Through the Shortbread Tin: Dramatising Scotland's greatest literary hoax

When Martin O’Connor first talked to director Lu Kemp about his latest play, he thought she was using some unfamiliar theatrical terminology. What she liked about the script, she told him, was its “versioning”.

Perhaps she had coined the word, perhaps she had borrowed it; either way, it works well to describe Through the Shortbread Tin, a play that fields alternate versions of existing stories. If the same story is told in different ways, whose version should we believe?

The ambiguity is deliberate. O’Connor’s theme is the uncertainty created by Scotland’s greatest literary forgery, a hoax that makes the line between fact and fiction impossible to draw.

Martin O'Connor in rehearsals for Through the Shortbread Tin | Eoin Carey

It is about Ossian, a Scottish poet from the third century who was dubbed the “Homer of the north”. His epic Gaelic poems, translated into English by James Macpherson, caught the imagination of 18th-century readers, beguiled by these ancient tales of heroes, battles and great romances. Thomas Jefferson, the American founding father, believed “this rude bard of the North [was] the greatest poet that has ever existed”.

But it wasn’t true. Or at least, not exactly true. Macpherson claimed to have gathered the poems from oral sources before translating them into English. But even if he were familiar with traditional Gaelic verse, the bulk of the material he published in Fragments Of Ancient Poetry in 1760 seems to have been made up. Also invented was the figure of Ossian himself.

Rehearsals for Through the Shortbread Tin | Eoin Carey

What intrigues O’Connor is the influence this had on Scottish culture. How many of the images the nation has about itself are based on fantasies somebody dreamed up two-and-a-half centuries ago? Does it matter if those images, shaped by Robert Burns, bolstered by Walter Scott, have little basis in fact? Or is it more important that Scotland’s stories have a poetic truth?

“This is the most questions I’ve ever had in a script,” says O’Connor, who was named Scots Performer Of The Year in the 2024 Scots Language Awards. “Lots of questions to the audience, lots of provocations.”

Staged by the National Theatre of Scotland on a tour that stretches, appropriately, across the nation from the Borders to the Outer Hebrides, the play stars O’Connor alongside singers Josie Duncan, Claire Frances MacNeil and Màiri Morrison. Further confusing the question of authenticity, they will sing Gaelic translations of Macpherson’s poems to imagine what they would have sounded like had they existed in the first place.

“The singers are resonant of the real sources that informed James Macpherson,” says Kemp, former artistic director of Perth Theatre. “They sit behind the text because, of course, these stories were passed down, they were oral storytelling and then they found their way, through James, into a different literary format.”

“Or did they?” jokes O’Connor.

Kemp continues: “So much of the piece is about what connection we’re allowed to our own culture. What obscures that culture and what illuminates it? Màiri Morrison, one of the singers, said she didn’t use to feel that her own culture was an indigenous culture or that Gaelic was an indigenous language. You can live within a culture and not recognise it because you’re not invited to recognise it.”

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It was through learning to speak Gaelic that O’Connor discovered the story. “People kept mentioning Ossian and I never knew what it was,” says the playwright, whose research was supported by a grant from the Gavin Wallace Fellowship in 2018. “When you learn any language it opens you up to the culture and society of that place. When you start learning Gaelic, you suddenly start to see the country that you’ve been in all your life in a new way. I learned more Scottish history in the past seven years learning Gaelic than I ever did at school.”

Rather than see Macpherson as a conman, cynically trying to dupe a gullible establishment, O’Connor regards him as a fellow artist. He can only speculate about Macpherson’s reasons for not claiming authorship, but the deception does not seem that far away from, for example, that of James Hogg presenting supposedly real testimonies in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

“When I started working on it, the hoax was really appealing,” he says. “That’s what took me into it, but reading about James Macpherson made me more empathetic to him.”

“It’s investigating why he might choose to make a hoax,” says Kemp. “Martin talks in the show about what people might have wanted at the time for Scottish identity, why it might have been needed and how it took off.”

Eoin Carey/National Theatre of Scotland

O’Connor continues: “James is a wee bit of an underdog. We talk about Walter Scott and we talk about Burns, but he pre-dates all that and set a lot of it in motion. We need to give him more credit.

“By creating this hoax, James Macpherson shone a light on Scotland, gave a place and a voice to it, so actually, it wasn’t just a hoax as in, ‘Ha-ha! That’s a funny thing,’ it opened up something.”

Not that Through the Shortbread Tin is all positive. Playful in tone, serious in ideas, it highlights the bad as well as the good in cultural cliché. “Every nation is going to have a problem with their brand image abroad,” says O’Connor. “In Scotland, it’s even more complicated: we talk in the show about culture being taken from you and given back in a form that doesn’t feel real.”

Through The Shortbread Tin is at the Corn Exchange, Melrose, from 1–2 April and on tour around Scotland until 2 May. For details, visit www.nationaltheatrescotland.com

Feature produced in association with the National Theatre of Scotland