Scottish Theatre: Diversity, Language, Continuity by Ian Brown Rodopi (review)

In this engaging account of Scottish theatre, from the middle ages to the present day, Ian Brown deploys a range of distinct critical genres to illuminate. His book is by turns a polemic, revisionist theatre history, linguistic disquisition, and memoir (he is a practising playwright as well as an academic). The study takes aim at the conventional interpretation of theatrical practice in Scotland as a fractured and parochial programme of cultural activity when compared to the rich and continuous inheritance of its English counterpart. Brown thinks this is nonsensical and that if one examines the available evidence with sufficient care one can find signs of dramatic activity even in the most unfavourable of cultural climates, such as in the censorious conditions of the West of Scotland in the early eighteenth century. Brown also believes that too many critics and historians have been content to think of Scottish drama as an adjunct of English literature. The diversity and cultural alertness of Scottish dramatic production can only be fully appreciated when understood as having three distinct elements, with works produced in English, Scots and Gaelic, as well as some fruitful cross-over between these language groups.

Drawing on the works of such theatre historians as John McGavin and Randall Stevenson, the study makes a convincing case that extensive theatrical activity in Scotland did not just spontaneously emerge in the 1970s as a response to current political and social circumstances, but had deep roots in the performative and expressive traditions of the nation. Brown’s polemical leanings add bite to his discussion, but if one were not already favourably disposed to the book’s patriotic components one might not be wholly persuaded by them. The Anglo-Scot James Thomson (1700-48) is characterised as an apostle of an exclusive unionism, having written the lyrics for the song “Rule, Britannia!”, yet Thomson produced a considerably more complex picture of British domestic relations in his verse, and, curiously for a theatrical history, there is no mention of Thomson’s career as a successful London playwright. Brown is especially illuminating on the ways in which early twentieth-century Scottish dramatists, such as James Bridie, invigorated the sentimental tropes of the previous generation of authors from the Kailyard school of Scottish fiction. But Brown is at his best on the recent history of Scottish theatre (and his own part within it).

He has vivid accounts of the one-woman Scottish renaissance of Liz Lochhead, the committed naturalised socialism of John McGrath, and of Clive Perry’s landmark tenure as director of Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s.