Book review: The Edinburgh Companion To Scottish Drama

The Edinburgh Companion To Scottish Drama

Edinburgh University Press, 248 pp, 21.99

A FEW weeks ago, on Midsummer's Night, the National Theatre Of Scotland celebrated its fifth birthday by launching its latest bold challenge to traditional ideas of what theatre is, or might look like. Presented by 235 different groups or solo artists across Scotland - and, in a few cases, far beyond - Five Minute Theatre was an experimental event which involved each group performing or recording a five-minute show in front of a live audience, and making it available for live streaming on the internet as part of a 24-hour NTS celebration of grassroots dramatic energy across the nation. Most observers - and not a few theatre professionals - were sceptical about the project when it was first announced; words like "gimmick" were freely bandied about.

Yet the results - ranging from a spellbinding moment of storytelling in a house in Sutherland to a five-minute teenage version of Tam O'Shanter at Alloway Kirk, and from a hugely professional short movie about the culture of apology from Dundee Rep, to groups of kids in Lanarkshire improvising on anti-sectarian themes ("we've been wrong, we've been so stupid and wrong") - were compulsively, magnificently, gloriously interesting, with dozens of the most successful pieces still circulating on the internet. And because of the NTS's insistence that each piece should have a live audience, however small, it felt like an event that subtly redefined the whole idea of theatre in Scotland; and showed, definitively, that what happens in formal theatre buildings is only the tip of the dramatic iceberg, in a nation drenched in possibilities for performance, oratory, live storytelling, showing-off, and making fun, often in the most thrilling contemporary and historical settings.

And it's this sense of a theatre differently defined, and emerging from a much wider range of public and social experience than the word "theatre" normally allows, that gives the powerful initial impulse to the new Edinburgh Companion To Scottish Drama, edited by academic and playwright Ian Brown. In its early chapters, this book of 17 collected essays, with an introduction by Brown himself, mounts a fierce and convincing argument against the common assumption that for two or three centuries after the Presbyterian revolution of the 1560s, theatre in Scotland was almost entirely suppressed, and had no continuing tradition of the kind that existed in London.

On the contrary, both Brown's introduction and Sarah Carpenter's compelling opening chapter on Scottish drama before 1650 conjure up a vivid image of a society in which old mediaeval traditions of civic and religious pageantry, May Day celebrations, and public entertainment were far less thoroughly suppressed than is sometimes imagined. The Presbyterian tradition of thunderous preaching only added to the range of dramatic experience available. The spirit of popular satire against the abuse of power, famously expressed just before the Reformation in Sir David Lindsey's Ane Satyre Of The Thrie Estaites, seems never to have died out in the towns and cities of Scotland, and was often expressed through witty monologues written for insertion into traditional pageants and celebrations. And it is worth considering how the emergence of the National Theatre of Scotland, which famously defines itself as a "theatre without walls", is beginning, after half a decade of grassroots work across Scotland, to reconnect with that old tradition of local satire, busking and comment; and to bridge what has sometimes been a substantial gap between that tradition, and what became, during the 18th and 19th centuries, an increasingly anglicised world of professional theatre.

In that sense, Brown's wide-ranging collection of essays would probably benefit from a slightly tighter, and perhaps more circular, structure, describing the context of the current Scottish theatre scene and its rich range of possibilities before plunging into an account of its historical roots and remarkable resilience. As it is, it dives straight into the historical argument, conjuring up a powerful sense of a theatre tradition not so much non-existent as simply hidden through a lack of continuous national memory and self-awareness; Brown's introduction refers to this as a "creative amnesia".

From Carpenter's chapter on theatre before 1650, the book moves on to record now widely forgotten periods of theatrical creativity - with their own cohorts of Scottish playwrights, venues, actors and impresarios - from 1650 through to the hugely successful "national drama" of the early 19th century, largely dedicated to lavish mainstage versions of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and other luminaries of the romantic age.

There is a short but valuable note from Michael Newton on the dramatic content of the Gaelic song and storytelling tradition; and a persuasive argument, in Barbara Bell's chapter on the National Drama, that it was the coming of the railways in the second half of the 19th century - and the relative ease, thereafter, of touring big commercial productions out of London - that led to a decline in professional theatre production in Scotland, rather than any lack of native enthusiasm, talent or tradition.

And as Paul Maloney's chapter on 20th century popular theatre makes clear, the decline was in any case partial, and short-lived. The Scottish pantomime and variety traditions survived in rude health; and they were accompanied, from the earliest years of the 20th century, by a series of initiatives designed to present Scottish-made work to Scottish audiences, and to connect theatre in Scotland with wider developments across Europe - from Glasgow Rep to Glasgow Unity, from the Citizens' to the Gateway, from the Scottish National Players to 7:84 and Wildcat, and from the Traverse to the Tron. That impulse was strengthened and enriched by the coming of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947, and of Glasgow's Mayfest in the 1980s; and as public funding for professional theatre rapidly increased, from the 1960s onwards, it began to find a rich and full expression in the sheer variety of work, across a range of 15 or 20 production centres, that characterises professional theatre in Scotland today.

The latter chapters of Brown's anthology focus more strongly on individual playwrights or groups of playwrights, from Barrie in the early 20th century to Scotland's Makar, Liz Lochhead, still writing today. For the sheer thrill of analysis, perhaps the finest of these chapters are Gerard Carruthers's thoughtful account of the career of James Bridie, Steve Cramer on the intensely political Traverse generation of the 1980s and their 1990s successors, Ksenija Horvat's wonderfully rich account of the career of Liz Lochhead, and Trish Reid on the changing landscape of dramatic writing after devolution - although despite extensive reference to the changing role of women playwrights, not one chapter analyses their recent relative eclipse by a new generation of male writers, following the "in your face" moment of the mid-1990s

In the end, this focus on the dramatists - rather than the actors, directors, designers and venue managers who also help shape Scottish theatre - slightly unbalances the book, tilting it away from an account of drama as a live art towards an account of drama as an aspect of literature; it is less of a companion to Scottish drama than an interim reflection on it, necessarily selective, and not always strongly balanced.

It remains, though, a rich and often fascinating study of an art form traditionally under-recognised in Scotland, often contested if never completely suppressed, and still widely ignored to this day, even by those who consider themselves well-informed about our national cultural life.

And at the heart of its central argument about the rich, resilient, yet often forgotten tradition of drama in Scotland, there lies a deeper question, and an implied warning. For if we have succeeded so often in the past in losing our memory of whole movements and generations of theatre-makers, and in compelling each new generation in Scotland, ignorant of the past, to reinvent the same wheel and to challenge the same stereotypes, then there is no guarantee that the current golden age for theatre production in Scotland, with all its award-winning shows and internationally acclaimed playwrights, may not eventually suffer the same fate.

This is a cycle of forgetting to which the coming of the National Theatre of Scotland should make some difference: one of the classic roles of such an institution is to act as a focal point and memory-bank for theatre culture, where achievement can be remembered and celebrated, as in the NTS's current series of Staging The Nation events. The question of whether the NTS can successfully fulfil this role, while remaining the cutting-edge 21st-century theatre producer it aspires to be, provides the starting-point for the next chapter in any comprehensive story of Scottish theatre.

For the time being, Ian Brown's useful and sometimes exciting collection offers plenty of food for thought; and plenty of vital information about a culture often lost, but now - just possibly - beginning to be found again, and to forge itself a new and firmer place, at the heart of our national life.