Embrace the Struggle to Rejoin Scotland’s People to their History

GEORGE GUNN casts a skeptical eye over the role of the proposed Scottish National Theatre, and suggests that the work of W B Yeats in Ireland and the identity and insight of Highland experience can provide a path for a genuine National Theatre.

WHAT IS THERE to say about a National Theatre of Scotland?

“Nothing” would be one answer. But nothing would be an easy answer and it also would be a mistake. Nothing comes from nothing. In the first fundamental scene in King Lear the following exchange takes place. It is between King Lear and his daughter Cordelia:
LEAR: What can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters? Speak!

CORDELIA: Nothing, my lord

LEAR: Nothing!

CORDELIA: Nothing

LEAR: Nothing will come of nothing: speak again!

CORDELIA: Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth
I love your majesty according to my bond; nor more nor less.
So it is that I must heave my heart into my mouth and proceed to make some sense out of all of this. But I must plead some sympathy for my position. Making theatre is my life’s work, and for many of the population theatre is an obscure activity. I make theatre in the north Highlands, so doubly obscure for me.

The Grey Coast Theatre Company, my company, makes theatre with community groups, with primary schools, who ever we can gather some times and it is vital and important work we do and I’m sure I’ll get my reward in heaven, or in Wick, but for the majority of the theatre-going population in Scotland Grey Coast is unknown to them. When we tour we do go to such places as the Traverse and The Arches but, although I cannot prove this assertion, we are treated as if we are a foreign company.
In many ways this is true and yet we are the most native of Scotland’s theatre companies, rooted as we are in the culture and people of Caithness and Sutherland: they are both our subject and our first audience. You may think that this would limit us, that it gives Grey Coast really no place to go. I, obviously, would disagree; for us it is all very simple: we must succeed in Thurso or we fail in Edinburgh.

The Highlands of Scotland, especially our far northern province, represents, for Scottish theatre, a huge opportunity. Everything the Grey Coast does is new and this is for one reason: it has never been done before. There is no native theatre tradition in Caithness and Sutherland. That is not to say that making theatre is alien to the people. It is not. Since the Reformation they have just called it something else.

The Grey Coast Theatre Company has been going now for eleven years and we are only just beginning to make a difference. To paraphrase the Bible and our Helmsdale play The Great Bunillidh Volcano: In the beginning there was nothing, now there’s something. Maybe King Lear was wrong, but I would suggest, in Scottish theatre terms, the Grey Coast company is Cordelia and like her we pay the price for telling the truth. But the truth is far more exciting than falsity, or spin, or PR, or any other made up charade. I’ll come to the current Highland theatre scene later on, time does not allow me to explore that fully here.

So what is there, really, to say about a National Theatre of Scotland? Well, there is plenty. There are two words which must sing out to those who are going to be responsible for the delivery of our National Theatre: they are “localise” and “internationalise”. Easy for me to say, granted, but there are also two main obstacles in the way of localisation and internationalisation. One is the increasing Englishing of our theatre managements. The other is the increasing urbanity of our theatres content.

The former, unfortunately but inevitably, leads to the latter. Everything, of course, is dangerous when we discuss such matters but if we are concerned about the formation of a National Theatre of Scotland now is the time to tell the truth.

The main question is: will it be able to achieve anything meaningful in its current proposed form – that is, the commissioning body which will harness and present “the best of Scottish theatre”?  Perhaps the detractors of this proposal have a point and what the nation needs is a building with a company established inside it. Weaknesses abound on both sides of the debate.

Who is to say, really, what is “the best of Scottish theatre”?  If our theatres are, in the main, controlled by the well meaning but culturally denuding managers of a neighbouring but nonetheless colonising dramatic hegemony which operates under the dangerous assertion that there is no real Scottish dramatic tradition then how can a distillation, a concentration, of that assertion in the shape of an artistic director and a board of directors ever hope to present to the Scottish people and the world “the best of Scottish theatre”?

What is the National Theatre of Scotland actually for? Is it going to be a showcase for civic Scotland, the performing arm, if you like, of the Scottish Parliament, something the Executive can point to as an “achievement”. How can it answer the charge that most of what presently passes for Scottish theatre is a mere sophistry when it comes to the relationship that these productions and artistic directors have with the real culture of the nation as lived and experienced by the majority of its people, of what actually makes Scotland Scottish as opposed to being an under developed region of Britain.

If the ever increasing frantic activity our leading theatre companies have to put into mere survival, and where the mediocre is deliberately heralded as the innovative because no one can afford to say otherwise, is the everyday reality of working professional theatre in Scotland, how on earth can a National Theatre Of Scotland hope to transcend that spin and ballyhoo in order to actively progress the art form in this country?

