A Pint of Dramaturgy: Victoria Bianchi walks the CauseWay

CauseWay is based on a true story of Frances Parker and Ethel Moorhead, two suffragettes who, in 1914, cycled to the Robert Burns’ cottage armed with a mission and pipe bombs. 

From their first meeting to Ethel’s eventual

incarceration, it explores the story of two women, and of one cause that divided a nation. Weaving the songs of Burns together with the politics of the suffragettes, CauseWay invites us to join with Frances and Ethel in their journey towards a fairer world and asks whether, over 100 years later, we’ve arrived at our destination.

Victoria Bianchi, who trained at RCSSD, is a playwright and performer based in Glasgow. Her works have been performed at, amongst others, Summerhall (Edinburgh), The Arches (Glasgow), Buzzcut (Glasgow) and Camden People’s Theatre (London). She is currently the writer-in-residence for South Ayrshire, creating performance works for heritage sites. CauseWay is her first full-length work for Òran Mór.

What was the inspiration for this performance?
It was originally developed as a site-specific piece for the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway in 2014. The outreach team at the museum wanted to present something as part of the WWI centenary that was a little different, and, as the attempted bombing had happened just before the war began, it seemed like the perfect story to tell. 

When I started working on the piece, I found the story really interesting, but I think my real inspiration came from this gap of 100 years. The main thing I wanted to ask with the play was how far we have come, in terms of equality, in that time.

How did you go about gathering the team for it?
I talked with Susie (Armitage) a fair bit about developing a new version of the work for A Play, A Pie and A Pint. We talked about how this performance, where site had been so crucial, could work in a space like Òran Mór. After the play was programmed, we discussed potential directors and decided to bring Debbie Hannan on board. 

This all happened very close to Christmas time, so there was definitely a sense that it had to be cast quickly given that we were going into rehearsal on 11th of January. Debbie is based in London, so we were emailing constantly about different casting options. We decided on Stephanie McGregor and Beth Marshall, who are both fantastic actors but also so incredibly engaged and enthusiastic about the issues in the piece. 

Working with a really passionate team is fantastic because as a writer you invest so much in the story, so it’s brilliant for the entire team to be so invested too.

How did you become interested in making performance.
I think I was about 6 when I went to my first drama class and after that there was never really anything else I wanted to do. At first I wanted to be an actor but as I went through university I became more drawn to devising contemporary performance. 

I think that, like most people in their late teens/early twenties, I was engaging more with  political ideologies and current affairs; I had left my little childhood bubble. The more I learned about the world, the more I wanted to say and the more I wanted to create. I wasn’t inspired by performing other people’s words any more; I wanted to put my own words out there.

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?
My process has developed a fair bit in the past four years. After I finished my MA I created a few solo performance works, before starting to focus more on playwriting in recent years. I suppose, though, the way I create work is still similar; it always starts with words.

I’m never sure of what will happen in any performance, so I just sit down at my computer and just start to type. I begin with what feels most important in that moment, with the scene that is the most fully-formed in my head, and the narrative grows from there.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?
While the work is not a promenade piece, I hope that the audience feel a sense of the journey of these characters. I mean this in a metaphorical and literal sense, because they did cycle for almost 40 miles to try to blow up Burns Cottage. 

Sometimes we find ourselves so far from where we began that we’re not sure how we got there, and that’s a really important element of this play. As Ethel and Frances make their way towards their destination, I want the audience to understand how they got there, and to think about how far we are now from where they were then.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?
I’m a great believer in drawing the audience in with humour before finding a way to break their hearts a little; make them laugh until they cry. This story is not particularly funny, but I thought it was important to find the humour in it, and to find an accessible side to the characters.

I think A Play, A Pie and A Pint is such a special space for performance, it’s intimate and friendly, and I wanted to bring a sense of that into my script. The audience are addressed directly as attendees at different rallies and , in the final scene, jurors in a courtroom. In this way, they are implicated in the story and will hopefully be able to relate more easily to the characters.

