2024 Arts Preview: The Year Ahead in Theatre

Co-productions, touring shows and revivals will keep theatres busy in 2024 but there are fewer opportunities in the sector, writes Joyce McMillan

Flick through the online “What’s On” pages of Scotland’s 25 or so leading theatres and companies, as 2024 begins, and it’s easy to form an impression of a theatre scene that is not only bustling, but thriving. In the first six months of the year, a theatre-goer with boundless money and enthusiasm could see around 40 new productions made or co-produced in Scotland, more than 50 visiting productions ranging in scale from tiny children’s shows to the mighty blockbuster Hamilton (set to arrive at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre in February), and a dozen revivals of existing shows made in Scotland, many of them smash hits of 2023 including the Tron’s brilliant production of surreal Belfast drama Cyprus Avenue, starring David Hayman (at the Glasgow Pavilion in February), and Gary McNair’s love letter to Billy Connolly for the National Theatre of Scotland, Dear Billy, which will tour again in May and June.

Of the 40 new shows produced in Scotland, almost half are part of a blockbusting 18-week Play, Pie And Pint spring lunchtime season, produced on a shoestring at Oran Mor in Glasgow, and featuring many relatively new and untried writers. Of the rest, four are at the Lyceum in Edinburgh, including a re-working of Gary McNair’s recent solo version of Jekyll And Hyde starring Forbes Masson, set to open in January, a brand new David Greig play called Two Sisters, an adaptation of the Blue Beard story written and directed by Emma Rice, and a new stage version of the wartime Muriel Spark novel Girls Of Slender Means; alongside a revival of Zinnie Harris’s stunning Macbeth: An Undoing, starring the magnificent Nicole Cooper, which also tours to New York this spring. With Dundee Rep, the Lyceum is also co-producing a major new version of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, set to open at Dundee in April.

The other theatre with something of a production-line in motion, by midsummer, is Pitlochry Festival Theatre, whose artistic director Elizabeth Newman has succeeded, over the last five years, in making it one of the key producing centres in Scotland. It will offer four new shows by the end of June, including a studio play about the great walker and writer Nan Shepherd, two main stage musicals – a co-production of Footloose, and an in-house take on the Carole King musical Beautiful – and a version of Jane Austen’s Sense And Sensibility by Glasgow writer Frances Poet; plus a further four later in the summer.

Gary McNair in Dear Billy. PIC: John Devlin

The Tron Theatre offers up two fascinating new productions alongside its busy programme on visiting shows, in the Scottish premieres of Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone, in February, and Philip Ridley’s Radiant Vermin, in June. Perth Theatre stages Joe Orton’s What The Butler Saw, opening on 30 April. And elsewhere, there are a handful of interesting new shows from Scottish touring companies, led by Raw Material and Capital Theatres with James V: Katherine, the fifth in Rona Munro’s cycle of Scottish history plays, a studio-scale show which will open at The Studio in Edinburgh in April, before an extensive tour across Scotland. Also on tour will be the National Theatre of Scotland with a new adaptation by James Ley of Damian Barr’s autobiographical book Maggie And Me, about growing up gay in post-industrial Lanarkshire in the 1980s. And even beyond Hamilton, the range of touring work from elsewhere on show in Scotland is impressive, from the blockbusting Macbeth starring Ralph Fiennes, opening at Ingliston in mid-January, to visits from the many international companies who will contribute to Edinburgh’s annual Manipulate Festival of visual theatre, in early February, or this year’s Edinburgh International Children’s Festival, in late May, or the 2024 Edinburgh International Festival and Fringe themselves, later in the year.

If there is plenty to keep theatre audiences interested and entertained in 2024, though, the detail of the programmes reveals some deep underlying problems, including soaring ticket prices that exclude all but the well off, during the current cost of living crisis. Then there is the dead hand of adaptation and co-production everywhere, drastically reducing the amount of theatre work available to freelance theatres artists in Scotland, from actors and playwrights to designers and directors. At least one of the co-produced shows in the Lyceum’s spring season, for example, will not be made or rehearsed in Scotland at all; and where Scottish theatres co-produce with each other, the impact on the overall number of shows created is obvious.

And finally, it is striking to note the increasingly worrying imbalance, in Scottish theatre, between the public support various producing organisations receive, and the amount of work they manage to produce. By far the most expensive theatre companies in Scotland, in terms of public support, are the National Theatre of Scotland – which receives around £4 million a year direct from the Scottish government – and the big building-based companies including the Lyceum, the Citizens, Dundee Rep, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, the Traverse and Tron, which typically receive between £800,000 and £1 million a year via Creative Scotland; although Pitlochry, historically more dependent on box office income, receives only half as much.

Yet among them, those seven companies have so far announced only 12 new productions for the first half of the year, eight of them at the Lyceum or Pitlochry. The Citizens’ long closure for rebuilding continues; the Traverse – after its huge December success with Same Team – has announced no new in-house play for this spring. In a report published this year, Scotland’s leading building-based theatre companies rang a loud alarm-bell about the mounting pressures they face, in trying to convert their income – whether from the box office, sponsors, or the public purse – into a steady stream of new professional productions on stage, that will support a thriving community of theatre-makers in Scotland. And until those difficulties are analysed and addressed, by theatre organisations and major funders alike, the underlying health and sustainable future of Scottish theatre will be in question; despite all the riches still available to theatre-goers in 2024, in spaces ranging from the 3,000-seat Edinburgh Playhouse, to tiny halls and community centres across the land.