Mark Fisher: Scottish playwrights: Heggie/Lochhead/Greig
© Mark Fisher
What's so special about Scottish theatre? That was a question I posed
in 1995 in the introduction to Made in Scotland, an anthology of
Scottish plays edited by me and Ian Brown, the then artistic director of
Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre. We'd selected four plays and having
billed it as a specifically Scottish collection, I felt duty bound to explain
what the term 'Scottish' actually meant. Then as now I was at a loss.
After all, what possible connection could you make between these four
plays? The Cut by Mike Cullen was a political drama about life after the
miners' strike. The Life of Stuff by Simon Donald was a comedy set in
a drug-fuelled night club underworld. Bondagers by Sue Glover was a
pastoral evocation of 19th century farming practices. And Julie
Allardyce by Duncan McLean was a play about the off-shore Aberdeen
oil industry. There was no unifying factor.
But the question was important. In those days before 1999, when
Scotland began to be governed in part by its own parliament, there
were two political impulses – both of which you might recognise in the
recent history of Slovakia. The first was to recognise Scotland as a
distinct cultural unit, a society with a sense of otherness, one that
could produce books with titles such as Made in Scotland. Those of us
who lived in the country found this to be self-evident – we just
instinctively felt that, of course, Scotland was different. Culturally,
socially, politically, geographically . . . the population's focus was in a
different place to the rest of the United Kingdom and, indeed, the
world.
That was easy. But the second impulse was to find the evidence to
justify such a distinction. If Scotland was really so distinct, surely it
would have a body of literature, of art, of music, of drama that would
be equally distinct. Yet for me the evidence proved nothing.
It is simply not possible to identify theatrical genes unique to the
Scottish stage. You can't look collectively at Scotland’s playwrights and
say they have any equivalent, say, to the lyricism of the Irish, the
moroseness of the Russians or the philosophic enquiry of the French.
Those national tags are reductive clichés, but Scottish playwrights are
just too diverse for any similar reductive cliché to stick.
That's partly because of the absence of a compelling Scottish
repertoire. Although there has been a boom in playwriting over the
last 20 years, there is no icon of Scottish drama against which all new
work must be measured. There is no Playboy of the Western World, no
Sean O'Casey trilogy, no Waiting for Godot. Some people say that JM
Barrie's Peter Pan is the best play written by a Scottish writer, but it
holds no greater sway in Scotland than it does anywhere else. It is not
a requirement for budding Scottish playwrights to be acquainted with
the work of James Bridie who was a significant playwright in the first
half of the 20th century, but is only occasionally performed now. In
short, there is no proto-drama from which all others sprang; no
playwright to whom all Scottish playwrights aspire or react.
This is neither good nor bad. It just means that the many interesting
and varied playwrights at work in Scotland cannot be subject to any
simple categorisation. But what I felt in 1995 is that this variety is in
itself a distinctive characteristic of the past two decades in Scottish
theatre. Scotland is a small country of only five million people, with a
large percentage living in the “central belt” area that includes Glasgow
and Edinburgh. The theatre economy has been small enough to retain
its intimacy, its relationship with the audience, its sense of self – and
also big enough to sustain a wide variety of theatre styles.
Scotland might not do well-made plays as well as the Irish, it might
not do devised drama as well as the Quebecois, it might not do
children's theatre as well as the Scandinavians, and it might not do
experimental theatre as well as the Dutch, but it does do all of these
things – occasionally superlatively – in a way that those other
countries do not. Scottish theatre is a great all-rounder.
Today, I’d like to talk about three playwrights – David Greig, Liz
Lochhead and Iain Heggie – to give you some flavour of this variety. It
would be nice also to talk about John Byrne, David Harrower, Chris
Hannan, Stephen Greenhorn, John McGrath, Gregory Burke, John
Clifford, Rona Munro, Henry Adam, Douglas Maxwell, Stuart Paterson,
and the translations of Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman, and many
more, but sadly I don’t have enough time.
If there is one playwright who embodies the spirit of variety that I’ve
been talking about, it is David Greig. So let’s start with an extract of
his play San Diego, which was performed in the Edinburgh
International Festival in August 2003. This extract appears at the very
start of the play.