Do you see your work within any particular tradition?
I think CauseWay has a real folk element to it; it uses music and poetry to tell the story, and it’s a very Scottish play. I suppose I want to bring this cosy, traditional style of performance together with much more radical, polemic work. 

I love contemporary performance, I love the anger and the urgency, and I want to bring that to my work within a more traditional model of playwriting. I wouldn’t say that I always try to have a message in the work that I make, but it’s always a response to something I’m dissatisfied with. After all, doesn’t all the best artistic work come from some form of anger?

Ali Bawbag and the Four Dramaturgies: Gary McNair talks panto

Christmas Panto
Ali Bawbag and the Four Tealeafs
Mon, 30 November, 2015 — Wed, 23 December, 2015
By Dave Anderson and Gary McNair

Featuring Dave Anderson, George Drennan, Frances Thorburn and Anita Vettesse

Ali is a very poor man, with a brother who is wealthy. He also has a wife who looks, let’s face it, like a man. One day, Ali is in the woods – don’t ask – when he sees a (budget) band of robbers. 

The leader says a magic password and a boulder rolls away from a rock face. Ali discovers, after they’ve gone, a cave full of riches, and his life is never the same again. A strange tale unfolds, involving Ali’s greedy brother, his aspirational wife, the band of robbers, and more besides.

Drennan and trumpet

Òran Mór’s annual Christmas Panto for grown-up children has become a not to miss Festive Season comedy treat. Join us this December for Dave Anderson and Gary McNair’s irreverent take on Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Boo, cheer and sing-along, Oh, yes you will!


How did you get involved in this PPP panto business?
Gary McNair: I’ve got a good relationship with the guys at PPP. I had my very first commission their with Crunch and I’ve gone on to write and direct several other pieces for them. I’m also a part of the group the DM collective, founded by David MacLennan,  we create political satire shows there every year or so. 

It was through this that I first got to work with the wonderful Dave Anderson, we’ve really got a lot out of working together on those shows and from there, he invited me in to collaborate with him on the writing process for the summer Panto which was a real honour and a great laugh so, thankfully, he’s asked me back along.  


Will you be performing in it? After all you’re known as a monologist who performs his own scripts.
Oh no I won’t! 

I know that I’m perhaps more known to people as someone who performs my own scripts, but I tend to only do that once a year and so I save performing for the projects that I feel are right for me to do or the stories that I feel that only I could tell. But for the rest of the year, I create shows for other people to perform, which I enjoy just as much as performing. I really love the art of writing. 

I love getting to craft a story and watching other people bring it to life. Also, I can’t sing for toffee so I wouldn’t unleash that agony on a paying public. 

Were you a panto fan growing up?
Not massively. But that’s only because I never really went to any. Our school didn’t do any panto trips as far as I remember so it never really got into my blood in the way that it has for other people. It was only in later years, and, actually it was through watching the panto’s at Oran Mor, that I realised that it’s such a brilliant medium for satire and social commentary which is right up my street. 

Show seems more aimed at adults is that a statement about panto’s potential as a more mature entertainment?
I guess it is a little more adult, yes. But not in a Jim Davidson way. Far from it. I think that, yes, panto has the potential to be mature entertainment, but I think that’s always the case. When you go and see the best ones like Johnny McKnight’s or Brian James’, for example, they’re working on multiple levels; the kids love it because it works for them but the adults are hooked in as well on big laughs that are perhaps going over the kids heads, kind of like the Simpsons in that manner.

Panto’s always have so many themes relevant to everyone; hardship suffered by the poor, greed versus good, the toppling of evil empires, I think if the show was particularly mature in anyway, I guess it would be that with the knowledge that it is a venue that has a more mature audience as well, we’re freed up a little more to push these themes more to the direct political reference to what’s going on the world and so we’re able ramp up the satire a little. It’s also very very silly. 

That’s the joy of writing it with Dave, his comic timing is exceptional and he has real integrity in his work too because he cares a great deal about the world. And it helps that we can have a bloody good swear into the bargain. 

