Table Of ContentHistory as Theatrical Metaphor
History, Myth and National Identities
in Modern Scottish Drama
IAN BROWN
History as Theatrical Metaphor
Ian Brown
History as Theatrical
Metaphor
History, Myth and National Identities in Modern
Scottish Drama
Ian Brown
Kingston University
London , United Kingdom
ISBN 978-1-137-47335-6 ISBN 978-1-137-47336-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-47336-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951855
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I
NTRODUCTION
‘The great virtue of history is that it is adaptable’—so Peter Ustinov
has the President of Concordia, ‘the Smallest Country in Europe’, say
in R omanoff and Juliet (1956). 1 Ustinov’s President aims to reinterpret
and, thus, manipulate ‘history’ to bring about the marriage of a Russian
man and an American woman so that his small state can hold a Cold
War balance. For him, history is a living diplomatic and political resource.
Its potential for continual adaptability is also suggested in Brian Friel’s
Making History (1989) when Peter Lombard observes to Hugh O’Neill,
Earl of Tyrone:
I don’t believe that a period of history […] contains within it one ‘true’
interpretation just waiting to be mined. But I do believe that it may contain
within it several possible narratives: the life of Hugh O’Neill can be told in
many different ways. And those ways are determined by the needs and the
demands and the expectations of different people and different eras. […] I
simply fulfi l the needs, satisfy the expectations—don’t I? 2
Needs and expectations will call constantly for revisions: Stephanie Preuss
has suggested, regarding recent Scottish plays on historical topics, ‘[dra-
matic] revisions of history are almost always openly political’. 3 The varying
ways ‘revisions of history’ can and do take place in different playwrights’
practice will be a recurrent theme of this book as it explores what ‘openly
political’—and what covert—forms such revisions take. Its later chapters
examine the implications and underlying complexity of Ustinov’s term,
‘adaptability’, in Scottish history plays, particularly since the 1930s, and it
vii
viii INTRODUCTION
is taken as given that history is regularly presented and reinterpreted for
‘political’ purposes, however broadly defi ned.
This book emerges from academic interest in Scottish theatre history,
the study and teaching of dramaturgy, commitment to historical study
and, inescapably, my professional playwriting practice. Its inspiration is a
perception of history as not only based in factual research, but in a series
of tropes and even myths. Even in employing postmodern methodolo-
gies, history cannot be ignored or simply played with: the playwright will
explore and rethink, through non-naturalistic means, what Steve Cramer
calls ‘ideological imperatives in the semiotics of historical iconography’ 4
and, one might add, mythopoeia. Cramer suggests that there is no ‘real’
story to be discovered, but that some form of truth, however tenuous and
problematic, may be found by exploring the interstices between, and iden-
tifying the ideological praxis behind, various versions of historical ‘truth’.
In this process, Gil Hochberg’s claim that ‘works of art not only refl ect
historical and sociopolitical realities but further compete with them, intro-
ducing alternative actualities, which might fi nd expression only at the level
of cultural imagination’ 5 is highly relevant. Often, unless one is a trained
historian, and even then outside of one’s ‘period’ not entirely, one’s per-
ceptions of ‘what happened’ depend on whatever creative narrative—
play, novel, television or fi lm—shaped one’s version of ‘what happened’.
Historical narrative, whether creative or academic, is inevitably partisan.
This book seeks to expose the processes of partisan shaping of history and
myth in Scottish history plays, especially since 1930.
In doing this, its chapters address not just ways Scottish playwrights have
treated historical material—which for current purposes is defi ned broadly
as material relating to events until the end of the Second World War—but
also how they have used language and dramatic structure to achieve par-
ticular theatrical and ideological ends. In most, if not all, cases, it appears
that those ideological ends consciously, but sometimes perhaps uncon-
sciously, have embedded particular attitudes to conceptions of ‘Scotland’,
its society and its relationship to national and international identities. The
argument being developed suggests, without much fear of controversy,
that any form of national identity depends on what Benedict Anderson
famously calls ‘imagined communities’ 6 where that sense of community is
supported, indeed developed, by means of shared mythologies, some often
passed off as ‘history’. Yet, as Chapter Two examines, there are questions
that arise as to how far ‘history’ itself depends on mythologizing historic
material, in ways akin to, although distinct from, the ways a dramatist may
INTRODUCTION ix
do. Both playwrights—like writers in other literary forms—and historians
contribute to the construction of popular perceptions of history, mythol-
ogy and national communities. The fi rst three chapters of this volume,
then, explore questions of theatre, history, mythology and national com-
munities from various perspectives. The other chapters aim to cast light on
the dramaturgical practice of selected Scottish playwrights writing in Scots
and English and address both their use of history as a theme on stage and
differences in their practice over decades. Recent work by Angus MacLeod
and by Susan Ross on early twentieth-century Gaelic-language playwriting
has drawn attention to parallel developments in drama in that language. 7
Scottish playwrights are, of course, hardly unique in engaging with his-
torical material, often in order to address current political and moral issues.
As Chapter 1 demonstrates, this practice has been widespread in European
drama (not to mention other cultures, whether oriental or transatlantic).
Meantime, however, it is helpful here to set a contemporary context by
drawing attention to the many Scottish dramatists from the 1930s into the
present day who have written plays on historical themes, most famously
in recent times, David Greig’s D unsinane (2010) and Rona Munro’s T he
James Plays (2014), both discussed in Chapter 8. These plays alone mark
the range of dramaturgical methods by which Scottish history has been,
and is, treated on stage by modern playwrights. Such contemporary vari-
ety, however, admirable as it is, only refl ects and depends on the lessons of
earlier recent work like John McGrath’s ceilidh-based T he Cheviot, the Stag
and the Black Black Oil (1973) or the deconstructed and self-consciously
theatricalized dramaturgy of Liz Lochhead’s M ary Queen of Scots Got her
Head Chopped Off (1987). All these plays, each in their own way, repre-
sent the reciprocal infl uences and constructions of past and present, as
the past is presented as infl uencing the present and contemporary writers
imagine and create anew the past or, rather, a ‘past’.
Modern Scottish playwrights considered later in this volume who
make use of history for a variety of reasons range in time from Robert
McLellan, beginning in the 1930s (the earliest dealt with in detail),
through—beside such leading current fi gures as Greig, Lochhead and
Munro—Peter Arnott, Bill Bryden, Donald Campbell, Jo (formerly
John) Clifford, Stewart Conn, Sue Glover, Robert Kemp, John McGrath,
Hector MacMillan, Alexander Reid, and W. Gordon Smith. This is an
extensive list and by no means comprehensive. Other Scottish playwrights
have written plays on historical topics, some several. These include not
just members of an older generation like James Bridie, George Byatt, Ada
