Three Plays on Scotland

My bitterness at recently being called a 'journo-nationalist' is compounded by my feeling that this insult presumes a great deal about my ability (I am not a journalist, lacking shorthand and even rudimentary phone-hacking skills) and my politics (I am a philosophical anarchist, who believes notions of Scottish nationalist and British Unionism both reinforce the ideal of the nation-state as the appropriate means of government: I am also a pragmatic regionalist democrat, who hasn't worked out a position on Scottish Independence).

Cultural National Identity does intrigue me: whatever happens in the referendum, it will still shape daily life. Even more interesting is the way that this sense of national identity is expressed on the stage: not because it represents any portion of the population (although it does, just by the law of averages, probably) or that the opinion of a playwright is, in itself, more valuable, accurate or well-considered than anyone else's opinion. But it is amenable to critical analysis and, being art rather than philosophical essay, includes an emotional appeal alongside the intellectual.

I would prefer to use a script than a post on twitter, anyway.

Recently - in the last year or so - I have seen three productions that have addressed Scottish identity: David

Greig's Dusinane, Tim Barrow's Union and Kieran Hurley's Rantin. Since two of them use historical settings (or mythical approximations of history), two authors get off the hook of being held personally responsible for the vision of Scotland they portray - while every play is about the time it is written in, both Greig and Barrow could appeal to the forces of factual accuracy shaping their narratives. Hurley, on the other hand, is bolder. He collects various stories from around Scotland (fictional rather than verbatim) and throws out a patch-work cabaret of a contemporary, pluralistic nation.

All three have expressed public support for Independence - but this is more as a point of information. It is not easy to discern the politics of the writers from the plays. 

Dusinane feels ambivalent about the relationship between England and Scotland - although it rewrites Macbeth to include a more Scottish angle and clearly posits the English as invaders (in a moment that suggests a similar action to the ones taken in Afghanistan and Iraq), it is ambiguous about the Scottish clans and leaders' ability to self-govern. While Malcolm comes off as a tactical politician, he is also corrupt and lazy and one speech deconstructs the various warring parties that hope to profit from Macbeth's death - at each other's expense.

Meanwhile, Union might home in on the Act of Union, and the betrayal of the Scottish nation... actually, it is pretty clear that this play was written by a nationalist. It gets borderline racist in its depiction of the English (especially Queen Anne, who is depicted as a mentally ill hedonist, excited only by tea, flirtations with her closest female adviser and fucking the help). There is a Scottish poet, there is an Edinburgh whore, representing the rural honesty (and intelligence, because he quotes Catullus every five minutes) and fecundity of the nation tricked into losing its parliament. 

Rantin, the only play that is set in the present day, has no grand narrative - indeed, Hurley quotes The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black Black Oil in saying that his is a story with no ending. It is admirably multicultural, although clearly leftist in its sympathies: the passionate monologue in praise of King Lud by a check-out girl is contrasted with some sardonic thoughts on 'the invisible hand' (Adam Smith's belief that markets will regulate themselves). Unlike both Dusinane and Union, Rantin's Scottishness is not racial or territorial. The inclusion of American tourists, Palestinian refugees and a drunk bloke chatting to a kelpie draws an inclusive idea of belonging.

Yet despite the accents and occasional swish of a kilt, none of these plays argue for a coherent Scottish identity that is radically different to the identity of any other modern, post-industrial nation. Dusinane's Scotland is part medieval tribal society and part occupied territories - the difference in the geography of England and the Highlands is over-played to separate the two nations, and the ubiquity of Gaelic might be emphasised at the cost of (another version of) historical truth. The clan divisions are pictured as arguments over personal influence, rather than the hangover of old territorial claims (both are true, but Dusinane emphasises the former). 

Rantin, on the other hand, pictures a Scotland that is similar to London: the victims of the system are displaced by economic pressure, and, despite the play's allusion to the ceilidh format, the music is informed by global influences as well as Scottish folk. There is an attention to place - many locations are explored, and part of the script is set aside for a description of whatever locality the play is visiting - but place is shaped less by the particulars of Scottish history that the dominant of free-market capitalism. The replacement of the shop assistant with those bloody self-service machines, or the tyranny of the investor who puts cash over community, are issues for the western world. 

Still, they have a good crack at Donald Trump. He is a Scottish problem.

Somewhere beneath Union's Braveheart meets Benny Hill capering, there is a brutal, neo-Darwinian vision of life: sex and death, abortions, the struggle for love and the need for money, corrupt politicians (the only one who believes in what he says happens to have commissioned a massacre): while there is no doubt that the dissolution of the Scottish Parliament (in the play) is an act of treachery, it stems from the horrors of human nature. 