Is the show set in Glasgow? Will there be familiar characters to those of us that hang around the west end?
It’s set in panto land, of course. But it is peculiar how similar panto land can be to Glasgow at times.

Gary in his previous Xmas show...

Sound Fest: being wrong @ Wakeful Chamber

Meanwhile at the Oran Mor

Broth@ PPP: a Few Thoughts

Squash by Martin McCormick

A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT
Founded by  DAVID MACLENNAN


SQUASH
MARTIN McCORMICK
Directed by FINN DEN HERTOG
Sound Design LEWIS DEN HERTOG

Full Tilt @ Tron 2014

Angie Darcy from Janis Joplin: Full Tilt wins Best Performance Award at The Musical Theatre Network Awards 2014

From Fringe First award winning playwright Peter Arnott and multi- award winning director Cora Bissett (Roadkill ), and featuring Angie Darcy as Janis Joplin the show tells the story of the rock and roll legend as seen through the eyes of Joplin and her Full Tilt Boogie Band.

The Performance Geography of Glasgow, The West End

Although the West End of Glasgow is dominated by the University, it has fewer theatres: The Oran Mor on Byres Road is home to A Play, A Pie and A Pint, a lunchtime season of new works which has successfully exported its format around Scotland, but has only sporadic touring companies (most recently, The Sam Shepherd Roadshow did a few nights); The Cottier’s, with a troubled history of opening and closing; Webster’s Theatre, a recently converted church.

Despite this, the West End is a vibrant hub for the arts, not least due to its annual Festival, which brings together music, performance and comedy during July and makes extensive use of

Cottier’s for both its Chamber Music project and informal plays. The Cottiers was also the location for the Glasgow Cabaret Festival in 2011. Its success, however, has led to expansion and , Pete Sneddon of SCENEGINEERING explained in The Evening Times (10/4/2014) that ‘we plan to… is utilise Cottier’s as more of an event space, for concerts and weddings, which allows us to develop Webster’ as a theatre complex.’ Indeed, the popular pantomime has been transferred from Cottier’s for December 2014.

The programming at Cottier’s and Webster’s does not follow the mainstream of Glasgow’s city centre, but offers space for smaller companies, often outwith the touring circuits or as part of other festivals. 

A Play, A Pie and A Pint, however, has established a clear identity.

Now in its twenty-first season, it was founded by David MacLennan in 2004. Running for an hour at lunchtime, it offers a new play every week, and has a loyal audience. Authors featured range from the established - Rona Munro, David Greig and David Harrower have all contributed - through Glasgow favourites such as Kieran Hurley, AJ Taudevin and Gary McNair - to emerging names like Sylvia Dow. 

Despite the high turnover of plays, and an emphasis on the script, many successes have begun their life here: most recently, Peter Arnott’s Full Tilt (directed by Cora Bissett and exploring the life of Janis Joplin through a concert format) transferred to the Edinburgh Fringe. 

A Play, A Pie and A Pint has become the most energetic producer of new plays in Scotland: the supportive audience, the company’s willingness to take risks on young writers and the week long runs are attractive - even Untitled, a well established Scottish company, have presented a ‘classic cut’ of Hamlet - and the long seasons ensure that there are plenty of opportunities.

The Glasgow School: Introduction

2014 has been a challenging year for performance in Glasgow. The deaths of Ian Smith, artistic director of Mischief La Bas, Adrian Howells, a pioneering maker of intimate theatre and David MacLennan, member of 7:84 and the founder of the successful A Play, A Pie and A Pint programme, have robbed Scotland of three imaginative and dynamic creators. The arrival of the Commonwealth Games, and its attendant cultural season, alongside the approach of the Referendum for Independence, has seen performance expand into new public spaces and become part of a dynamic debate on the future of Scotland.

In this context, Glasgow's performance communities have been presented to the world, and the importance of its arts as a tourist attraction and a way of defining the city's identity have become part of the council's strategies. In the visual arts, the Generation series of exhibitions has emphasised the growth of artistic endeavour and success over the past 25 years, while the selections made for the Commonwealth Games Culture strand have included writers, performers and venues that have a strong connection to the city's diverse traditions of theatre. Supported by a consistent calendar of festivals, performance in Glasgow has many strands, from the experimental live art influenced work often seen in The Arches through to the bold interpretations of classic texts at the Citizens.

