“Modernism and Scottish Theatre Since 1969: A Revolution on Stage” by Mark Brown
Reviewed by Simon Jenner
This is a book that takes sides with no apologies. Brown lays out a case for the coming-of-age of Scottish theatre as having occurred abruptly in 1969. The late Giles Havergal, then a young Edinburgh director, led the Glasgow Citizens Theatre. Colleagues included designer Philip Prowse and, from 1971, the playwright and translator Robert David MacDonald.
Havergal stayed until 2003. His record of productions is dazzling. With it, Brown asserts, Scottish theatre entered a golden modernist phase. It was one that was distinct from and superior to what was going on in England. Brown quotes Howard Barker whom he admires at the outset, “I always think of Scotland as a European country, and England as, unfortunately, not one.”
In addition, Brown charts how the modernist revolution fanned out with the founding of the company Communicado (set up in 1983, still flourishing), and the avowedly socialist 7:84 (1973-2008) as well as its offspring Wildcat (1978-2007). Brown convincingly argues too that the companies’ radical innovation succeeded in the same way that Brecht’s influence did, “not because of their political vision, but almost in spite of it”. This is Brown’s pithiest summary (while interviewing Anthony Neilson) of a position he sets out early on. It’s paradoxically also true that Brechtian techniques work best on plays other than those by Brecht where their implicit grammar of alienation requires no further intensifying.
It might be countered however that wider forces were at work. 1969 also saw the founding of ’69 Theatre Company by James Maxwell and his associates which swiftly became the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. Creative dissent and political energy rose in England too, notably in the north-west with its Liverpool and Manchester writers. That, naturally, is a different book. Brown, confining himself to Scotland, examines a separate culture, a concentrated modernism and legacy. I’s one that endures.
This period of 50 years is infused with European works that decisively altered theatre-making and theatre-writing in Scotland as well as audience expectations. Brown’s argument is singular, partial, thrilling, vastly erudite. It’s also informative since the book isn’t just saturated with first-hand quotes from the author’s own theatre interviews. A fifth chapter features Brown’s extensive interviews with five theatre-makers: four dramatists as well as director, auteur and set designer Stewart Laing.
Brown goes on to give four prime influences that formed the bedrock of this late modernist shift. First, he pays tribute to auteurism or directors’ theatre, something to which Britain in general is still resistant. Next, Brecht’s theory and practice: the latter also involving the staging of Brecht’s plays. It’s notable that Brecht’s fortunes rose and fell with the politics of the age, and though Brown doesn’t say so, it’s echoed in English performances as well as those at the Citizens. These notably drop off, particularly after the fiftieth anniversary of Brecht’s death in 2006. The next is Lecoq theatre: mime, non-verbal acting of all kinds. Fourth, Brown cites Howard Barker “The Reluctant Modernist”.
The last category seems singular. Barker, even more than Brecht, is honoured more for his influence than work. But this is Scotland in the late twentieth century. They do things differently there. Brown reminds us that Barker followed Joan Littlewood and Peter Brook to self-imposed exile in France. Invisibility follows, but it doesn’t follow that the influence vanished. It simply wore an invisibility cloak.
Nobody could argue that these four categories obtained elsewhere in the UK; or in Brecht’s case, to anything like the same degree. Brown makes good his assertions even where you might disagree.
Brown argues that it was Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, producing modernist classics, not Edinburgh’s Traverse, home of new writers, that forged Scotland’s exemplary theatre-making over 50 years. The book ends in 2018. Originally a PhD, with terms of reference still in “argufying” mode (to borrow William Empson’s term), this proceeds in an academic manner. That is despite the older Brown. A pithy, wise, eloquent reviewer, he clearly rewrites or brightens his doctoral prose.
Indeed it occasionally bristles with defences and its bladed partiality bearing marks of the way a PhD throws down a gauntlet, Brown asserts this has never been said before. This reviewer speaks with experience, himself choosing dates and hardening facts around them to craft a new history. Brown discusses early twentieth-century modernists from Schoenberg to Braque more than seems necessary. A thicket of defining modernism and recounting some of its history is interesting as speed-read but perhaps gets in the way. What it does prepare for is a delicious coup. Brown, marshalling other critics, takes down the empty Chinese dragon of post modernism as if it were a paper firecracker. He has no truck with it. Scotland remains a modernist country, and I applaud Brown’s modestly triumphant flourish as he returns to what is alive and not modish.
Whatever rich contradictions might be found in what follows, Brown carries more authority than almost anyone in his field. Meticulously researched, happy to share contradictions with a stupefying wealth of primary interview material, this volume is the account of Scottish theatre 1969-2018.