Rather than presenting a notional Scottish identity, all three plays affirm the flux that makes up any identity -  that geographical boundaries are less deterministic than the fundamental (if such a thing exists in the post-modern age) verities of 'human nature.' There are particular aspects that combine in a distinctive Caledonian manner, but these are less 'pure' Scottishness than a way of assimilating diverse influences. While I still don't have an argument for my pragmatical regionalist (my anarchist is just bored of the whole thing), the fluidity of the Scottish identities on display here encourage me, not least that art won't be tied to propaganda and just questions and expands any topic it commands.  

Barkin' Mad (Sigh)

It's only one of the completely uninteresting ironies surrounding my consumption of the media that it takes me a very long time to read a newspaper: a copy of The Metro can provide me  with toilet reading and paper for a week, although I sometimes throw them out after I mess up  the easy sudoku. Consequently, I get most of my  political understanding from Nick Cohen. Since I buy his books from Oxfam, I'm only now getting around to having an opinion on the invasion of Iraq. 

I regard Cohen as one of the great political polemicists of this, or any, age. That's because he shares both my instinctive distrust of Conservatism and an outraged disillusion at the failure of the left to provide a moral opposition. There are times when he loses me - usually when he calculates how the left reaches a particular nadir of intellectual bankruptcy by reciting their various opinions. And he frequently uses 'liberal' when he is talking about movements inspired by the SWP. I might pose as an anarchist,  but I don't see the SWP as being part of the same tradition as Gladstone, or Nick Clegg. I suspect he's doing a "Real Scotsman" argument there, to disassociate his instinctive socialism from the opportunist left.

At the heart of my political ignorance is a splendid idiocy. I insist that theatre must be politically and socially engaged, citing The Trojan Women as the prime example of how the stage can comment on immediate events. Then I have barely any idea of what the actual issues are, unless Kieran Hurley, AJ Taudevin or Rob Drummond have written about them. And when they do write about them, I become suspicious if I agree with them, fretting that the artistic community shares common political assumptions and is unlikely to challenge the audience with startling ideas. 

I have been especially petty about a superb sequence in Hurley's Rantin. I ought to acknowledge, as Hurley does, that the piece was a collaboration between four artists, including Taudevin and the wonderful Wounded Knee. But this scene - in which a young checkout girl bemoans both her teacher's lack of faith in her intelligence and the increase in automatic tills in the local supermarket. Sitting on a hill, overlooking her town, the young woman decides to take a golfing iron to the machinery, realising that the machine is taking away her job and that she is part of a bold history of direct action.

This moment - the most explicitly political in Rantin and a rare moment in Hurley's work where the rage equals the compassion - has changed my shopping habits. My father has always refused to use those automatic tills (he even threw his shopping basket on the floor in anger once). Now I aspire to his revolutionary activism. After years of berating him at Sunday lunches for his failure to address systemic inequality, I accept that his tiny actions of resistance are more powerful than my rhetorical bellows about injustice.

Apart from this being a brilliant theatrical moment, it also attacks the consumerist false  consciousness at a point that encourages meaningful action. I was asked a direct moral question - am I going to ignore a tiny change without acknowledging the impact it has on people's livelihoods?

I mention this episode again and again because it is a model for what political theatre means to  me. It doesn't expect me to join a lofty cause, or dwell on a fashionable assumption about the bad guys in the modern world. It connects daily life to the political. And it is very well written, coherent and angry.

As I trawl through the Fringe brochure, I am confronted with a large number of plays that present themselves as political. I'm always enchanted by the possibility that a play can present a resolution  to the mysteries of the world. Having spent a weekend watching Howard Barker's Victory (seriously, it is a long play), I was reminded of theatre's potential to make incisive points about big ideas, marrying the intellectual rigorous with an emotional immediacy. Rather like Nick Cohen's polemics, and the opposite of the news reporting in the Evening Standard that is serving duty in the Vile Bog this week. 

The newspapers - or the BBC website,or Radio 3, or the political magazines I buy when I have to get the bus to a staff meeting at The List offices in Edinburgh - hide their bias behind the moderate tone that symbolises objectivity. Of course, the news uses this bland measure in the way that Live Art uses nakedness - to signify something that it can then avoid. Theatre emotive intensity operates to alert the audience to potential bias, even as it gives concepts a powerful impact.

