Tragi-comedy of the Highland ‘Agelasts’

HI-Arts Journal aims to provide a regular platform for figures in the arts world to have their say about a key issue of the day.  This month: A proposed Highland Year of Culture in 2007 is surely a good thing, isnt it?  GEORGE GUNN begs to differ.

THERE was always something comic about Highland Council’s InvernessHighland2008 bid to be named European Capital of Culture. The problem with the whole affair was that the people behind it were incapable of laughing. They were, every civic one of them, what Rabelais termed ‘agelasts’, which is a neologism he coined from the Greek to describe people incapable of laughter and whom Rabelais detested because they came close to stopping him writing altogether.

Scottish First Minister, Jack McConnell, launches the InvernessHighland bid for Capital of Culture 2008 with members of Feis Rois

It was as if out rode our Highland Don Quixote, onto the corporate plain of the hard sell and the multi-million pounds marketing deal, certain that the old tin basin he wore on his head was a brand new helmet of ideas and that his old donkey was really a galloping stallion. The grand scheme of 2008 soon turned into a bathetic embarrassment without a Cervantes to put it right.
Of course the ‘agelasts of Inverness learned nothing from this.  When it became obvious that the Highland bid was never going to make the short list, when set alongside Belfast or Newcastle/Gateshead, instead of some honest soul-searching as to why the enterprise had failed, we witnessed a display of true ‘agelastian’, ‘Wha’s lek us, damned few an they’re a’ deid chauvinism’. The Highlands are special, you must understand, unique, economically transformed, undergoing a cultural renaissance and the jewel in the crown of braw, bonnie Alba.

That none of this is true doesn’t seem to matter. Instead of a year as a European Capital of Culture, Jack MacConnell, the First Minister, announced that 2006 would be the Scottish Year of Highland Culture. Except that 2006 is now 2007 because the Koh- i -Noor of our cultural crown jewels, Eden Court Theatre, will not be ready due to its extensive and necessary restructuring until then.

Lots of prime events are promised for this flagship year and Eden Court is essential because Cameron MacIntosh is planning to mount one of his West End productions and obviously this cannot be staged in Latheron village hall. Real theatre production needs a real theatre and Cameron, the Big Mac, is a real theatre producer. He also owns huge swatches of Lochaber. This irony seems to be lost on the “agelasts” at the Highland Council.

There was always something tragic about the Highland Council’s InvernessHighland 2008 bid. The problem with the whole affair was that the people behind it were incapable of weeping. The “Agelasts”, who are also aesthetically incapable of laughing, have proven equally unable to accept the necessary burden of the tragic hero: that is, to accept guilt.

The Inverness/Highland civic aspiration made the fatal mistake of presenting the chronic lack of a cultural infrastructure as a winning hand in the great card game of theme park largesse where the trump suit is a thriving cultural infrastructure.

In short, in attempting to strive for what they desired, but did not have, they succeeded only in guaranteeing that they would never get it. The trick is that you have to have what you want before you can get it. Don Quixote was reminded, quite matter of factly, that his war helmet (of ideas) was a tin basin and his mighty steed had long ears and was overly fond of carrots.

The other problem facing the information shy ‘agelasts’ of Glenurquhart Road was that as well as convincing the Westminster culturecrats as to the merits of the 2008 bid they had to convince their own people, the council tax payers of the Highlands, who expressed, at best, apathetic disinterest in the business.

There has been much in the way of production of feasibility studies and reports to committees (various) written and submitted upon this subject to argue the opposite point of view – that the 2008 bid for European Capital of Culture was a good thing. Unfortunately most of this effort is hidden away on websites or languishes on shelves in council or quango offices around the north.

A certain talent for divining, which most ordinary people have no time for, is required to access this information. What strikes the dispassionate viewer of this material almost at once is how smug it is. Ungrounded assumptions abound: we are indeed living through a “cultural renaissance” in the Highlands and Islands; the Scottish Executive has to be “praised” for its “Cultural Strategy” and its support for Gaelic in particular; the 2008 bid was a “significant recognition of the importance of culture in the area”.

That may be so in the inner circles of consultantland, but the stark truth for Scotland as a whole is different. The Scottish Parliament votes to dedicate less than a quarter of one percent of its annual budget to culture. Quite frankly it is a miracle we have any artistic activity at all. There is no manifest political will emanating from Holyrood to declare that culture matters and to invest in it accordingly. All we have are words and public relations where culture is a road map to somewhere else.

The recent announcement by Tessa Jowell, the Westminster Culture Minister, that London will bid to host the next but one Olympic Games compounds the matter. This will require billions of pounds and illustrates, if illustration is needed, the philosophy of the phenomenon preferred to the grass roots development required when it comes to cultural development.

What we are witnessing at work is a process of cultural displacement. Think of it as a great heavy pyramid. At the top we have the proposed London Olympic bid with its new dedicated Lottery games and the top-slicing of all other Lottery funds to pay for it. Below that we have the weighty priorities of Westminster, London and the Arts Council of England and its regional arts boards.

The level under that is Holyrood, Edinburgh and the Scottish Arts Council with its stand-still funding. Further down we have Inverness, the Highland Council, and all local authorities – not forgetting the hopeless and unrepresentative enterprise funded arts development agencies. At the very bottom of this pyramid, dear reader, is where ever you happen to be in your community. In my case this is Caithness and I can report that due to cultural displacement this northern county is now even flatter than geology intended.

But it is easy to laugh at our comical Don Quixote. It is even easier to weep over his tragedy. The ‘agelasts’ who control our cultural life deserve our detestation because, just like Rabelais, we know they will try to stop us writing, playing, dancing, painting and making music. In all the energy it has taken to produce the civic bids like 2008, all the strategies, policies, feasibility studies, so far, there is no evidence of the hand of an artist. The absence of such a vital involvement in political and public cultural policy is in the end its undoing.

The people of the Highlands will instinctively not trust any cultural initiative unless it is imbued with an artistic imagination. Otherwise, like the 2008 bid itself, like 2007 (or is it 2006?) as Scottish Year of Highland Culture, it will always be regarded as a symptom of the disease rather than the cure.

When the ‘agelasts’ laugh and weep Don Quixote suddenly realises they have been undertakers all along. Cervantes, unfortunately, has exited pursued by Rabelais.

George Gunn is the artistic director of Grey Coast Theatre Company.