Is Scottish theatre back?
In both The Crush Bar and Exeunt today: a chat about the state of theatre in Scotland with Brian Logan, Caitlin Skinner, and me. Plus: three shows to see next week.
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre by Fergus Morgan.
This is the free Friday issue, which usually contains a chat with a theatremaker or an essay on a theatre-related topic. This week, though, is a special issue, published in collaboration with Exeunt, my stablemate in the small world of theatre Substack, and featuring a three-way conversation about the state of Scottish theatre. After that, there are your usual three shows recommendations: two in London, one in Scotland.
In case you missed it, here is this week’s issue of Shouts And Murmurs, which is usually a weekly round-up of the most interesting writing about theatre elsewhere, but is actually a fiendishly tricky theatre version of Only Connect this week…
You can get Shouts And Murmurs straight in your inbox every Tuesday - and help keep this newsletter going - by signing up as a paid supporter of The Crush Bar.
Things are shifting in Scottish theatre.
After several years of to-ing and fro-ing, Creative Scotland finally revealed its new multi-year funding portfolio in January, which will distribute £200m to 251 organisations over the next three years. After a seven-year refurbishment, the iconic Glasgow Citizens Theatre will reopen in September. And, with the dark cloud of Covid receding in the rear-view mirror, a new wave of directors is arriving with energy and vision: Jemima Levick at the Tron Theatre, Alan Cumming at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, James Brining at the Edinburgh Lyceum, and Tony Lankester at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society.
Here, I discuss the state of Scottish theatre with two significant industry leaders: Caitlin Skinner, artistic director and CEO of influential feminist theatre company Stellar Quines and one half of theatremaking duo Jordan and Skinner; and Brian Logan, artistic director of Glasgow’s long-running lunchtime theatre A Play, A Pie and A Pint, former boss of Camden People’s Theatre, and comedy critic for The Guardian.
This issue is a joint publication with Exeunt, another Substack that publishes a range of exciting, innovative, insightful, entertaining journalism about theatre.
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Fergus Morgan: I have always felt that Scotland has huge potential in terms of producing theatre. It has some very well-established theatres and companies. It has thousands of years of interesting history to interrogate. It has world-leading universities and a world-leading conservatoire. It has the world’s biggest showcase of the performing arts. It is a country full of passionate, artistic, intelligent people. It could be really great. That is one of the reasons I have yoked my career to it. Do you agree?
Caitlin Skinner: I do. Small countries are where the most progressive political things can happen, so it makes sense that small countries should be where the most progressive artistic things happen, too. Also, Scotland has a strong folk tradition, of which theatre is part. Amateur dramatic companies are a big part of the fabric of Scottish communities. There is a great lack of hierarchy in the Scottish theatre industry, too. In my own career, it has been easy to move between different styles of work; it feels like we have an ecology that allows people to move seamlessly around. And, as you say, the Edinburgh Fringe is a massive asset, not just as a showcase for Scottish work, but as an opportunity for Scottish artists to see inspiring work from all over the world.
Brian Logan: I definitely agree, too. Historically, of course, because of the Scottish reformation, there was, like, 150 years when theatre was outlawed in Scotland to some degree. The reformation was also the start of the process whereby Scotland became the most literate and intellectually progressive country in the world, though. And perhaps you could say it also gave us the zeal of the convert as we are historical latecomers to theatre. Both of those things feel relevant, I think. I agree that there is an anti-hierarchical cultural impulse in Scotland, too, because of Presbyterianism. Scotland didn’t want to have anything to do with priests, which, looked at a certain way, is Scotland not wanting any intermediaries between the people and higher experiences.
FM: As you both know, I recently made a highly acclaimed podcast series about the history of Scottish theatre. It does seem to come in waves. There are periods – the early 1970s, the 1990s, the late 2000s – when it seems to really thrive. It does not feel like we have experienced one of those periods over the last decade to me. Partly, of course, that is due to money. Subsidised companies and theatres had not seen an increase in their core funding since 2015 until this January, when Creative Scotland revealed its new multi-year funding portfolio. There were a few questionable decisions – the Traverse Theatre being put in the naughty corner, Cumbernauld Theatre being cut, Dogstar Theatre being rejected – but most organisations received uplifts. What was your take?
