\u201d[16]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

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Giles Havergal in Death in Venice <\/em>(1999) by Thomas Mann. Photo: Alan Wylie<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

To get a sense of the European literary influence upon the Citizens\u2019 programming one need only peruse the list of productions which includes works by: Artaud, Proust, Laclos, Anouilh, Brecht, Beckett, Genet, B\u00fcchner, Gogol, Goldoni, Lermontov, Beaumarchais, Balzac, Cocteau, Goethe, De Sade, Kraus, Hofmannsthal, Toller, Sartre, Offenbach, Hochhuth, Schiller, Kesselrig, Rojas, Musset, Tolstoy, Racine, Pirandello, Ibanez and Dumas.[17]<\/sup><\/a> For his part, Havergal was in no doubt that he and his co-directors were engaged very consciously in a project to distinguish their Glasgow theatre from the\u2014typically naturalistic\u2014English theatrical aesthetics that had become so prevalent throughout the U.K.: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In terms of the \u201cEuropeanness\u201d of the work, Philip [Prowse] was always very determined that we wouldn’t become another \u201cEnglish company.\u201d We were up in Glasgow (which was actually home to me, as it turned out), but not for them [Prowse and MacDonald], and we actually wanted to take advantage of being 400 miles away from London, [sic] and create our own style of theatre. I always summed it up by saying we didn’t care what the Royal Shakespeare Company was doing. We weren’t influenced by that. Whereas, I think, if you were in an English theatre at that time, you would have to have been. We simply weren’t connected to that whole organisation that was \u201cEnglish theatre.\u201d[18]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The impact of the triumvirate on Scottish theatre over their 34 years is almost impossible to estimate. Leading playwright and artistic director David Greig comments: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I can’t think of any artistic director in Scotland who wouldn’t in some way want to emulate Giles [Havergal] or refer to him in relation to their own work . . . [Havergal] is the originator of a tradition, which is a gift . . . I could argue all sorts of different reasons why [Scottish theatre\u2019s renaissance] happened in 1969, but maybe we were just bloody lucky that he was available at the time.[19]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Havergal\nretired from the Citizens in 2003. Whether his successor Jeremy Raison\u2019s period\n(2003\u201310) succeeded in honouring the triumvirate\u2019s legacy is a moot point.\nHowever, there is little debate about the success of the directorship of the\ncurrent incumbent, Dominic Hill, whose distinctive style and classical repertoire\nare reminiscent, in many regards, of those established by Havergal.  <\/p>\n\n\n

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Adam Best and George Costigan in Crime and Punishment<\/em> by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, directed by Dominic Hill (2013). Photo: Tim Morozzo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Havergal\u2019s directorship of the Citizens was, I contend, the major factor in the creation of the most artistically fruitful strand in the history of live drama in Scotland. Still in the process of emerging, even as late as 1969, from the darkness of Calvinist prohibition, the nation\u2019s theatre, belatedly but wholeheartedly, embraced European modernist aesthetics, ultimately joining them with Scottish sensibilities and artistic achievements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\nCommunicado: The Radicals on Tour<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

If the Citizens created a European modernist revolution in\nScottish theatre in the 1970s, that revolution was transported around the\ncountry by new touring company Communicado in the 1980s.\nEstablished in Edinburgh in 1983, by Gerry Mulgrew, Alison Peebles and Rob\nPickavance, the company combined the European inclinations of the Citz with a\npassion for Scottish texts (which did not feature strongly at Havergal\u2019s\ntheatre). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mulgrew\n(who was familiar, from his training at Edinburgh\u2019s Theatre Workshop in the 1970s,\nwith the techniques of great European theatre masters such as Jerzy Grotowski\nand Jacques Lecoq) acknowledges a very definite debt to Havergal. However, he\nalso identifies a Scottishness in his company (both in terms of the repertoire\nand the accents in which actors spoke) that distinguished Communicado from the\nCitz:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Citizens . . . was a European theatre. It always slightly annoys me that Britain doesn’t see itself as part of Europe . . .  We [in the British context] always speak about \u201cthe Europeans,\u201d as if to keep them at arm’s length. We don’t really do that in Scotland, it’s more a southern English kind of thing . . . [However], in a sense, the Citizens wasn’t part of Scotland at all. There were very few Scottish actors who worked there. [The Citizens company] were seen as vagabonds or gypsies, exotic   people doing exotic things. They all had English accents, but they were doing German and French plays.[20]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