If Victory has a theme, it is less about the corruption  brought on by power than the corruption necessary to get power in the first place. It reverses the equation: King Charles II, usually the cheery chappy who restores the monarchy and gets saucy with the actresses, is pictured as an East End  Thug. Barker identifies the oppression of women, then reveals their complicity in the oppression. There's killing and raping, all performed with a degree of  emotional detachment. Seduction is, as some feminists suggest, on a continuum with sexual assault. 

Using the Restoration as the context, Barker cracks open the jolly version of history taught in schools, and makes the monarchy a distillation of the state's innate savagery. God, who inspired both the revolutionaries who devised the Commonwealth and the monarchists, comes in for a pasting. But this isn't the predictable  contemporary antagonism towards Christianity. Barker's critique might take in the specific protestant theologies that made Merrie Englande turn into battlin' Britannia, but God becomes a symbol of any creed based on absolute values. And these are revealed are toothless in the face of nature's urgings. 

Somehow, all the brutality avoids nihilism: the heroine's quest to collect her husband's broken corpse gives her a new, tractable husband and a baby. Her daughter learns Latin, despite her mother's attempts to keep her ignorant (although that education is probably going  to cause more trouble). Barker picks up on Brecht's vision of Mother Courage. In spite of the total shit-storm that engulfs humans, they maintain. But while Brecht's vision still has saints and heroes, Barker has survivalists. 

Brecht is easier on the mind. His Marxism allows for a justified death by sacrifice (Mother Courage's daughter does an impromptu drum solo to warn a village of impending invasion, gets shot but dies doing the Right Thing), and hints at a future society of equality. Barker prefers a bleaker vision: sure, there is hope, but its operation is mysterious. 

Barker is quite clearly political, but he avoids any hint of partisanship to either side of the monarchic/republican divide. And unlike the newspapers that I slowly digest, he isn't writing politics shaped by the format or the hidden consensus of western opinion. He might give his characters a dialect that is grounded in the language of East End gangsters ("poetry is dick" being my favourite line), but he respects the values of the historical period. God, for example, is a going concern and motivation. It's another contrast to Brecht, who takes real  liberties in Galileo, trying to convert a renaissance entrepreneur into a scientific saint who battles the tyranny of a church more contemporary than historically accurate in its fundamentalist anti-modernism.

In this ostentatious display of theatrical brilliance, Barker reminds me of why I am so slow to engage with the newspapers: they are driven by the need to be current. Back in the early days of the War on Terror, public opinion flip-flopped between opposition to Blair's plans and support. There was a massive demonstration (Not In My  Name, et c), then a quiet support when Our Boys were Over There. When Blair's chat about Weapons of Mass Destruction was exposed as a pornographic sheen of glamour, support waned. Rationality went out the window, with both sides changing their justifications for their positions more frequently than their shreddies. 

The complexity of Victory, meanwhile, means that different audience members are going to read it in different ways in different contexts. At a quick reckoning, I could see a justification of the Restoration (the republicans are generally undersexed intellectuals who hide their inability to relate to each other behind Big Ideas), a critique of monarchy (the King is an over-sexed thug), a tract that fits nicely within the tradition of misogyny (women are whores and shallow), an analysis of the way men abuse women by reducing their physical bodies to a symbol, a sardonic interlude on the virtue or arrogance of poets, a defence of being a sycophant, a message of hope through procreation. Plus it has the most creative use of swearing outside of a rant by Gordon Brown when he forgets to switch off his microphone. 

Total Football

It's around the half-way mark for Behaviour - as soon as The Arches finishes up, it's turn for The Tron to take up the baton with Mayfesto - and the emphasis on "emerging artists" has provoked me to reconsider how I approach reviewing each show. Since it's possible to buy a season ticket for Behaviour (no point in saying that they are well priced, since I don't actually work for The Arches.. yet), I wonder whether it's worth waiting until the final artist has performed before having a final opinion. I mean, the other times that people buy season tickets are for sport, and it's dangerous to access the success of a football team before the last ball has been kicked.

Watford FC, for comparison, have been looking tasty all season, but a sudden slump in form has meant that they are unlikely to qualify for automatic promotion this season. So while Behaviour has had some strong entries, including a reading of stand-up comedy that made me sentimental for 1970s' political drama and a monologue from one of the USA's most honest and bold performers, it's not over until Torycore rocks the 2013 Budget with some heavy riffs in the Glad Cafe. 

Unlike Watford, Behaviour has not been marked by a shift towards champagne skills after years of malign press about their old fashioned tactic: in many ways, the "emerging artists" have a closer link to the Hornets' years under Graham Taylor. There is a kick'n'rush freneticism to Amanda Monfrooe's Poke (making it an uncomfortable experience, challenging and unashamedly brutal), and Rantin recalls the deceptively jolly ceilidh style pieces that were all the rage in the time of 7:84. 

