All my writing on theatre and general social/political issues is available online here.

Most of these pieces are commissioned by, and first appear in, The Scotsman. Ultimate ownership of copyright remains with me, and is asserted here.

Everything on the site appears in date order, below, beginning with the most recent column or review.

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© Joyce McMillan 2009

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on BIRDS AND OTHER THINGS I AM AFRAID OF (Poorboy & Arches @ Kelvinbridge, Glasgow), for The Scotsman 8.2.10
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3 stars ***

POORBOY PRODUCTIONS of Angus are a theatre company who “make stories for places”; and when it comes to bringing life to some of the neglected places of our landscape, they are extraordinarily gifted.  Their latest work – co-produced with the currently exiled Arches Theatre – involves gathering a tiny audience at Kelvinbridge underground station, and leading them across the road into a handsome old space full of haunted atmosphere, and icily chill; a sign outside calls it “a building loooking for a future.”

Inside, in typical Poorboy style, there’s a gentle sense of the buried distaff side of history coming to life; a woman in a little hat dishing out funeral cups of tea, a range of old framed family photographs, lovingly arranged in space.  Then there’s a swift dive into a small junk room, like the walk-in cupboard of a Great Western Road flat; and into Lynda Radley’s monologue about an unhappy girl of 18 or so, raised in Northern Ireland, who has lost her mother, and who – to her vague resentment – has been brought back by her Dad to live in his native Glasgow.

What we see, in other words, is a vividly-staged but slightly ordinary monologue about a moment of transition in the life of a damaged teenager, sitting uneasily in a place that seems to have a more interesting story of its own; and although the atmosphere is powerful, the mismatch is disturbing.  Radley is a gifted young writer and performer who needs to avoid the current performance cliche of the naive child-woman in a big bad world.  And Poorboy, in the hands of director Sandy Thomson, is a company that needs to work with mature, high-powered writing that matches the depth of its womanly theatre-making; and that hasn’t fully found that voice again since its thrilling debut, back in 2004.

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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman 6.2.10
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IN THE MIDDLE OF LAST week, Professor John Hills, of the London School of Economics, published his massive report on economic inequality in the UK; and the figures it contains tell a sobering story about the extent to which people in Britain now inhabit utterly different worlds, depending on their income levels.    The richest 10% of the population now hold, on average, a hundred times more wealth than the poorest 10%, one of the biggest gaps in the developed world.

And when it comes to income – well, anyone who earns more than £50,000 a year is, comparatively, very well off indeed; better off than 92 out of 100 of his or her fellow Britons.  Yet so divided has our society become that most people earning around this sum find those figures almost impossible to believe.  In their world, £50,000 is peanuts compared with the vast sums paid to bank bosses, some public service chiefs, other chief executives.  And it’s that growing disjunction between ordinary British people earning ordinary British salaries, and a top governing and managing class whose earnings have soared away from the norm, that forms the inescapable backdrop to the horror-show of political sleaze and money-grubbing through which we have lived in recent years.

Of all the bad weeks for British politics we have seen of late, the one just past has perhaps been the worst.  The expenses nightmare has returned to haunt the damaged Westminster Parliament.  Three Labour MP’s, and one Tory member of the House of Lords, now face prosecution over fraudulent expenses claims; more than half of current MP’s have been asked to repay wrongly claimed expenses.

And this time round, there is no room for smugness at Holyrood either.  The First Minister is under investigation for using the debatable lure of lunch with him, at Holyrood, to raise party funding for the SNP; and it’s not long since the leader of the Labour Group in the Parliament was forced to resign, over an offshore donation to her leadership campaign fund.

Look where you like, in other words, in the accumulating nightmare of stories about expenses, fund-raising, and low-level influence-peddling, and you will find everywhere the traces of a society where the huge wealth of a few increasingly makes a mockery of the efforts of the many to make their voices heard.  Out here in the real world, we may well wonder how MP’s on salaries of £65,000 a year, plus generous allowances, managed to convince themselves that their pay was so paltry that a bit of legitimised expense-fiddling represented a reasonable response; the answer appears to lie in their continous exposure to the lobbying, the lifestyle, and the values of a tiny but hugely influential class of people who genuinely regard such salaries as a joke.