CS: It is really hard to complain about funding when you have got some, and especially when it is more than you used to get. The thing that has not been explored publicly is that the vast majority of organisations got less than they asked for. Creative Scotland came to us, told us to ask for what we needed but to be conservative. That is what we did. Across the board, what seems to have happened is that Creative Scotland took those figures and just sliced a bit off the top. Of course, it is great that we have had an uplift, but we are still in a situation where we cannot do everything we want to do.
FM: People have said to me that, where Creative Scotland needed to think radically with this round of funding and perhaps fund fewer organisations better, it has actually just tried to piss off as few organisations as possible, the result being that no-one can really achieve what they want to achieve. The context for all this, of course, is that the u-turns and shenanigans of the last few years have resulted in Creative Scotland’s relationship with the industry and with the Scottish government reaching an all-time low.
BL: It does look a little bit like we have all waited through years of delays and dysfunction to arrive at the funding settlement you could have come up with in an afternoon. The relationship between the sector and Creative Scotland is like an abusive relationship. You are denied and denied, eventually get some crumbs, then feel obliged to publicly demonstrate your gratitude for those crumbs. Our experience at A Play, A Pie and A Pint is similar to Caitlin’s at Stellar Quines. We have got a decent sum of money that we can work with, but it is less than half of the uplift that we asked for. We are still stuck in that salami slicing game of figuring out what to prioritise.
FM: Returning to that Scottish theatre utopia I sketched out earlier, it seems to me that a lot of the pillars are in place, but the dots are not being joined, which more funding would have made possible. I am talking about the pathways for emerging artists, the production opportunities for all artists, the relationships that would enable more shows to travel around Scotland and beyond Scotland, bringing money back into the industry.
CS: Making that stuff happen with limited resources is really hard. We are in a position where we struggle to make work unless we co-produce with another company. Employing more people and getting more freelancers involved and offering opportunities to emerging artists is not something we are able to do because we have to prioritise our core work of producing theatre. I think that is true across the industry and I think it is one of the big reasons there has been a lack of development in the sector over the last few years. There just aren’t that many spaces for new work, that many opportunities for artists to work on a small or medium scale, or that many ladders into the industry. We don’t really have that, ever since we lost The Arches in Glasgow.
BL: The absence of The Arches is conspicuous. The fact that it is still talked about a long time after it closed shows that. Here at PPP, part of our vision is to fill that breach. We put on a lot of work by first-time writers and directors, but there is not much space around the sausage factory that is our production model for developing talent in other ways, like R&D and scratch nights and residency positions. That was part of the plans we submitted to Creative Scotland, as were some ideas around expanding PPP around Scotland and internationally. We will have to see how that goes now.
FM: Let’s talk about the work itself. In my podcast, I somewhat reductively defined different eras of Scottish theatre. The 1970s was all about plays set in Scottish factories about Scottish things. The 1980s saw playwrights taking on wider, weirder topics. The 1990s, inspired by the Glasgow City Of Culture Celebrations in 1990, saw writers like David Greig and David Harrower achieve international success. The 2000s saw the founding of the National Theatre of Scotland and the soul-searching that led up to the 2014 independence referendum. What would you say has defined the last decade?
CS: I’m not sure. There is a lot of variety. I feel like we are seeing a lot of ensemble plays involving direct address to the audience. We are seeing more physical theatre. We are seeing some really great work for children and young audiences, too.
BL: The worlds of contemporary performance and new writing used to feel quite oppositional and mutually uncomprehending. Now, that barrier has broken down and there is a lot more traffic between those two worlds. There is a lot of interesting stuff happening in the middle of that Venn diagram.
FM: Hmm, neither of you have been as reductive and journalistic as I hoped you would be there. What about the future? I am, perhaps for the first time, feeling quite optimistic. We have a raft of new leaders – yourself, Brian, at A Play, A Pie and A Pint, plus Jemima Levick at the Tron Theatre, James Brining at the Lyceum Theatre, and Alan Cumming at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. The Citizens Theatre is reopening later this year. The National Theatre of Scotland seems to have got its act together. It feels like things are finally happening. What would you like to see happen? What are you excited about?
CS: We still need much more diversity. Scotland is quite far behind in that. There is very little work done around anti-racism and anti-oppression practices in the sector here. I would like to see some ground being broken there. I would like to see the sector become much more inclusive and provide more space for marginalised voices.
BL: One of my favourite songs is Scotland’s Story by The Proclaimers. “We’re all Scotland’s story and we’re all worth the same.” Everyone, whether they were born here or chose to make their lives here, deserves their stories to be considered as Scottish stories, and also deserves to be on the stage when more “traditional” Scottish stories are being told. I am excited to find ways of facilitating that at PPP.