The parallels with the visual art scenes are evident: performance takes many of its cues from the vitality of music communities and is confident in crossing boundaries of genre. New spaces, such as The Pipe Factory, continue a long-standing tradition of finding unusual spaces and curating different forms in a single event and artists like Raydale Dower frequently include a performance aspect in their gigs or exhibitions.

Dr Sarah Lowndes, now a lecturer at Glasgow School of Art, wrote a comprehensive study of the visual art movements in Glasgow in the years running up to the turn of the century, Social Sculpture. This book not only provided a context for the successes of many Glasgow conceptual artists, who have dominated the Turner Prize in the past twenty years, but also traced the connections between the bands and visual artists that have given the city its distinctive aesthetic identity.

There has not, however, been a comparable study of the performance scenes in Glasgow, and this project hopes to take a snapshot of the communities that make events that are rooted in theatrical processes.

Cut Up Widow Gets Clean

Oh dear! It seems that William Burroughs has got hold of my email. Can you work out what productions these press releases came from, before Uncle Bill rode in on his Horse and scattered the words?

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Double Bill: A Respectable Widow Takes To Vulgarity/Clean
26-29 March, 8pm
A Play, A Pie and A Pint
1 April - 3 May, 1pm & 7pm

The Traverse Theatre welcomes the return of its award-winning Double Bill production A Respectable Widow Takes to Vulgarity/Clean this week (26-29 March), with the arrival of the annual A Play, A Pie and A Pint series to look forward to next week (1 April - 3 May). We thought you might like to hear more about both productions.

Our 5*-winning Double Bill will be taking in the lyrical dexterity of Glaswegians in A Respectable Widow Takes To Vulgarity and the razor-sharp edge of international criminal femme fatales in Clean. This is your last opportunity to catch these splendid pieces on the Edinburgh stage before they transfer to New York later this season.

The £12 ticket includes a play, a pie and a pint of beer/125ml glass of house wine/regular glass of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, lemonade, orange juice, tea or filter coffee.

Our line-up offers an eclectic mix of themes, characters and stories to enjoy. 

With both lunchtime and evening performances, there is a time to suit every schedule.

Each performance is presented as an easily digestible 50-minute package. 

Our five PPP pieces this year bring a diverse range of stories to the stage: thematically, tonally and geographically.

Home at The Oran Mor

Previous production from PPP

Being the champion of the experimental, the painfully hip and the downright challenging, I'd like to disrespect Oran Mor's Play, Pie and a Pint. Now that I have found out that the theatre which has inspired me over the past decade has a category (it's called post-dramatic), I am all set to attack the very idea that a script is the foundation of theatre.

Unfortunately, I can't argue PPP. It offers a new play every week, pretty much, and has had plenty of shows move onto bigger tours. It has given Scotland new works by David Harrower and Rona Munro. It even hosted a few of my own post-dramatic heroes (Monfrooe, McNair). It's a good thing. I have to silence my angst-ridden post-modern trickiness, and salute the audience - loyal - the producers - persistent -  and the artistic director - the best Omar Sharif impersonator north of Manchester.

The following press release is another example of why PPP  is a good thing. It arrived from Edinburgh University.

 Writing student takes centre stage, with a pie and pint on the side

A playwriting student has won a new prize to have her work performed as part of a popular lunchtime theatre programme. Jenny Knotts from the University of Edinburgh has been awarded the inaugural David MacLennan Prize for her play, Home. It will be showcased in Glasgow theatre Oran Mor’s long-standing series, A Play, a Pie and a Pint.

Jenny’s winning piece is a comedy tinged with sadness, centring on twin sisters Maggie and Agnes’ last day in a house that has been their home for decades. Maggie suffers from Alzheimer’s and Agnes uses a wheelchair.The twins are from Ireland and their voices are inspired by Jenny’s own grandmother.

