Book Review : The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Drama : All the world's a Scottish stage

The Edinburgh Companion To Scottish DramaEdited by Ian BrownEdinburgh University Press, 248 pp, GBP21.99A FEW weeks ago, onMidsummer's Night, the National Theatre Of Scotland celebrated itsfifth birthday by launching its latest bold challenge to traditionalideas of what theatre is, or might look like. Presented by 235different groups or solo artists across Scotland - and, in a fewcases, far beyond - Five Minute Theatre was an experimental eventwhich involved each group performing or recording a five-minute showin front of a live audience, and making it available for livestreaming on the internet as part of a 24-hour NTS celebration ofgrassroots dramatic energy across the nation. Most observers - andnot a few theatre professionals - were sceptical about the projectwhen it was first announced; words like "gimmick" were freelybandied about.Yet the results - ranging from a spellbinding momentof storytelling in a house in Sutherland to a five-minute teenageversion of Tam O'Shanter at Alloway Kirk, and from a hugelyprofessional short movie about the culture of apology from DundeeRep, to groups of kids in Lanarkshire improvising on anti-sectarianthemes ("we've been wrong, we've been so stupid and wrong") - werecompulsively, magnificently, gloriously interesting, with dozens ofthe most successful pieces still circulating on the internet. Andbecause of the NTS's insistence that each piece should have a liveaudience, however small, it felt like an event that subtly redefinedthe whole idea of theatre in Scotland; and showed, definitively,that what happens in formal theatre buildings is only the tip of thedramatic iceberg, in a nation drenched in possibilities forperformance, oratory, live storytelling, showing-off, and makingfun, often in the most thrilling contemporary and historicalsettings.And it's this sense of a theatre differently defined, andemerging from a much wider range of public and social experiencethan the word "theatre" normally allows, that gives the powerfulinitial impulse to the new Edinburgh Companion To Scottish Drama,edited by academic and playwright Ian Brown. In its early chapters,this book of 17 collected essays, with an introduction by Brownhimself, mounts a fierce and convincing argument against the commonassumption that for two or three centuries after the Presbyterianrevolution of the 1560s, theatre in Scotland was almost entirelysuppressed, and had no continuing tradition of the kind that existedin London.On the contrary, both Brown's introduction and SarahCarpenter's compelling opening chapter on Scottish drama before 1650conjure up a vivid image of a society in which old mediaevaltraditions of civic and religious pageantry, May Day celebrations,and public entertainment were far less thoroughly suppressed than issometimes imagined. The Presbyterian tradition of thunderouspreaching only added to the range of dramatic experienceavailable.The spirit of popular satire against the abuse of power,famously expressed just before the Reformation in Sir DavidLindsey's Ane Satyre Of The Thrie Estaites, seems never to have diedout in the towns and cities of Scotland, and was often expressedthrough witty monologues written for insertion into traditionalpageants and celebrations. And it is worth considering how theemergence of the National Theatre of Scotland, which famouslydefines itself as a "theatre without walls", is beginning, afterhalf a decade of grassroots work across Scotland, to reconnect withthat old tradition of local satire, busking and comment; and tobridge what has sometimes been a substantial gap between thattradition, and what became, during the 18th and 19th centuries, anincreasingly anglicised world of professional theatre.In that sense,Brown's wide-ranging collection of essays would probably benefitfrom a slightly tighter, and perhaps more circular, structure,describing the context of the current Scottish theatre scene and itsrich range of possibilities before plunging into an account of itshistorical roots and remarkable resilience. As it is, it divesstraight into the historical argument, conjuring up a powerful senseof a theatre tradition not so much non-existent as simply hiddenthrough a lack of continuous national memory and self-awareness;Brown's introduction refers to this as a "creative amnesia".FromCarpenter's chapter on theatre before 1650, the book moves on torecord now widely forgotten periods of theatrical creativity - withtheir own cohorts of Scottish playwrights, venues, actors andimpresarios - from 1650 through to the hugely successful "nationaldrama" of