Review of the decade: Theatre - Black Watch leads triumphant march forward for Scots theatre

Published on Wednesday 16 December 2009 18:10

There has been much to be proud of in theatreland since the turn of the century, most notably the NTS's 2006 launch and subsequent success. But we ignore the country's wider drama scene at our peril, warns Joyce McMillan,on day four of our critics' look back over the cultural decade

• National Theatre of Scotland - Black Watch

LOOK back down the theatre trail from this Christmas to the turn of the millennium, and there's no doubt which of many magical moments stands out most strongly in the memory. The year was 2006, the month was August, the place was not a conventional theatre but the old Edinburgh University Drill Hall in Forrest Road, and the show was Black Watch, the greatest of all the 25 productions and projects staged by Scotland's National Theatre during its now legendary first year of operation.

The show was big, and beautiful, and magnificently staged; it was a state-of-the-art piece of theatre in every respect.

What made it truly great, though, was something that no theatre director – not even Vicky Featherstone of the National Theatre of Scotland, nor her associate, John Tiffany, who directed Black Watch – can ever entirely predict or plan; and that was the perfect coincidence between Gregory Burke's script, based on detailed interviews about the experience of ordinary Scottish soldiers in Iraq, and the mounting concern and anger over the war in places where the play was staged, first in Scotland, and then across the world, from Sydney to Los Angeles.

Black Watch became, in other words, one of the key artworks of a uniquely strange and disturbing decade, one that began at the height of a glittering and apparently endless boom and ended in the most spectacular economic bust since 1929. What's more, Black Watch came from a small country that had seen its own rollercoaster decade, beginning in a mood of celebration over the opening of the Scottish Parliament, rapidly decaying into an orgy of national exasperation and self-disgust over the Holyrood building project and other disappointments, and then gradually beginning to achieve a new equilibrium.

And it belonged, absolutely and completely, to a decade that has seen what is possibly the greatest communications revolution since the invention of the printing-press: the decade that saw the internet establish itself as the key global public arena of our time and begin to challenge all other traditional means of cultural exchange, from bookshops and music stores to newspapers themselves.

In that environment, theatre can never rest on its laurels, or assume that it will always attract an audience by churning out a diet of well-made plays. It has to offer levels of engagement, excitement, surprise and live interaction that are not available on screen or online; and shows such as Black Watch, with their "total theatre" involvement of all the human senses, help – among many other things – to make the case for the art form itself.

In that sense, the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) – which began operations in February 2006, following a decision by the Scottish Government almost three years earlier – has emerged as an iconic 21st-century institution, born of the times we live in.

With no theatre-building base, and no permanent company of actors, the NTS functions as a light-touch commissioning and co-producing company, with a strong creative drive, and its flexible structure has opened the way to what is, by national theatre standards, a formidably experimental programme. Ever since its explosive opening night in 2006 – when the NTS created no fewer than ten site-specific shows on the theme "Home", staged in found spaces, from a ferry in Lerwick harbour to a tower block in Glasgow and a drill hall in Dumfries – the company has tended to specialise in new work, site-specific theatre, ambitious children's shows and a dazzling range of well-funded youth and community work.

Of almost 70 NTS projects and shows in the past four years, only about 20 have been conventional main-stage or small-scale touring shows for adult audiences. This is not, in other words, the National Theatre of which conventional campaigners dreamed; but it is arguably the right National Theatre for our time, and one that has put Scotland at the cutting edge of international theatre culture.

It's worth remembering, though, that the NTS has been able to make such a substantial impact only because of the richness of the theatre scene into which it was born. Back in 2000, for example, Scotland already had – and it still has – at least two outstanding companies in the emerging field of site-specific theatre, in Angus Farquhar's NVA and Jude Doherty and Ben Harrison's Grid Iron.

In the Traverse, it had – and still has – one of the world's leading new-play theatres, producing a steady, brilliant and politically challenging stream of new writing through the decade, from Burke's dazzling 2001 debut with Gagarin Way, to David Greig's Damascus in 2007.

In Glasgow, Scotland already had the Arches, one of the most exciting cross-art-form venues in Europe, linking young theatre-makers to the worlds of music, clubbing, visual arts and new media; if this has been the decade of any one Scottish venue, it has been the age of the Arches, the venue most able to break down and challenge traditional forms. And if Suspect Culture, icons of Scotland's 1990s zeitgeist, finally called it a day – as did the last remnants of the once-great 7:84 Scotland Company – Wildcat veteran David McLellan reinvented himself, and the whole business of new-play production in Scotland, with the 2004 launch of his now-legendary Play, Pie and Pint lunchtime theatre at Oran Mor in Glasgow, which has produced no fewer than 168 new short plays in five years.

This decade of reinvention and formal challenge has not, by contrast, been a vintage period for main stage theatres such as the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh and the Citizens' in Glasgow. But there have been ten years of memorable achievement for the ensemble company at Dundee Rep, who produced both the greatest classical revival of the decade in Dominic Hill's 2007 NTS co-production of Peer Gynt, and the most exuberantly successful new Scottish musical, in the joyous, beautifully-staged Proclaimers tribute show, Sunshine On Leith. And at end of the decade, perhaps in response to economic recession, new and traditional forms of music theatre began to take shape all over Scotland, with David Greig and Gordon McIntyre's beautiful miniature musical Midsummer emerging as one of the surprise smash hits of last year.

As the decade ends, though, it's worth sounding a warning in one key area. The long-running debacle over the merger of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen, and the setting up of the new Creative Scotland, has cast a pall over the second half of the decade, and created a dangerous psychological gap between the NTS – which is directly funded by the Scottish Government – and the rest of Scotland's large and medium-scale theatre groups, which have been subjected to the kind of prolonged period of uncertainty that inevitably breeds paranoia and mistrust. The result is that, at a time of unprecedented central government investment in the art form, when our National Theatre has won huge respect on the world stage, and when levels of achievement in Scottish theatre have arguably never been higher, many sections of the industry are more depressed and fearful about their future than ever before, and more inclined to look outside Scotland for work.

This is the cost of government carelessness about the arts as a key element of national life. And it highlights the laziness of any assumption that if the National Theatre of Scotland is all right, then the nation's theatre culture is all right. For in fact the reverse is the case; and it's only steady support for Scotland's wider theatre life, in all its richness and variety, that will sustain the NTS through the storms of the coming decade, as a representative not only of itself, but of a nation full of strong creative centres and one that finally knows how to value its own unique contemporary genius.

REVIEW OF THE DECADE

Duncan Macmillan on Art: Silly money chasing silly art

Fiona Shepherd on Pop and Rock: The accent is on pop's brogue traders

Kenneth Walton on Classical: Years of change

Jim Gilchrist on Jazz and Folk: Young talent keeps the torch burning

Joyce McMillan on Theatre: Black Watch leads triumphant march forward

Alistair Harkness on Film: Technical hitch