I am restraining myself from suggesting that the characters were inspired by Oran Mor's audience. 


Jenny was moved to write Home after watching a documentary about the care of elderly people in Scotland. Jenny said: “Winning the David MacLennan Prize is a dream come true – I have been going to see plays at Oran Mor for years and know how important it is to the Scottish theatre scene. I think it is so generous of them to support a new writer like myself with a fully commissioned play, and I can’t wait to see where this takes me.”

David MacLennan is an acclaimed Artistic Director at Oran Mor who champions new writing – producing more than 30 weeks of new plays every year. He initiated the new award exclusively with the University of Edinburgh, offering Postgraduate students in Playwriting the opportunity to have their work performed as part the renowned theatre series.

I am hoping that MacLennan has a look round the corner of Byres Road later this year: there are a bunch of immensely talented playwrights up at Glasgow this year, on the Playwriting and Dramaturgy course. I've heard a rumour that one of the writers has written a twenty minute tragedy called 'Trigger Warning.'



David said: “We are delighted to produce Home at Oran Mor – Jenny’s distinctive voice is unlike any I have heard before and I think our audiences will really enjoy it. The calibre of the students’ writing was incredibly high this year and it was a challenge to choose a winner. Moreover, the partnership with the University has been a success and we hope it continues.”

Jenny is a student on the University of Edinburgh’s MSc in Playwriting, led by award-winning playwright Nicola McCartney. The programme aims to give its students real experience in Scotland’s theatre scene.



Jenny Knott’s Home will be performed in Oran Mor at 1pm from 25-30 November. Tickets can be purchased here:

The Jazz Club Murder

It is sadly appropriate that I am reading the assembled criticism of Kenneth Tynan in the same week that I have seen Oran Mor’s The Jazz Club Murder.  While the Murder has the well-mannered aplomb of a mildly ironic drawing room drama – despite the setting, the detective-vicar never loses his Oxbridge charm – it subscribes to a set of values that would, no doubt, have had Tynan plotting to become the first man to say ‘fuck’ on the BBC, thereby setting a bomb under post-war civil society.

There’s some fine trumpet-playing by George Drennan – a man given to whipping out his horn at any excuse, even when playing a pantomime baddie, a winning performance from Paul Dodds as the heroic priest, and even a sexy dual turn from Frances Thorburn, who plays the seductive American singer and teasing society mademoiselle with equal restraint. But from its structure  - mild investigation followed by almost dramatic revelation – to its underlying morality (vengeance corrupts the soul), Mr Runcie’s drama is comfortingly predictable.

To complain that it sentimentalises an era – the 1950s – is to miss the point: the drama depends on stock characters rubbing along happily. The murderer is barely glimpsed before the final scenes – preventing any possible shock or sympathy – allowing the play’s wit to rest on the vicar’s flirtations with the toothsome twosome. Undeniably, it goes for the easy path to the audience’s affection – the packed crowd laughed willingly at the strained jokes stolen from Mae West.

Yet the light irony it beings to its depiction of a London of jazz clubs and underworld villainy lacks any satirical bite: Murder is an entertainment, a light one, that ignores the tragedy of an innocent killed before her time or the journey of her killer from loyal son to condemned criminal. It signifies a past long forgotten, evoking the era more through the mannered conversations and the simplicities of plot: it rarely threatens to reveal the depth of the characters, even preferring to have fun at the expense of the cast’s changes of role.

Moments of fun abound – aside from an unfortunate misuse of the word ‘ball’ (is the jazz singer really asking the vicar to have sex with her, because that is what the word means. Ask Little Richard…), and the repeated phrase ‘catching the milk train back to Cambridge’ which sounds suspiciously like a euphemism after the heroic vicar has spent the evening with two different women – there’s a lively humour in the vicar’s commentary on events. Slight missteps in tone – some of the jazz numbers have a little too much of the Whitney Houston hysteria to convince – are quickly absorbed into a straightforward, facile plot. Drennan, although given little to do, is always charismatic: Doodad wins over the audience and acts both as plucky protagonist and obedient narrator.