FM: Tell me what your respective companies are up to at the moment?
CS: Stellar Quines had been based in Edinburgh forever, but we spent some time really looking at what it means to be a feminist theatre company nowadays. The company was formed to create opportunities for women within Scottish theatre and make a noise about that but, thirty years on, it feels like that is everybody’s job now, so where can we have the most impact? We made the decision to relocate to Kirkcaldy in Fife and reshape the company around the community there. We will still make professional theatre and tour it around Scotland, but we will be rooted in the conversations we have in Kirkcaldy and the surrounding area about gender inequality. Our next show is an adaptation of Frankenstein called Frankie Stein. It is a play with songs, written by Julia Taudevin with music by Bethany Tennick, and it will be performed by a core of three professional actors, plus our young company, plus an adult community cast. And it is going to take place in an old shop above an LGBT community centre in Kirkcaldy in April.
BL: We have premiered our first show of 2025 and have seventeen more to go in our Spring season. They are not just running in Glasgow, too. They are travelling to Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Ayr, Dumfries and Galloway, Paisley, Johnstone and Mull. There is a perception of what constitutes a PPP play, which I think is quite narrow. The only real parameters are that it has to be 55 minutes and usually has to feature no more than three actors, which are actually fairly negligible limitations in terms of what worlds could be conjured on our stage. I want to encourage people to think more expansively about what a PPP play could be. I want to see what space there is, within the straightjacket of the PPP model, for devised work and experimental performance.
FM: Lastly, just for fun, I want you both to pick one show from the last decade of Scottish theatre that you loved, and one that you are looking forward to. I’ll go first.
I loved Isobel McArthur’s Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort Of) and I am really looking forward to Make It Happen, James Graham’s new play about Fred Goodwin, RBS, and the financial crash with Dundee Rep, the National Theatre of Scotland and Edinburgh International Festival, starring Brian Cox. And I am looking forward to Small Acts Of Love, the show about the Lockerbie bombing that will reopen the Citizens Theatre in September.
BL: The musical Scots sprung to mind, but that was a PPP show, so I guess that is against the rules. I loved Cora Bissett’s musicals Glasgow Girls and What Girls Are Made Of. I just saw Vanishing Point’s Confessions Of A Shinagawa Monkey at Tramway, which I loved, and I am looking forward to seeing Death Of A Salesman with David Hayman, A View From The Bridge at the Tron Theatre, and Through The Shortbread Tin, Martin O’Connor’s new National Theatre of Scotland show about James Macpherson.
CS: I loved Moonset by Maryam Hamidi, which is not to be confused with Moonstruck, the movie starring Cher. I thought it was such a bold production from Joanna Bowman of a play that celebrated young, female voices. I am really excited to see Confessions Of A Shinagawa Monkey, too. I am keen to see Groupwork’s When Prophecy Fails, too, and I cannot wait to get back in the Citizens Theatre.
FM: Confessions Of A Shinagawa Monkey is great. Sandy Grierson does the best monkey performance I’ve ever seen.
BL: Ah, well that is just because you didn’t get to see me in Tom McGrath’s Animal with Scottish Youth Theatre in 1989, Fergus. I’m sure Sandy drew on me for inspiration.
Three shows to see next week
Wild Rose - Edinburgh Lyceum, until April 19
This highly anticipated musical adaptation of the 2018 movie is directed by John Tiffany and stars Dawn Sievewright as Rose-Lynn, a Glaswegian mum who dreams of making it big as a country singer. It has already extended its Edinburgh run and looks set to transfer to London afterwards. You can get tickets via the button below.
The Mosinee Project - New Diorama Theatre, until March 22
This playful show from theatremaker Nikhil Vyas and his company Counterfactual explores the intriguing true story of a mock communist takeover in a small Wisconsin town in 1950. I saw it at the Edinburgh Fringe last year and loved it. You can read my review in The Stage here and get tickets for its London run via the button below.
The Habits - Hampstead Theatre, until April 5
Director Jack Bradfield featured in The Crush Bar last year, ahead of his company Poltergeist Theatre remounting their award-winning show Alice In Wonderland at Brixton House. Now, Bradfield is making his debut as a playwright with a five-handed drama inspired by Dungeons and Dragons. You can get tickets via the button below.
That’s all for this issue
That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter, or email me at fergusmorgan@hotmail.co.uk, or you can find me on Bluesky.
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