And if the business of MP’s pay and expenses is depressing, then it is more than matched by the nightmare of our current method of funding political parties, which essentially seems to consist in selling access to front-bench politicians, along with the power seriously to influence policy, to whoever can afford to make the largest donation to party funds.  There was a time, of course, when parties were funded by the many small subscriptions of their grassroots members.  But now – well, why bother trying to recruit a million ordinary supporters, when a Bernie Ecclestone or a Lord Ashcroft can write a cheque for the same amount at a single stroke?   The wealth of major donors increasingly makes a mockery of any decent grass-roots tradition of party organisation; and it has gradually reduced our political parties from serious representatives of mass social movements, to organised gangs of ambitious would-be politicians, all bidding for the support of the same limited range of wealthy donors and media owners.

And what is most tragic about all of this is the extent to which ordinary British voters seem to take the view that this humiliation of our political class is something in which we can all revel, at no cost to ourselves; rather than a tragedy which, if it continues, will eventually devour our every hope of living in a decent, fair and compassionate society.  If there is, after all, one lesson that we should have learned for the near-catastrophic financial crisis of the last two years, it is that what we need is not a weaker political class, but a stronger one – one that can tell the difference between clear, robust regulation that prevents the abuse of ordinary consumers and the plundering of the public purse, and the kind of expensive and ineffectual bureaucratic fiddling around the edges of a profoundly unjust society that has so sapped the energy of Britain’s bloated public sector during the last dozen years.

For the truth of politics is that democratic government – sovereign government elected by the people, and sometimes compelled to act in their interest – offers our best and often our only hope of overcoming gross inequalities, redistributing opportunity through our society, facing down the insolence of private power, and helping those who are too weak or vulnerable to help themselves.  Even in its present state, government offers a myriad of  benefits and services, from the NHS to old age pensions, that we are far too inclined to take for granted, and without which our society would be far less civilised.

And whatever we make of our present crop of politicians and parties, each one of us has an obligation, as a citizen, not to throw the baby of democratic politics out with the bathwater of the present generation’s failure.  For if we do – if we refuse to vote, sit in the pub, call down a plague on all their houses – then we effectively hand all power over our futures to the men and women who gave us last year’s financial crash; and who have now walked away, their pockets stuffed with taxpayers’ money, to start the game all over again, in the absence of any government sharp enough, strong enough, and well enough loved by its people, to finally call their bluff.

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on WALL OF DEATH – A WAY OF LIFE  at the SECC, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 6.2.10
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4 stars ****

IT’S A SHOW IN four parts, the National Theatre of Scotland’s amazing Wall Of Death at the SECC.  Co-produced with the Ken Fox troupe, the last family group of wall of death riders in the UK, and created through the inspiration of artist Stephen Skrynka – who has longed to ride the Wall Of Death since childhood -  it’s a one-hour entertainment that exists right out in the borderlands where theatre and showmanship meet installation art.

It begins with a fairground booth, created by Skrynka, that explores the idea of rotation through dozens of tiny images held on the turntables of old wind-up gramophones.  it leads us towards the Wall Of Death through a circle of filmed images of Skrynka beginning to learn the art of riding, and Ken Fox talking about it. Then there’s a roar of thrilling sound flashing through the space, a theatrical flood of light from the side of a fairground truck, a chance to meet the four-strong troupe and their “spieler”, the ebullient Neil; and to hear their modest, sometimes intriguing answers to frequently asked questions about their art.

And then its up into the Wall Of Death itself, for fifteen minutes of brilliant, searing showmanship from Fox and his riders, Alex, Luke and the wonderful Kerri.  Their poise, their calm, their perfect athleticism, as they drive their roaring bikes to the top of the wall, soaring and swooping like dancers or acrobats, draws gasps of pure excitement from the audience, gathered in a circle around the top of the great drum.  Has Skrynka mastered the art of riding the Wall?  No, he hasn’t; he says that the learning process goes on.