The Scottish Arts Council’s recent announcement that funding for 7:84, Borderline and Suspect Culture is up for review or the chop in 2005 does not help the case. What it does do is display a terrible headless chicken-ness. Can they not see that Scotland is a lesser place without those three theatre companies? I may not agree or like what they produce but, god help me, I will proclaim their right to exist, to thrive.

If any of these questions or issues have any validity then the primary task of our National Theatre is to protect the companies which currently exist and to sew the seeds of a genuinely native dramatic tradition and not to promote and flaunt the worst examples of a failed and failing cultural form.

The present criticism of our current Scottish Executive is that it has raised the disgrace of inactivity to a fine art. The very nervousness which runs through the soul of the Labour Party, especially that very British branch of it which hails from the south west of Scotland, when any aspect of Scottish autonomy is proposed turns into veritable epilepsy when the spectre of Scottish culture raises its self determining head.

When it comes to the establishing of a Scottish National Theatre the very mention of these three words – theatre, national and Scotland – in any sentence in any context is like an Independent fox in the Unionist henhouse to a significant section of the Labour Party in Scotland. For many of them it as if their worst nightmare has come true.

So where on earth do the Scots look if they want to find a viable comparison to shape, model and sustain their emerging National Theatre? Much has been made by the National Theatre working party of the Swedish National Theatre. Others have pointed to Iceland for inspiration and instruction. But, in truth, these near neighbours can offer us only a scant organisational correspondent, their histories, if not their immediate cultures, being so different as to offer us a false roadmap. But in order that we do not submerge ourselves beneath a swatch of questions it may be instructive to concentrate upon the singularly most important question, to my mind, in the entire debate: what do we want a National Theatre of Scotland for, exactly?

Sometimes it is educational to look into places and ideas which, at first glance, may seem far from helpful. So it is with this in mind that I direct our attention to William Butler Yeats and how his life and work tackled, either head on or tangentially, the legacy of English colonialism in Ireland. Why? Because I believe there is a lot to learn from it for, at present, in my opinion, Scottish theatre has never been so weak, so flabby, so out of touch with history and because of that cannot point, in any meaningful way, to the future.

So, why did W B Yeats, along with Lady Gregory and others, found the Abbey Theatre? This was Ireland’s first and only literary theatre – note literary, not national. It became Ireland’s National theatre over time, when there was a nation for it to be the theatre of. Has it retained its literary nature, or is that too romantic a question?

Must we agree with Yeats when he proclaimed “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone” and yet Ireland lives and thrives with its theatre on the stages of England and the world, whereas Scotland’s theatre does not and is not. Who in Scotland now could pose the insistent maxim “That Ireland should retain its culture by keeping awake its consciousness of metaphysical questions”?

That Scottish life and letters lacks such a voice to raise such issues is understandable because our cultural expression is channelled into servitude of the civic master: ask not what your government can do for the arts, but what can the arts do for the government?

In such violently reactionary times I am not proposing that we adopt a negative dialectic in relation to thinking of what a Scottish National Theatre can be. In many ways Yeats’s indigestible fascistic politics, his mystical fantasies and occult ramblings serve to remind us of what not to become as his poetry, majestic and revolutionary, urged us to contemplate what we can become.

What Yeats so brilliantly pointed to was that Irish history, its struggles and mythology, was endemically heroic so its poetry and theatre must, by time’s instruction, be heroic. Yet this heroic nature must be rooted in the everyday, must be based on reality: we may sleep and dream in the arms of Ossian and Dierdrah, but we are rudely awake in the hell’s kitchen of Jack MacConnell and Tony Blair.

It is the job of the job of the National Theatre of Scotland to dream in public because I believe that the theatre is the most important and vital art form in our country. All other art forms find their home in the theatre. Only the theatre can provide them with that immediate connection with an audience which keeps both audience and artist alive.

Yet there is a weakness in glorifying the native because if we do we will have accepted too easily the consequences of our own cultural colonialism, we will have abandoned history, we will be saying that this is the only way we can be. There are always other alternatives.

The alternative for an emerging National Theatre of Scotland must be in transforming the national consciousness into the liberating land of the social consciousness. Whatever limitations our theatre operates under they are, essentially, self imposed limitations. They are the consequences of history and consciousness, we must recognise them for that and not wallow in any impasse, but rather constantly strive to search out practical and cultural alternatives – of what the critic RP Blackmur cited as to what Yeats brought to his poetry, which is, “the terrible ambiguity of an immediate experience.” Or, as Yeats himself would have it, “The uncontrollable mystery of the bestial floor”.