[SAN DIEGO READING]
There are two major strands to David Greig's output: one comes from
his life as a conventional playwright, the other from his collaborations
in more experimental fields. Each strand is distinct, but overlapping
and, in a play such as San Diego, you can trace the influence of both.
Born in Edinburgh in 1969, David Greig studied English and Drama at
Bristol University, where he shared a student flat with Sarah Kane, the
brilliant young playwright whose plays, Blasted, Cleansed and Crave,
have been seen all over Europe. Greig was both a friend and an
advocate of Kane, though it's hard to find any similarities in his own
writing which has none of her angst or capacity to shock.
Rather, his is a theatre of ideas, sometimes cerebral, sometimes witty,
frequently concerned with questions of identity, character, place and
nationality. Perhaps because he spent his childhood years in Nigeria,
perhaps because his middle-class accent gives away few clues, he is
fascinated by the external factors, the cities, the landscape, the
society, by which we define ourselves.
Greig chose to write San Diego in an instinctive way, trying to avoid
rational analysis and favouring the impulses of his subconscious. That
is not to say it lacks shape, rationale or poetry, but that its meaning is
for you to decide and not for him to explain.
To get a handle on the most abstract side of Greig's work, it pays to be
aware of his output with Suspect Culture, the Glasgow-based theatre
company he set up with director Graham Eatough in 1990. The
distinctive characteristic of that company is its collaborative approach
to theatre making. The technique has varied from show to show, but
typically it involves Greig writing a script at great speed in response to
the improvisations of the actors. The result has been work that lies
somewhere between the formal, linear constraints of conventional
playwriting and the frequently banal and clunky limitations of devised
drama. Thanks to Greig's uncommon speed and fecundity, Suspect
Culture at its most successful has managed to combine the best of
both worlds.
A case in point was Timeless, seen in the Edinburgh International
Festival of 1997. If you had to come up with a plot synopsis for it
you'd struggle. You could say it was "about" four twentysomething
barflies reminiscing about the past. That would be as much as you
needed to know in terms of a conventional story. But what was really
at its core, what it was actually "about" was a much more elusive
meditation on the passage of time, on our dewy-eyed attitude to the
past and perhaps on a certain generational aimlessness. Or you could
argue that it was "about" an exploration of theatrical form, an
aesthetic exercise to see what happened when you structured a show
around the melancholic lament of a string quartet. In other words, you
couldn't respond to it as just another new play.
This is typical of Suspect Culture, which does all it can to find not only
new things to say, but also new ways to say them. Mainstream in 1999
was nominally about a sexual encounter between two music business
executives, but that's not really what it was about. Structured like a
Rubik's Cube – with every combination of four actors swivelled round
to voice echoing conversations so you couldn't recall who said what to
whom – the play asked teasing questions about the nature of identity:
are we what we say, what we do or what others expect of us? The
meaning – to do with the tension between the quirks of the individual
and the blandness of the mass market – was locked into the play's
very structure.
Making a distinction between the plays Greig has helped create with
Suspect Culture and those for which he is the sole author, you find a
playwright with a more straight-forward but similarly adventurous
approach to form. It frequently seems he is testing himself against the
touchstones of the European dramatic canon. His 1996 play The
Architect, for example, carried resonances of Ibsen's The Master
Builder: each is a well-made play, focusing on the family life of an
architect and charting the rise and fall of men confounded by their own
creative urges. Where Ibsen talked of "castles in the air", Greig
considered the blight of cheap concrete tower blocks, both writers
exploring the clash of creative ambition with more ordinary human
demands.
In 1999, the fabulously titled The Cosmonaut's Last Message to the
Woman he Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union seemed to nod
towards Brecht in its short demonstrative scenes about alienation and
one-way communication. The Speculator, with its combination of
rewritten history, profane language and poetry, brought to mind
Howard Barker. And 2002’s Outlying Islands being a well-made play
set during the Second World War and dealing with the emotional
repression of the upper-middle classes, had overtones of Terence
Rattigan.