But even by PPP’s conservative standards, Murder is whimsical. It seems churlish to attack so slight a piece of theatre (and this is neither tragedy, nor drama), especially since it aims to entertain. Yet Tynan’s ghost haunts me: like Aristotle, like Plato, he recognised the power of theatre as a moral force, as disruptive, as challenging. There’s nothing wrong with The Jazz Club Murder, beyond the occasional dodgy accent. But it isn’t enough.

The Trouble With Double

Morality, of course, remains in fashion. The triumphs against the repressive models of moral stricture - such as censorship of the theatre (1968), Clause 28 (rather later than it ought to have been, frankly) - haven't removed the necessity of moral limitations on the arts, but shifted the grounds. While once the representation of homosexuality was either prohibited or satirical - it isn't that simple to reclaim John Inman as subversive - arguments about attitudes towards gender or sexual identity remain dynamic.

It is, however, less fashionable to critique a play on the grounds that it is morally obnoxious. That kind of talk harks back to the complaints of St Augustine (who saw theatre as a distraction from God) or The Daily Mail, which would probably worry about the impact on the children: either that, or it's political correctness gone mad.

I'm probably political correctness gone mad: certainly, my moral parameters are unrecognisable to conservative values. I'd rather see Empress Stah get naked and drink her own blood than see an actress in bra and panties during a lunchtime play - although I can see how, if the matter is simply 'area of flesh exposed,' Stah must appear more immoral.

And finally, I get to The Trouble With Double. It's part of the Oran Mor's A Play, A Pie and A Pint season. I'm not sure whether to begin with the good things or the bad things. The bad thing is that I would, in fact, ban this play - or at least this production of it.

(Of course, I wouldn't really ban anything. I am committed to a liberal anti-censorship argument: liberal in the sense it is vague. I don't begrudge the cast and crew getting paid, I don't begrudge the audience the cheap laughs or the vulgar titillation. The problems that I have with D.c. Jackson's script aren't really that is represents a serious threat to morality or social order.)

Let's start with the good. D.C. Jackson might be the closest thing that Scottish theatre has to a poet - in terms of word wielding, Jackson has the same fluid facility that marks Russell Brand out from the cornucopia of comics, a dizzying command of alliteration and the well framed phrase and fable. Like a poet, Jackson bombs on the punchlines - many of the gags require only a blast from a trombone to become more obvious than the Conservative Party's duplicity. But he can sling words around the stage with the energy of a cage full of chimpanzees flinging faeces.

And Kenny Miller can direct up a story. Trouble never relaxes, keeps the pace fiercer than Beyonce: despite the weakness of the plot's premise (yes, it's an identical twins farce), it moves sleekly to the inevitable resolution.

Johny Austin and Robert Jack and Louise McCarthy do the business on stage. Jack is a geeky sex-pest, not without charm. Austin is the timid groom to be. McCarthy gets to play both limpid wife and sexpot sister.

If as Aristotle says, the plot is more important than the characters, and both are more important than the ideas therein, Trouble  might get a pass. Sadly, Jackson wasn't too fussed about characterisation. All three actors are playing off the shelf personalities, and when McCarthy strips down to her skidders, a horrible truth is revealed.

This is a pilot for a 1970s sit-com that never happened. The ingredients are all in place: the men are hopeless, driven by insecurity or sexual opportunism. The women are either malicious and sexual or prim and demanding. So much talent is wasted on something that Sid James might lend an ironic bite. To the left, we have a scene from the action. Feminists are quite justified in taking this as a reading for the show's temperature. They are also correct to ask why the woman is dressed in an erotic manner and the man... do I have to be PC Gone Mad to object to this?

It is a sex comedy that is neither erotic nor self-aware. It is dated, trivial and, when it relies on the jokes in the script (that is, when cast or director aren't pushing the funny by their performances), it is like a saucy postcard source book.

Now the critic decides: am I to moralise, or judge the play on its performance? If the former, then PPP are banished beyond the city walls, until they can be more mature about sexuality. If the later, they ought to get a raise.