On one hand Yeats imagined that and on the other, as he commands his imagination (in “The Tower”) to “Call images and memories/ from ruins and from ancient trees”. How does any artistic director of any emergent and forming National Theatre of Scotland ever hope to accommodate all that, or even begin to think it?

One thing I hope he or she would accept, or rather, needs to appreciate, is that our theatre is emerging from a shadow. Do I need to name the shadow? Yes, I do. It is England, it is Shakespeare. So what are we to do? First, we must, absolutely, accept and deal with England’s brutal legacy and its effects on our culture and politics, and secondly we must aspire to the light which shone in William Shakespeare’s work, embrace it and understand why it shone so brightly.

If we think of the established Shakespeare-led English speaking cultural hegemony as being that which is above ground, then the aspiring articulation of a Scottish dramatic voice must be that of the underground, of that beautiful noise which Hamish Henderson identified as “the radical tradition”, where everything, by necessity, is changing and where the only permanence is flux.

Only if the National Theatre of Scotland employs such a subversive embrace will it serve the needs of the emerging Scottish nation, its people and their mongrel culture, to cite William McIllvaney.

And yet the sobering thing about the poetics of William Butler Yeats is that he constantly warned of nationalist excess. Would we, if we were so inclined, think Yeats either prophetic or journalistic if we had applied the following lines to Scottish theatre, “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” or “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ are full of passionate intensity”?

What Yeats urges us to is an understanding of the necessary madness of change, but that we must also be big and brave enough to deal with the consequences. I see nothing in contemporary Scottish theatre which assures me we are capable of either or any of that. What we do have is the confused and confusing blubberings of a detached practice: where the playwrights’ know nothing and care less of the country they write in and about by default: where the directors are so superbly distanced from the cultural life of the country they are in to be, actually, not in it at all: where the actors, those god blessed messengers, do their best to fly with clipped wings: where the audiences are consecutively starved and gluttonised on the ill conceived ditherings of a half dead art form that dare not speak its name.

That, you might think, is a hard reflection, but, I would argue, if we are honest, it is the place from where we must start. We must be brave enough to say that, at present, Scottish theatre is one of the last outposts of English cultural colonialism and, having said it, move on. All we have in the future is struggle. We must embrace it, confidently, subversively. In order to ensure that that embrace does not choke us then, I would suggest that the National Theatre of Scotland must, at once, accept that it is political. That the Artistic Director, the Chair and the Board, must understand politics and be aware, constantly, that art is not enough. Art has never been enough.

The emerging theatre of the Highlands, and the sheer excitement generated by the possibility of that, offers the National Theatre of Scotland a natural place to start in – a home base, if you like. If it does, and I absolutely hope it does, then it will, in theatrical terms, have to perfect the technique of trouble, to paraphrase Yeats once again.

The truth is we, as a people, as a nation, do not know who we are. A National Theatre of Scotland actively working and developing itself and its audiences in the Highlands would allow Scotland, as a whole, to begin to find out who we are. Our theatre must do for our own country what the poetry of Yeats did for Ireland, which is to rejoin the people to their history. By doing that, by understanding that, in many ways a sunless December task, will Scottish theatre be able
o talk to and engage with the rest of the world.

What the Highlands can offer the National Theatre of
cotland is the opportunity, as Edward Said said of Yeats in another context, that he “rises from the level of personal experience to that of national archetype, without losing the immediacy of the former or the stature of the latter”. By that, I think, he means that you cannot separate the individual from their instinctual life.

That “instinctual life”, I believe, is the cultural strength of the people, and by developing that energy which is native, but not unique, to the north, to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, we can launch our theatre ship to a good beginning. In it is identity. On board, also, is legitimacy, a legitimacy which offers a bright but choppy future.

All this, this northern base, would be, I concede, an unlikely setting for a National Theatre. It would be unexpected, but we, as Scots, have never been very good at doing what is expected. But mainly what the Highland experience offers the National Theatre is insight, a powerful historical narrative which can never be apolitical, where the very ground you walk upon is the stuff of both politics and legend, where every face and voice contains a story that is particular to that face and voice but which is a verse in the great poem of the world.

Yeats called this “the struggle of the fly in marmalade”. The past history of Highland theatre is recent and problematic, but what we do possess is the beauty of the unknown. We are at once ancient and yet like infants trying to find their feet. Politics must not emasculate the National Theatre of Scotland, it must be its subject. If we have the courage to dream that into reality then, I will conclude, the natural home for such a theatre is the Highlands. Who would believe it?

This article (but not its title) is the text of a talk which George Gunn delivered to the Changin’ Scotland event at The Ceilidh Place, Ullapool, on Saturday 29 November 2003. The article appears here with the permission of the author.

© George Gunn, 2003