Scottish Theatre (thinking out loud)

No doubt the world is waiting for the Vile opinion on Scottish Independence. Sadly, I am a Wessex Regionalist, and my opinion is firmly in the awkward shuffle category. I'm not sure whether my opinion matters, or has any force. I just like watching theatre and catching people, like the ancient mariner, and talking about myself until they wander off.

That said, I read a book. Scottish Theatre Since the Seventies, although published before devolution, deals with the nature of national identity in the medium I can understand. There are chapters on the Citizens' Theatre (in the days of Giles Havergal), explaining how the venue spent the 1970s swinging the lead with 'divinely decadent stage compositions' (Michael Coveney called them that in his history), 7:84's glorious history (this is pre-2000) and an interview with John McGrath. I'd taken to complaining that McGrath had been written out of Scottish theatre history of late, but Kieran Hurley explicitly references 7:84 when he talks about his latest, Rantin, and the description McGrath gives to Olga Taxidou of a putative National Theatre of Scotland makes him sound like a prophet. He practically calls it a 'theatre without wall.'

While I know that the line is blurred, I am more intrigued by cultural nationalism than political nationalism (and make a particular point of castigating racial nationalism). In his survey of the Citz, David Hutchinson mentions that Glasow still has 'gaps in its provision' for theatre: not enough musicals, Scottish dramatists and scripts from the English mainstream. Elsewhere, the Mighty Mark Fisher discusses the rise of Tramway, and the overwhelming impression is that Scotland, in the late 1990s, was getting plenty of international action, and was rich with what I'd now call 'visual theatre.' Havergal's style is described as being all about the image over text, and while I am not sure contemporary Scottish playwrights would have the same complaint today, the emphasis seemed to be on programming work that came from Europe and was less tied into the idea of the 'script.'

The book abounds in the myths of Scottish Theatre: that there wasn't much going on before the wars (a myth later contested through a look at the music hall); that 'tough guys' have a place in the heart of the theatre-maker (The Hard Man et al), that socialism is the common political belief of the nation. These are myths not in the sense of being untrue - although I would question the last one, since there are plenty of Labour councillors who don't appear to believe in socialism - but being stories with meaning.

Rather nicely, Femi Folorunso points out 'as Raymond Williams once pointed out, the difficulties of criticism is that while there is a general acceptance that some relation must exist between social and material environments on the one hand, and on the other the nature of artistic creativity and the changes taking place within it, this is always very difficult to demonstrate.' In other words, who knows whether theatre represents an idea that is common in society, or can reflect any particular Scottish identity. In fact, RD Laing goes further, suggesting that no-one knows anything of anyone else's experience. Can theatre be 'Scottish'? Still - the book is worth a read.

Notes on Political Theatre

Yet, as the companies evolved, increasing frustrations with the methodology, coupled with a broader retreat from traditional left-wing politics in the UK, saw a movement towards a more traditional script-based theatre. Red Ladder, who began life in 1968 as The Agitprop Street Players, originally formed to present a piece during a demonstration: by 1974 they had produced Strike While the Iron is Hot: although this was devised through workshops, founder member Kathleen McCreey is credited as co-author. From  the early pieces - described as 'units' rather than plays - Red Ladder moved towards a socialist-realist theatre: while The Cake Play was a simple, immediate presentation of inequality, closer to 'performance art' than a scripted play, tensions caused the collaborative approach to falter. 

Richard Seyd’s The Theatre of Red Ladder, however, revealed the problems inherent in this collaborative process: dominant personalities would hold up progress until ‘those in a minority would… make the decision unanimous… just so work could continue’ (cited in Hedden and Milling, p. 106). 

John McGrath, famous for founding the socialist 7:84 companies in England and Scotland, and co-founder of the feminist company Monstrous Regiment Gillian Hanna contrasted the democratic enthusiasm of the ‘pure’ devised theatre against the skill of the playwright. 

McGrath’s 7:84 allowed a degree of group discussion – Boom (1974) was the result of an early collection of ‘the whole company… throwing in their ideas’ (ibid, p. 111) – but maintained his status as author: ‘they are skills which need aptitude, long experience, self-discipline and a certain mental disposition in one individual’ (ibid, p. 111). Hanna, meanwhile, reflected on Monstrous Regiment’s adaptation of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as ‘a disastrous foray into the grave labelled devised writing… incoherent. Too many people had a hand in writing it’ (ibid p. 113).

John McGrath voiced his concerns about such inclusivity following a joint production between 7:84 and Belt and Braces.

There was total decentralization, a total exchange of roles… everybody could do anything on the show. It was total chaos. The gigs got fucked up because somebody didn’t tell somebody that they’d made an arrangement (cited in Hedden and Milling, p. 106).

McGrath continues with a trenchant complaint: that he wanted to make socialist, not anarchist theatre. 

British political theatre, however, drew on a rich tradition, going back to George Bernard Shaw in the early twentieth century, and had been inspired by the example of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble in the 1950s. The rise of The Angry Young Men after 1956, the continued work of Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop, even Kenneth Tynan’s critical championing of the ‘engaged’ play against the absurdists: these provided the context for the rise of political theatre in the 1970s. 

Playwrights like Howard Brenton and Trevor Griffiths mused on the ideologies and failures of the left – even Sir Laurence Olivier found himself as a leftist patriarch in Griffith’s The Party. By the 1980s, David Hare was writing for the National Theatre and the radical fringe companies of the early 1970s were integrated in the mainstream, receiving Arts Council funding (1973 for Red Ladder, while both incarnations of 7:84 folded after funding was withdrawn).

Yet the experiments of the 1970s remain crucial for the examination of how devised performance can, through its processes, embody political ambition. The influence of the American radical theatre – companies like The Firehouse Theatre, The Living Theatre and the San Francisco Mime Troupe (who went as far as helping Black Panther Eldritch Cleaver escape arrest) – encouraged consideration of how political theatre could engage audiences (The Agitprop Street Player’s The Industrial Relations Act was performed at a demonstration in Hyde Park, echoing the ‘guerrilla theatre’ of Ronnie Davis from the SF Mime Theatre, which included practical skits teaching passers-by ‘how to stuff the parking meter’ (cited Sainer, 1975). And in the difficult conversations that frustrated McGrath, there was a genuine attempt to consider how a collaborative creativity could operate.