Rantin is a departure from Hurley's previous play, Beats: it is more episodic, the collaboration with musicians and other actor/devisors more explicit. There's a moment of full-bloodied politics, more violent than anything he describes in Beats (which had a police charge) or Hitch (culminating in a massive protest). A teenage girl sits on a hill, ponders the legacy of the luddites and heads into town, swinging a golf-club.

Monfrooe, meanwhile, has the entire planet engulfed by apocalyptic fog, when the battle between two women over the last child on earth goes beyond the wordy arguments beloved of Greek tragedy. The rage behind these moments - which may or may not reflect the authors' own feelings on supermarket automatic tills and environmental crisis respectively - harks back to the relentless energy of Watford's 1980s 4-2-4 formation than the sophisticated midfield mastery of Gianfranco's XI. 

Whether these moments presage a building theme within Behaviour, in which the political climate has provoked a more ferocious theatre, or are simply isolated fragments within a more gentle programme, they suggest that some theatre is following on from its foundations in Athenian tragedy. Apart from making a more traditional criticism difficult - if Rantin does contain a desire for an anti-technocratic revolution, does commenting on the quality of Hurley's performance as an aging, cynical alcohol matter?  - these hints are hopeful for anyone who clings to a belief that art might be more than just a matter of expressing the economic infrastructure.

See E V E R Y T H I N G with a BEHAVIOUR Festival Pass (£45/£35)

NTS The Arches Auteurs (Part One)

It's natural to assume that The Auteurs season is the result of The National Theatre of Scotland's pause between artistic directors. With Vicky Featherstone now at The Royal Court and new director Laurie Sansom yet to arrive, The Auteurs are a creative development programme that looks back to Featherstone's emphasis on artistic led projects and lines up some of the artists who are likely to play a part in the NTS' future.

The selections are bold and diverse: Claire Cunningham, dancer and aerialist, currently touring her previous NTS production Menage a Trois across the world; Gary McNair taking on the comments that his work is analogous to stand up comedy; Kieran Hurley, already an award winning monologuist now pushing himself further into collaboration and format busting; Trilogy designing and break out live artist Nic Green, furthering her interest in ecology; Rob Drummond, who has decided to learn yet another skill after the overwhelmingly popular and intelligent Wrestling.

There is little to connect these artists in terms of style or subject. They share a home city in Glasgow, but their approaches and interests vary. Although McNair and Hurley have toured together, they cast very different lights on matters personal and political. Cunningham began her career as a singer, before demonstrating astonishing choreographic skills. Nic Green's most famous work has integrated community engagement with focussed, polished performance. And Drummond's restless script-writing has seen him tackle old school vaudeville tricks, men in lycra having a fight, instant authorship and now, the myth of The Rite of Spring's first performance.

Between them, however, there is a shared energy and a belief in a theatre that can change things. And while none of them comfortably fit the simplistic tag of "political" theatre makers, they are unashamed to address complex issues and engage with tough philosophical quandaries.

Hurley has perhaps the most political history: early work at The Arches saw him Hitch to the G8 Summit and bring back a report that was half reportage, half personal reflection on the protests, and his contribution to Oran Mor's A Play, A Pie and A Pint was a collaboration with Julia Taudevin which responded to the London riots of 2011. But Hurley is no mere ideologue in the mood of the 1970s' playwrights who sought to examine Marxist theory and potential in theatrical form. At his best, as in Beats, he is capable of taking the most personal story and demonstrating how it relates to grand cultural movements.

Throughout his career to date, rather like Drummond, he has shown a willingness to expand his repertoire of styles. Hitch and Beats were collaborative monologues, using music as an integral device. Rantin takes this further by offering a show that is "part living room gathering, part play, part gig session." Yet his writing is precise, using the telling detail to open up landscapes and pining his thoughtful intellect on specific lives and circumstances.

After a deeply personal Menage a Trois, Claire Cunningham is heading towards the global in Pink Mist. Teamed up with sound artist Zoe Irvine, Cunningham's research into land-mines during a trip through Cambodia has inspired a show that "takes it time. Gradual creeping time. The kind of time it takes to slowly demine a strip of land one metre wide and ten metres long."

Past pieces from Cunningham have revealed an artist with a cheeky sense of humour and an eye for the dramatic: Mobile/Evolution, her Fringe success, demonstrated  a danger-defying panache  and a bold aesthetic sense. Again, she is a restless artist, connecting her experiences both to her performances and the wider world.