What strikes you looking back across his substantial body of work is
not the various likenesses to other plays, but the consistency of
theme. His interest in national identity and the definition of home
might have been at its most obvious in his early work such as
Stalinland and Europe, for example, but these themes continue right
the way up to San Diego. Consistent also is his elegant, ironic sense of
humour and his tendency to cram each play with curious facts and
fancies that set the mind racing. He is writer who can be both sexy
and cerebral.
Let’s move on to Liz Lochhead, who was born in Motherwell, near
Glasgow, in 1947. She’s a more straight-forwardly popular playwright
than David Greig, though she is equally intelligent and, being a poet,
she is much more interesting from a linguistic point of view. This
reading is from her comedy Perfect Days, which is about a successful
Glasgow hairdresser who is approaching 40 and desperate to have
children.
[READING]
Lochhead is probably still best known for Mary Queen of Scots Got her
Head Chopped Off, first produced by Communicado Theatre Company
in 1987, and written in a rich, ribald, earthy, semi-archaic Scots. She
took a similar approach to a translation of Medea in 2000, which
managed to embrace low comedy and high tragedy to tremendous
effect and was a huge hit in Scotland and abroad.
Her other translations and adaptations include Moliere's Le
Misanthrope, which became Miseryguts, and an intelligent version of
Chekhov's Three Sisters, which she moved to post-war rural Scotland.
Her work is clever, considered, expansive, highbrow, lowbrow,
democratic, accessible, funny, emotional and poetic. She would stand
shoulder to shoulder with any of the great living Irish playwrights, a
mature voice demanding respect. Like David Greig, she has many
different writing styles. It varies from the exuberant theatricality of
Mary Queen of Scots, the tragic authority of Medea, the interweaving
monologues of Quelques Fleurs, the snappy translation of Tartuffe, the
Gothic romance of Dracula, and the contemporary realism of Perfect
Days.
Unlike David Greig, however, Lochhead has little tolerance for plays
without either story or clear meaning. She is not interested in
presenting vaguely associated collections of images and ideas, leaving
the audience to join up the dots. She believes in tightly constructed
plays will a clear narrative line.
In this, she is in agreement with Iain Heggie, a 50-year-old Glasgow
playwright, who is strongly influenced by David Mamet in his approach
to language, character and action. The next reading is a complete play
called The Cake, which was one of a series of short sketches grouped
together as The Sex Comedies and first seen in 1992.
[THE CAKE READING]
Since his full-length debut with A Wholly Healthy Glasgow in 1987,
Heggie has shown himself to be one of Scotland’s most demanding,
provocative and entertaining playwrights (that first play was set in a
down-market health club where the staff, who are interested only in
sex, are thrown off-course by the arrival of a new employee who is
genuinely concerned with fitness).
In dark comedies such as American Bagpipes, Clyde Nouveau, An
Experienced Woman Gives Advice, the outrageously titled Wiping My
Mother’s Arse (a conventional, naturalistic comedy-cum-farce set in a
world of involuntary bowel movements, anal sex and the kind of
emotional damage that only sons can inflict on mothers) or the foulmouthed filthiness of Love Freaks (an adaptation of a Marivaux play,
made virtually unrecognisable in its switch to modern-day workingclass Glasgow), he has produced work that is linguistically dazzling,
psychologically troubling and invariably funny. When I return home on
Friday, I’ll be seeing his latest play, Sauchiehall Street, a comedy set
in the office of a theatrical agent.
Heggie is a meticulous writer who is forever testing out new ideas,
revisiting old work, rewriting, deleting, appending – recognising that
playwriting is a complex craft that needs time to mature.
Because he’s such an exacting writer, his work hasn’t always been
done justice to on the stage. As you heard to a small extent in The
Cake, his early plays are a breathless barrage of half-sentences as
each character inter-cuts the last or switches thought mid-breath,
requiring a discipline of the actors that is hard to achieve. Rather than
immerse themselves in their character in the style of the method
school, Heggie’s actors must “think on the line”: they are nothing until
the thought pops into their heads. His plays, suggested one of his first
directors, Caspar Wrede, have a closer relationship to pre-20th century
high comedies than to the naturalistic comedies of our own time.