Though disposing of red flags, red rags are another matter. Brown blithely asserts the primacy of the “Citz” over the Traverse. He explains it by arguing that by focusing exclusively on new writers (like the Royal Court, though Brown might not allow that comparison), the Traverse scored fewer successes. The Citizens, mounting a magnificent procession of ground-breaking revivals of modern classics, did far more to renovate Scottish theatre.
There is however a paradox in Brown’s thesis. He heralds four 1990s writers whom he interviews as “the finest Scottish playwrights, not only of their generation, but of any generation”. They are David Greig, Zinnie Harris, David Harrower, and Anthony Neilson. The interviews show that playwrights are crucial to Brown’s thesis, even more than directors. However Neilson is clear, “The Traverse was my natural home then.” (p. 165). A child of 7:84, Neilson makes no claim to knowing Scottish theatre history. Nevertheless the more radical Neilson sees himself as very different to David Greig who also benefited from the Traverse. Perhaps as writers, close allies of Havergal’s aesthetic might be more easily found in the Traverse. Brown though scrupulously records every contradiction that does not sit flush with his thesis. The book’s fifth chapter then is alone worth the price.
If auterism, Brecht and Lecoq are three prime influences in Scottish modernist theatre, the fourth, Barker, is a more esoteric one. For Scotland-based director Graham Eatough, Barker “mapped out a place where a theatre company could potentially exist”. (p. 22). For Eatough, Barker seems vital to the early 1990s dramatists he met. For Greig and Bristol flatmate Sarah Kane (she cited Barker as her favourite playwright) that meant straddling text-based work with anti-naturalist theatricality and startling images. Harris too declares (p. 134), “[Barker] is definitely one of my top influences.” Though two of Brown’s four top dramatists agree, this might still render Barker vestigial to Scottish modernism. Brown though brings Barker into every interview and elicits a “Yeah!” at the least.
However, as Michael Billington argues, writers are theatre’s lifeblood, and Barker has proved inspirational to other writers – and directors like Eatough. In addition, Billington’s set of divisions in his 2007 State of the Nation argue that changing governments shape the life of theatre. Brown – critical of Billington in his Neilson interview where Neilson wants Billington “gone” – himself regrets a relative lack of successors to the 1990s generation. That may have wider political, educational and financial roots too. However, despite the stimulus of Citizens, leavening the Traverse with modernist classics as Brown imagines, and thus edging out some new writing, hardly seems ideal. It’s a cliché that writers need room to fail; even theatres need such grace or margin of error. There is little incentive to indulge that, with arts funding generally tightening since 1979: another date modernism needs to note.
Equally though, Brown’s point is made. Modernist theatre-making, as opposed to its writers, can be seen as the lungs those writers need for support as they summon things from their imagination. They need to be shown possibilities. A trudge through new work produced in a dour manner is as deadly as a long diet of classics.
It happens that this writer (informally) interviewed two Edinburgh-based witnesses to the events of c. 1969-74. Writer Charles Lind and Miles Jenner, theatre-maker and brewer. Like Brown, both cited John McGrath’s 1973 The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil as a defining moment in Scotland’s theatre history, and its impact on them. It’s a play that tackles the infamous Clearances. However both cite the Traverse as where new writing happened. Lind says, “The Traverse were the pioneers, Citizens the juggernaut.” Lind and Jenner both recall wondrous productions that Brown cites, re-thought modernist classics in productions that England saw increasingly less of. Though as Lind cautions, “There wasn’t new writing at the Citizens. You went for groundbreaking productions of Brecht or O’Neill. New writing was the Traverse’s domain.” The point is clear. You need both.
Brown has blind spots. For instance, he sees little virtue in Rona Munro’s much-vaunted The James Plays, and notes that his own criticism was the most trenchant. Elsewhere he lists Munro among important dramatists but cites virtually no other plays. He applauds earlier dramatists like Ena Lamont Stewart (Men Should Weep) and C.P. Taylor (Good) but asserts that their predominantly socialist ethos makes them “precursors” of “agitprop” companies like 7:84 and Wildcat. Does that inconvenience shunt them (with writers like Joe Corrie and Tom McGrath) to the side of modernist theatre’s burgeoning?
The last footnote in this volume, its last word, notes that David Harrower, writer of Knives in Hens and Blackbird, announced in February 2018 that he had ceased writing for theatre. Brown’s concerns with the following generation’s lack of ambition and scope seems prescient. Both things seem to herald an end, and not what Brown is arguing. He relays it unflinchingly. Whatever unfolds, Modernism and Scottish Theatre traces a route through a heroic phase and tests a springboard by which its legacy could be refreshed.
Mark Brown Modernism and Scottish Theatre Since 1969: A Revolution on Stage
Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 9783319986388
Available from Amazon
