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.
 

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