A Bit of Random Thought

In the introduction to Scottish Theatre, Randall Steven claims that the recent (that is, the 1970s) growth in Scottish performance is related to the use of Scots in scripts. Admittedly, it's a little out of date (printed 1996). Having watched Sunset Song, the adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's novel, I am not sure that this correspondence can be read as causal. The language of LGG is Scots, with some lovely poetic twists, but the language itself is not enough to carry a plot that takes in WWI, female oppression, the move away from an agrarian economy and the connection between humans and their land.

The adaptation takes as much of LGG's text as it can handle without collapsing into a book reading. Plenty of key moments, including the birth of a baby and the death of the heroine's husband, are told as they are shown: despite a few moments of choreography, Selladoor's production gives reign to the script's verbosity. This is  nothing to do with Scots as a viable theatrical language, nor a critique of Julie Ellen's  direction: rather, it is a problem with a theatre that is literary in nature, and has too much respect for language.

Randall Steven's claim is not necessarily supported by the subsequence growth of Scottish theatre: not only are many of Scotland's new wave of creators less interested in the script as the singular foundation of a performance (since 1996, Cryptic, Untitled and Vanishing Point have become major players, all of whom are intrigued by theatre's visual aspects), they have not noticeably taken up works in Scots. And even those writers who often visit Scottish themes do not recognise Scots as the lingua franca of Scotland. In the contemporary multicultural Scotland, it isn't.

That said, Sunset Song uses Scots because it is about a people who spoke Scots - and, despite some rather obvious metaphors about the woman as the land, there are moments of poetry and passion that Scots is perfectly balanced to express. What might be the case is that theatre, with its opportunity to craft a language's identity, offers a place for Scots to grow....