But at the end of the evening, we have plenty to celebrate and to think about, nonetheless.  There’s the sheer skill of the performance, which simply commands respect and delight.  But beyond that, there’s a subtle, thoughtful tribute to a travelling, risk-taking way of life that has ancient roots, and is under constant threat in our crowded and sanitised modern world.  And there’s a rich combination of beauty, and sadness, and sheer, hair-raising fun.  The show’s co-director, the NTS’s Vicky
Featherstone, says that theatre has to be constantly re-defining itself, if it wants to stay in touch with audiences in the 21st century; and with this show, she gives a powerful demonstration of just how vibrant, and how thrilling, that process of exploration can be.

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on PROMISES, PROMISES (Random Accomplice at the Tron Theatre Glasgow), for The Scotsman 5.2.10
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5 stars *****

DOUGLAS MAXWELL’s coming-of-age as a playwright has been a long, public business, not without its ups and downs.  But now,  with this great new monologue for Johnny McKnight’s Random Accomplice company, Maxwell has made his breakthrough, producing a 90-minute text of such sustained brilliance, in its effort to confront some of the deepest problems facing our society, that it sometimes threatens to take the breath away.

The speaker is Miss Margaret Anne Brodie, a retired London Scottish schoolteacher with a drink problem, and a lifetime of classroom experience.  Asked to do some emergency supply teaching, she is enraged to discover that a traumatised and mute Somali girl who has just joined her class is to be subjected by “community leaders” to a terrifying exorcism in front of the other children.   Something about the situation, and about the compelling presence of the child herself, drives Miss Brodie into a vortex of passion and memory which she cannot control, as she remembers a youth destroyed by her own highly religious and abusive father; and what looks initially like a familiar attack on “political correctness” begins to shade into something much darker, more challenging, and finally more violent.

In the course of this fierce solo drama, performed by Joanna Tope and with an intensity, an allure, and a technical brilliance that is beyond praise, no aspect of victim-culture in our society – or the minefield of competing agonies it has exposed – escapes Maxwell’s gaze; he uses Miss Brodie ambiguous position as an abused middle-class woman, and a self-critical middle-class Scot, to demonstrate time and again how millions in the west are caught forever between the roles of oppressor and oppressed.  In the end, Miss Brodie’s response is to absorb Rosie’s silence, and become mute.  But not before she has given us a story never to be forgotten; and a series of question which are all the more worth asking, precisely because they have no answers.

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH at Oran Mor, Glasgow, for The Scotsman, 4.2.10
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4 stars ****

THE STORY OF ROBERT KIRK, the troubled minister of Aberfoyle, is not a new one in Scottish theatre.  In the mid-1980’s, Theatre Alba discovered and produced Netta Blair Reid’s two-act play The Shepherd Beguiled, about the strange story of the 17th century man of God so fascinated by old tales of the “good people” – the big, powerful faery folk said to live beneath the hills of his home country – that when Kirk disappeared one night among those hills, he was thought to have been taken by them, his restless spirit doomed to roam for ever in search of a way home.

Whatever the history of this strange story, though, Catherine Czerkawska’s new monologue makes a powerful job of retelling it, and marks a fine opening to this spring’s Play, Pie and Pint  season of lunchtime plays.  Using the voice of the lost minister himself – played by Liam Brennan with a terrific combination of emotional commitment and sheer technical command – Czerkawska transforms the story into a lyrical yet driven 50-minute lament over Scotland’s failure to integrate its dour Presbyterian faith and dogged Enlightenment rationalism with the wilder, more beautiful and more sensual aspects of its Gaelic heritage, represented by the eerily amplified voice of singer Deirdre Graham, crooning soft old songs.

