Scotland expects more from National Theatre
June 23, 2010 by Guest Writer · 2 Comments
Picture: Weatherbox
by Robert Dawson Scott
Congratulations to the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS). It won the Best Show for Children and Young People category recently at the annual Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland (CATS) at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre.
Actually Mr Write, a clever little show by Rob Drummond, which saw a new play created on stage with the help of its teenage audience every night, was the only NTS show nominated in any category for this year’s CATS. Is that enough for the most prestigious theatre in the land? After all, at £4.5m, it gets over £2m more in public funds than the Traverse in Edinburgh and Dundee Rep put together, and they won six awards between them, including Best Production.
Other direct comparisons are tricky but just for the record, in the most recent Olivier Awards in London, The Royal National Theatre (RNT) got six nominations out of 77, slightly better than the NTS two out of 40 and up against the commercial might of the West End but not exactly overwhelming. And there will always be peaks and troughs. Three years ago the NTS Black Watch carried all before it.
Anyway, even I, as founder of the CATS, would not argue that awards are conclusive. The NTS produces an enormous range of work, some of it not even eligible for CATS because it involves amateurs. Overall, they mounted 19 shows in the year to April 2010 seen by 58,630 people, though the average capacity of 63% conceals some very wide variations.
Six of those shows were part of the NTS Transform programme where the NTS “embed” some of its best artists in locations, often schools, and invites the local community to make a show about whatever matters to them. Another two were similarly local affairs. One (Wall of Death) was a circus act and one (Long Gone Lonesome) was effectively a touring band.
Such versatility is all very well. The NTS’ takes its “theatre without walls” slogan seriously, and it undoubtedly does a much better job of reaching all parts of the nation than the RNT ever has. But I suspect the nation was expecting a bit more than a community outreach scheme when the NTS arrived four years ago.
The fact is that, with the exception of Black Watch, the NTS home team have yet to really nail a big classic or modern text. The Bacchae? Spectacular but empty. The House of Bernarda Alba? A great tragedy rendered as soap opera. 365? An Edinburgh festival embarrassment.
Peter Pan? A rocky start though apparently much better by the time it finished its tour. Peer Gynt, technically a co-production between the NTS and Dundee Rep, was a triumph. It would not have happened without the NTS money (nor would it have gone to London where it did very well) so the money is far from negligible. But I doubt even the NTS would claim that, creatively, it was anything other than Dundee’s triumph. Add in a play based on a Czech animated film, a collaboration with an unknown young American collective, an installation based on a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, Pirandello, Schiller… bouncing around the repertoire like that is enough to have anyone asking what the NTS is really playing at.
But if it has only fitfully delivered on the main stages, it is not for want of trying. No-one should underestimate just how hard it is to pull together the combination of the right play, the right people, and the right time and place for a large scale show. It is, for example, an open secret in the theatre world that Alan Cumming, successfully brought back for The Bacchae, was originally contracted as Captain Hook for Peter Pan only to pull out to pursue a lucrative film offer. Other household names are being wooed, but it is not easy for a small player to compete with the RNT, never mind Hollywood. It is perhaps a backhanded tribute to how far the NTS has come in four years that it is a player at all.
A couple of decent Edinburgh festival shows this summer – and both Caledonia and the boxing show Beautiful Burnout look promising on paper, as indeed has much of the large scale repertoire – and grumbles will quickly dissipate. “Excellence,” I was once told by Richard Jarman, for many years the embattled head of that other national institution, Scottish Opera, “is our best defence”. It will be for the NTS as well. It is a hoary old chestnut for comics and vaudevillians that they should “leave ‘em wanting more”. But, after Black Watch, audiences are impatient for more from its still fledgling National Theatre. Scotland expects.
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An excellent article that either undermines or underlines its own message in the last two words — I’m not sure which.
One of the problems that cultural endeavours in Scotland have long endured is the thorny question of defining what culture is.
The culture of the Gael was long ignored, and it was only MacPherson’s work on Ossian that changed that, and only because of the parallels with the Greek epics, and in order to achieve that, he had to invent a good part of what he published in order to fill gaps in the oral tradition.
The allegations of fraud in his work then largely undid this, so when the London Gaelic Society wanted to raise support for Gaelic, they did so by taking traditional songs and bending them to fit the choral model popular in England at the time. Scotland was again mimicking someone else’s culture to show itself as cultured.
Which brings us to today.
What do we have? Scottish Opera does lots of foreign pieces and pieces written in Scotland based on a foreign form. The Scottish National Orchestra does lots of foreign pieces and pieces written in Scotland based on foreign forms. (I have to admit I’m not that genned up on what the SNT has been doing of late.) There’s nothing wrong with this, as long as we remain mindful of our own culture and do not let ourselves fall into the trap of thinking that this outside culture is more important than our own.
Which brings me back to those final two words: “Scotland expects” — there’s a reference to a foreign culture if ever there was one. If influential people within the Scottish arts establishment feel such an overpowering need to defer to the culture of other countries, then Scottish arts are doomed to remain subservient to those of the rest of the world.
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I saw Black Watch a couple of years ago and it was absolutely terrific.
Last week I saw Peter Pan and I thought it was also very good; not quite as gripping as Black Watch (of course), but that is not really a fair comparison. It is a different kind of story, aimed at a different audience (including my late primary/early secondary age children, who were discussing the play and what it meant for some time afterwards).
Based on what I have seen personally, the above article seems like carping.
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