Scotland the Brave!

By JBR

The Scottish Independence debate has spilled over into theatre now. Scottish journalist and theatre critic Anna Burnside has suggested political theatre has no place in this year’s Edinburgh Festival. “The festival allows us to bring genuinely world-class work to Scotland and I would hate to see that compromised simply to shoehorn in shows on an independence theme” she is quoted as saying in The Observer, responding to the suggestion that this year’s Edinburgh Festival production of Rona Munro's James Cycle plays, starring Sofie Gråbøl (pictured) might be a rather public manifesto for an independent Scotland. This new cycle of history plays is a co-production by the National Theatre of Scotland and the National Theatre (so nothing world-class about those two institutions then) and is promising to be one of the highlights of this year's Festival. When the eyes of the world are on you, Burnside seems to be saying, it’s better to keep things clean, keep them palatable. No good, she intimates, ever came from rocking the boat.

But one of the things that theatre does best is politics. One of the best uses of our cultural integrity and brilliance is to challenge the norm, to point out errors, to present a case. Who could possibly desire the Edinburgh Festival concentrate itself this year, any year, on merely presenting a homogenised, sanitised, politically acceptable festival?

The Edinburgh Festival began in 1947 as an international celebration of arts and cultural. The Edinburgh Fringe grew up around it as an event, designed to upset a culturally dominating apple-cart and as a reaction to les événements in Paris in 1968. Its very origins are subversive, political, and counter-cultural. Many visitors to Edinburgh this summer will make no distinction between the Edinburgh International Festival and the Fringe Festival, so enmeshed have they become. Edinburgh is where I return year after year to learn about the coming trends in theatre, and to educate myself - not only about theatre, but about the world. And when the eyes of the world are on Edinburgh this summer, then yes, we should be on our best behaviour, but no that does not mean we should shy away from the political, from the radical, from viewpoints that scare and challenge us.

One of my highlight’s of the 2013 Fringe was Belarus Free Theatre - now even more terrifyingly pertinent than it was in the balmy days of last August. Belarus Free Theatre are an example of political theatre at its finest. Provocative, shocking, frightening and mind-opening. Nirbhaya, which recently played at the Southbank, literally floored me last summer in Edinburgh. I can’t recall ever being so utterly destroyed in the theatre. It was powerful, it was shocking, it was almost too horrifying to watch. It exposed a terrible, terrifying wrong in a part of the world I have never visited. It brought to life a newspaper story that had affected me, but not hugely - but Nirbhaya with it’s theatricalisation of stories of rape and abuse, challenged me and changed me. It was political and dangerous and it was most certainly world-class. In Edinburgh, with the eyes of the world on it, Nirbhaya got to deliver its message. And that message? Knowledge and Change.

That’s what I want from my theatre - I want my mind to be opened. I want to see a world through someone else’s eyes, a world that I may perhaps have limited, or little knowledge of. I’m not scared of being challenged, I don’t need my hand to be held, I’m capable of making intelligent decisions on my own thank you very much. I’ve already questioned, here, the value of a theatre critic telling me what I should and shouldn’t enjoy. I certainly won’t sit by and allow a theatre critic to dictate what should and shouldn't be shown at the Edinburgh Festival! Theatre can be both world-class and unpalatable. Theatre can open my mind to the possibility that my opinion isn’t the only one - but it can only do this if we allow it to go ahead.

We also need to understand something of Scottish theatre itself. Jan McDonald, writing in The Cambridge History of British Theatre, points out that Scottish nationalism has always been, perhaps inextricably, linked with Scottish theatre. The Scottish National Party was founded in 1920, a particularly fecund period for the Scottish National Players. As demands for independence grew through the 1970’s, the Citz, the Traverse, the Lyceum all flourished. The radical Theatre 7:84 (Scotland) was launched. During the 1990’s when the campaign for devolution was informing an understanding of Scottish identity it was Scotland’s theatre companies and Scotland’s theatre communities who expressed a myriad of national identities. The Glasgow Repertory Company, founded in 1909, declared one of its aims to be ‘the production of plays, national in character, written by Scottish men and women”. Glasgow’s Unity Theatre, founded in 1943, three years before the Edinburgh International Festival, had as it’s motto ‘Theatre is the school of the people, it makes them think and it makes therm feel.” Of The Traverse, one of Scotland’s most acclaimed theatres, and the jewel in the crown of the Edinburgh Fringe, McDonald writes that it was famed not for the work it did, but for what it stood for - “a vibrant, slightly risqué, exclusive group of young people with a passion to change the theatre in Scotland and the world.’ If Edinburgh is not the place for theatre to talk about Scottish nationalism then where on earth is?

If you want your Edinburgh Festival to be a home to safe, palatable world-class theatre that has been deemed appropriate, then it’s your right to hold that opinion. But I’d rather have my Edinburgh Fringe- dangerous, provocative and angry - than your Festival any day. Or, to borrow from Liz Lochead’s celebrated prologue to Mary Queen of Scots got her Head Chopped Off (1989) “Ah dinna ken whit like your Scotland is. Here’s mine.”

@JoshRochford

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