Last Friday, the new visitor centre at the Culloden battlefield was the appropriate venue for the closing conference of the Skills Building for the Future programme which, for the past three years, has been delivering high quality training to museums and heritage groups across the Highlands and Islands (heritage-skills.co.uk).

Our guest speaker for the conference was that fine author and journalist Neal Ascherson, whose talk spun out so many themes and ideas that it could have provided material for an entire seminar series.  Watch out for a video soon on our sister site Heritage North.  Neal was telling me that he had only recently found out that one of his own ancestors had been wounded at Culloden while serving with the ‘other’ side—that is, the Hanoverian, Government army.  It’s a sign of how ‘live’ an issue Culloden still is that we even think in those terms—after all, there were Scots in both armies, and if the Jacobites had won, would we have had the Scottish Enlightenment, or would Scotland have remained a backwater to the larger Catholic states of Europe, and a pawn in future European conflicts? But still, the Hanoverians remain, in the popular view, the ‘wrong’ side.

Over dinner the evening before we had all been talking about the different approaches possible to re-telling such sensitive histories.  Neal Ascherson described a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, where the displays are fiercely partisan: these are the weapons you used against us; these are the weapons we used against you--that kind of thing.  In contrast I recalled visiting the Irish National Famine Museum a few years ago, in Strokestown in County Roscommon, where the sober, even-handed, cool presentation of the facts, and of individual stories, left the visitor nowhere to stand outside the argument, because there was nothing to take an oppositional stance to.  Later, Neal spoke of the little museum at the site of the Battle of the Boyne, which, as he said, treats the whole event as firmly locked back in history, with no reference to the fact that simply mentioning the date ‘1690’ in some parts of Northern Ireland could have been a matter of life and death until very recently.

Afterwards, I wondered if this was an argument that you could read over from heritage to the arts.  The 70s were the heyday of agitprop political theatre, following on from the upheavals of ’68 and reacting to the crises of a time that included the three day week and regular power cuts. The best remembered example is of course 7:84’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, but throughout the decade a substantial network of touring companies criss-crossed the UK presenting more or less strident or nuanced takes on the political and social issues of the time: Joint Stock, Red Ladder, Gay Sweatshop, and many more. It seems a sad comment on their efforts that they should have been trumped by the landslide election of the Thatcher government, and the triumph of everything those companies had opposed.

Could such a burst of ideologically-committed creativity emerge from today’s unsettled times?  It seems unlikely.  For one thing, those politically-driven companies were part of a much larger ‘alternative’ theatre movement which barely exists today—as an arts centre director in the 80s I was a member of CATS—the Circuit for Alternative Theatre Scotland.  Now CATS stands for the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland—a fitting symbol of changed circumstances.  Back then, there were regular raised voices about government money going to those who were dedicated to over-throwing the status quo—and on the other side the companies themselves were criticised for accepting such tainted money. That seems a dead argument now, when all arts funding is getting ever more restricted.

It’s not that political theatre as such is dead, it’s more that it has mutated into something more balanced, less partisan, more thoughtful—and more establishment.  Forty years ago the Royal Shakespeare Company faced immense criticism, and censorship from the Lord Chamberlain, for its anti-Vietnam production US.  Now the National Theatre of Scotland wins an international reputation—especially in the States—with Black Watch.  Gregory Burke’s script, and John Tiffany’s production, give the voices of the squaddies themselves a powerful immediacy.  No overt political point is made, but the reality of the British Army experience in Iraq is conveyed with terrifying force.  The most unforgettable part of the play is, paradoxically, wordless: the final scene where the entire company performs high-speed, highly-choreographed drill, at the end of their tethers, with individual members falling as if hit, and being pulled in again by their comrades.  As my colleague Nick Fearne said, you have tears in your eyes, but you don’t know why.  It has gone beyond argument, beyond dialectic, beyond words.

The Cheviot… didn’t change land ownership in Scotland—that had to wait thirty years for devolution. But it did change Scottish theatre for ever. A conservative, text-ridden, rather staid theatre community was blown apart by a mongrel mix of stand-up, physical theatre, musical, and polemic.  In thirty years’ time we will, no doubt, still be dealing with the aftermath of the Iraq War, but I suspect we will look back on Black Watch , not as a milestone in political theatre, or as an expression of the widespread opposition to the war, but as another paradigm shift in Scottish theatre, raising the bar for ambition, impact, and sheer physical achievement.

So maybe, in both museum displays and theatre productions, polemic and ideology are on a hiding to nothing. The more universal the message, the deeper its impact on us may be.  No one who saw Black Watch is ever likely to think of the role of soldier in the same way again, no matter the conflict.  My abiding reaction to the National Famine Museum was of regret at the sheer incompetence of the human race, and our inability ever to learn from the consequences of that incompetence.  That humbling message is one that can never be repeated too often.

(Footnote: for those who read the previous blog and are breathless to know the outcome, the concert was a triumph.  Auntie Belle was entranced.  So, it’s never too late for a spot of audience development).