Meditating on Traverses

Is it possible to read the programme for the Traverse season and, like a mystic casting blind eyes over ancient runes, discern the deeper patterns of the Scottish theatre world? Since the Traverse is celebrating fifty years of producing new work - and, in the process, has elevated fifty emerging writers to a year long attachment - and has recently welcomed a new artistic director Orla O'Loughlin, perhaps it is the best place to start.

Perhaps. Alongside the Tron, the Traverse has a programme that is made up of both guest companies and in-house productions. Unlike the Tron, or the Citizens, it has had a specific vision built into its programming from the beginning: it is concerned with "New Writing." Under Dominic Hill, now artistic director at The Citizens, the definition of new writing was expanded - a dance season was added, but the Traverse Fifty programme has reasserted the script as the heart of the theatre's process. Add in the various engagement programmes, which often focus on getting young people writing, and the Traverse is actively engaged in maintaining the importance of the word made drama.

The venue's choice of collaborators is telling: on the one extreme, pitching in with A Play, A Pie and A Pint for a series of midday specials to the other, hosting Platform 18's double bill, from The Arches. PPP  is radical in format - short new plays given week long runs over lunch - but conservative in style - the script is still the thing, mostly. Platform 18, on the other hand, is always experimental. Past winners include Nic Green, who used it to develop part of her Trilogy, while this year has Amanda Monfrooe, a master of matching eclectic influences to her darkly post-modern take on reality and Peter McMaster, who is interpreting Wuthering Heights through a feminist perspective and all-male cast.

From these collaborations, the position of the Traverse as a broad, inclusive venue is clear, and it does sketch out something of Scottish Theatre's breadth. Although the choices in the PPP runs are often energetic and youthful - rising star Sabrina Mahfouz is no polite chronicler of drawing room society, and Douglas Maxwell has plenty of fun taking a respectable widow to vulgarity - their audience is traditionally older (the edition at Oran Mor is often packed with peckish pensioners). The Arches, meanwhile, has a younger audience, coming from the diverse artistic communities of Glasgow and well versed in the outrage and idioms of Live Art.

Spreading out to their various visiting companies reveals an even bigger perspective on Scottish Theatre - which expands to include Firebrand (from the Borders), Lyceum Youth Theatre (from the next door theatre), Clerkinworks (straight out of London), Gare St Lazare and Blue Raincoat (Irish) and Pepperdine University (visiting from Malibu). The work flowing through Scotland is international in character - perhaps inevitably from English speaking nations, although manipulate upped the European quotient back in February.

There's more than a touch of politics in this season - Clerkinwork's The Bear gets stuck into the criminal justice system, White Rose uses the Soviet defense of Stalingrad to examine gender politics, Mahfouz has three female criminals getting up to tricks, and Why Do You Stand In The Rain? returns to the aftermath of WWI for a story of state savagery. Yet there is a far more potent theme that carries beyond this: the personal politics of First Love (an adaptation of a Beckett novella), Jenna Watt's meditation on Flaneurs who fail to intervene, and in the double bill of Chapel Street and Bitch Boxer, a lively look at the impact of Cameron's Broken Britain on individual lives.

Perhaps this collision of public and private is best demonstrated by the Traverse's big production this Spring Quiz Show by Rob Drummond. Drummond is undeniably becoming of the most important authors of his generation - recent success has seen his Bullet Catch head to the USA - and Quiz Show demonstrates his ability to use a popular subject to delve deeply into philosophical ideas.

Apart from a rude health, this spring at the Traverse suggests that Scottish theatre is not only enthused by an interest in international theatre - with England providing only one of the possible areas of influence - but that it integrates the politics of the personal into wider contexts. It's easy to say that theatre has become suddenly political, or that it is obsessed with national identity, but the emphasis on particulars, on the specifics of life rather than the grand narratives of dogma, make this political theatre distinctive from its earlier incarnations, such as in the 1970s, when it was driven by Marxist ideology.



 - Quiz Sho