There\nwere, of course, Scottish actors (most notably a young David Hayman) at the\nCitizens, but it is also true that Havergal\u2019s theatre became a haven for\nEnglish actors such as Rupert Everett and Glenda Jackson, whose European\ninclinations were not well catered for by the London stage. Even in the\nearly-1980s, the general rule in Scotland was that Scottish accents were heard\non stage only in Scottish plays. The classics were performed in \u201cReceived\nPronunciation\u201d (a supposedly \u201cdefault\u201d accent for the English language within\nthe UK, which, in fact, was a bourgeois, southern English mode of speech).\nCommunicado changed this state of affairs. In addition to Scottish work,[21]<\/sup><\/a> Mulgrew\u2019s touring company gave a Scottish voice to work by such leading\nEuropean writers as Lorca,[22]<\/sup><\/a> B\u00fcchner<\/em>,[23]<\/sup><\/a> Schiller[24]<\/sup><\/a> and Gogol<\/em>.[25]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

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Gerda Stevenson and Gerry Mulgrew in A Place with the Pigs <\/em>by Athol Fugard (1995). Photo: Sean Hudson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Communicado theatre company can be credited with the dissemination throughout Scotland, from the early-1980s forward, of Havergal\u2019s European modernist revolution and with giving that revolution a more distinctively Scottish voice. It should also be considered the trailblazer for a rich stream of touring and non-building based Scottish theatre companies and artists, all of whom shared and, in many cases, continue to share the European modernist inclinations of the Citizens and Communicado. These include such companies as: Suspect Culture, Vanishing Point, Grid Iron, children\u2019s theatre companies Catherine Wheels and Wee Stories and children\u2019s theatremakers Shona Reppe and Andy Manley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nGolden Generation: The emergence of Scotland\u2019s European Playwrights<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Post-war Scotland had enjoyed a flourishing in playwriting;\nafter Ena Lamont Stewart and C.P. Taylor came such writers as: Peter\nArnott, John Binnie, John Byrne, Jo Clifford, Sue Glover, Chris Hannan, Iain\nHeggie, Jackie Kay, Liz Lochhead, John McGrath\nand Rona Munro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Excellent\nthough much of the output of these writers was, it tended, with some\nexceptions, to be written for Scottish audiences. There is nothing wrong with\nthis, of course; creating Scottish plays for Scottish audiences was a crucial\npart of the process of the recovery of a national theatre culture. However, it\nwasn\u2019t until the 1990s that a truly outward looking European playwriting came\nto the fore in Scotland.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Kirsty McKay and Kevin Lennon in Further Than the Furthest Thing<\/em> by Zinnie Harris (Dundee Rep, 2012). Photo: Douglas McBride<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The names David Greig (The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman he Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union<\/em>, 1999), Zinnie Harris (Further Than the Furthest Thing<\/em>, 2000), David Harrower (Knives in Hens<\/em>, 1995) and Anthony Neilson (The Wonderful World of Dissocia<\/em>, 2004) are well known throughout Europe and beyond. To them we should add Pamela Carter, a dramatist who has been active in Scottish theatre since the 1990s, including in important collaborations with Suspect Culture (the company of writer\/director David Greig and director Graham Eatough, 1993\u20132009) and Untitled Projects (the company established by director\/designer Stewart Laing in 1998). The work of these writers is characterised by a stylised, modernist and non-naturalistic aesthetic and, for the most part, a use of standard English (rather than Scots-English) which is easily translatable internationally. It has achieved for Scottish stage writing a previously unimagined stature and acclaim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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