the early 19th century, largely dedicated to lavishmainstage versions of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and otherluminaries of the romantic age.There is a short but valuable notefrom Michael Newton on the dramatic content of the Gaelic song andstorytelling tradition; and a persuasive argument, in Barbara Bell'schapter on the National Drama, that it was the coming of therailways in the second half of the 19th century - and the relativeease, thereafter, of touring big commercial productions out ofLondon - that led to a decline in professional theatre production inScotland, rather than any lack of native enthusiasm, talent ortradition.And as Paul Maloney's chapter on 20th century populartheatre makes clear, the decline was in any case partial, and short-lived. The Scottish pantomime and variety traditions survived inrude health; and they were accompanied, from the earliest years ofthe 20th century, by a series of initiatives designed to presentScottish-made work to Scottish audiences, and to connect theatre inScotland with wider developments across Europe - from Glasgow Rep toGlasgow Unity, from the Citizens' to the Gateway, from the ScottishNational Players to 7:84 and Wildcat, and from the Traverse to theTron.That impulse was strengthened and enriched by the coming of theEdinburgh International Festival in 1947, and of Glasgow's Mayfestin the 1980s; and as public funding for professional theatre rapidlyincreased, from the 1960s onwards, it began to find a rich and fullexpression in the sheer variety of work, across a range of 15 or 20production centres, that characterises professional theatre inScotland today.The latter chapters of Brown's anthology focus morestrongly on individual playwrights or groups of playwrights, fromBarrie in the early 20th century to Scotland's Makar, Liz Lochhead,still writing today. For the sheer thrill of analysis, perhaps thefinest of these chapters are Gerard Carruthers's thoughtful accountof the career of James Bridie, Steve Cramer on the intenselypolitical Traverse generation of the 1980s and their 1990ssuccessors, Ksenija Horvat's wonderfully rich account of the careerof Liz Lochhead, and Trish Reid on the changing landscape ofdramatic writing after devolution - although despite extensivereference to the changing role of women playwrights, not one chapteranalyses their recent relative eclipse by a new generation of malewriters, following the "in your face" moment of the mid-1990sIn theend, this focus on the dramatists - rather than the actors,directors, designers and venue managers who also help shape Scottishtheatre - slightly unbalances the book, tilting it away from anaccount of drama as a live art towards an account of drama as anaspect of literature; it is less of a companion to Scottish dramathan an interim reflection on it, necessarily selective, and notalways strongly balanced.It remains, though, a rich and oftenfascinating study of an art form traditionally under-recognised inScotland, often contested if never completely suppressed, and stillwidely ignored to this day, even by those who consider themselveswell-informed about our national cultural life.And at the heart ofits central argument about the rich, resilient, yet often forgottentradition of drama in Scotland, there lies a deeper question, and animplied warning. For if we have succeeded so often in the past inlosing our memory of whole movements and generations of theatre-makers, and in compelling each new generation in Scotland, ignorantof the past, to reinvent the same wheel and to challenge the samestereotypes, then there is no guarantee that the current golden agefor theatre production in Scotland, with all its award-winning showsand internationally acclaimed playwrights, may not eventually sufferthe same fate.This is a cycle of forgetting to which the coming ofthe National Theatre of Scotland should make some difference: one ofthe classic roles of such an institution is to act as a focal pointand memory-bank for theatre culture, where achievement can beremembered and celebrated, as in the NTS's current series of StagingThe Nation events. The question of whether the NTS can successfullyfulfil this role, while remaining the cutting-edge 21st-centurytheatre producer it aspires to be, provides the starting-point forthe next chapter in any comprehensive story of Scottish theatre.Forthe time being, Ian Brown's useful and sometimes exciting collectionoffers plenty of food for thought; and plenty of vital informationabout a culture often lost, but now - just possibly - beginning tobe found again, and to forge itself a new and firmer place, at theheart of our national life.