Kirk, who was a fine scholar, might have been remembered as the first man to translate the Psalms into Gaelic.  Instead, he seems to have been driven close to madness by the fierce binary oppositions – rationalism or crazy superstition, respectability or sensual fulfilment – that dogged our national culture at the height of the Reformation, and still influence our thinking today.  And between them, Czerkawska and Brennan come close to making him a real hero for our times, desperately struggling for ways to move on from an arid, over-rationalised modernism, without sinking back into the darkness of mindless superstition.

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on 1945, QUARTO INTERIOR, and THE MANIPULATE FESTIVAL at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, for Scotsman Arts, 4.2.10
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1945   4 stars ****
Quarto Interior  3 stars ***

IN A DARKENED Traverse Two, lit only by a couple of unquenched exit lights, an audience of fifty or so sit listening intently.  Sometimes, lights flicker somewhere in the centre of the stage area.   A circular shape appears, like an eclipsed earth, and then gradually darkens or burns; then light gleams on the intent face of installation artist Mischa Twitchin, as he holds a candle to a small sheet of glass on which fragmentary pieces of text are etched.

Mostly, though, our attention is on what we are hearing, the 35-minute sound installation by Twitchin and George Tomlinson which goes under the title 1945: A Passion.  It’s a dark meditation on the end of war, and the failure of peace; an exploration of Michel Foucault’s bitter notion that  peace is really only a disguised continuation of a state of war – Cold War, psychological war, hidden or unreported war.  We hear voices, sounds and music, all of them remarkable.  The music includes Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and works by Beethoven, Glazunov, and Luigi Nono, some of them in versions recorded at the Berlin Haus Des Rundfunks in June 1945.  The voices are those of Joseph Beuys, Richard Dimbleby, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Martin Heidegger and Andrei Tarkovsky; sometimes they are chopped and distorted into pure sound.  And the words of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets haunt the first half of the sequence, while a Paul Celan poem about the crucifixion defines the second.

The overall effect is beautiful, strange, sad, thought-provoking, a show for adults about some of the most serious stuff of history; and those qualities make 1945 a fitting postscript  to the first day of this year’s Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival at the Traverse, a rich, ever-changing international mix of shows, installations, films and masterclasses that runs until Saturday under the benign gaze of Traverse director Dominic Hill, who brought the festival with him when he arrived from Dundee Rep two years ago.  Earlier in the evening, a packed Traverse One has been both moved and entertained by Circolando of Portugal’s Quarto Interior, a clown show about a classic male “odd couple” trying to share a house and a life.  It covers more familiar ground than 1945, in a more predictable clowning style; but it swerves away from the bright nursery colours of ordinary clown-shows to root its story in the earth, wood and straw of traditional folk legend and in some remarkable folk-band music, producing a series of stunning and beautiful visual images along the way.

And as the contrast between these first two shows demonstrates, Manipulate remains – in its third year – a Festival that struggles to define itself in a single, slick description.  As the festival’s artistic director Simon Hart says, it’s clear that it is not about traditional text-based drama.  It’s clear that it has an interest in puppet theatre – or “object theatre” – that aims at a consenting  adult audience, rather than the traditional children’s market; it’s clear that it often involves the creative use of light, shadow-play and animation, and of powerful visual imagery.

But it also reserves the right – as with 1945 – to push its own boundaries into areas that are more aural than visual.  Perhaps the best definition is that it’s a small but growing international festival dedicated to theatre at its most sensual and imaginative; the kind that startles our senses and allows our imaginations free rein, as patches of light, or ordinary inanimate objects, suddenly take on a dramatic life of their own.  The Festival programme, which changes each day, also includes an acclaimed, spine-chilling marionette show from the Figurentheater of Tubingen in Germany, a rich programme of new animated films, an evening of experimental puppetry and shadow-theatre by young Scottish artists, a Spanish Fawlty-Towers-style puppet comedy, and a raunchy Friday evening show known as the Puppet Grinder Cabaret.

“Partly, the Festival is about developing these art-forms in Scotland,” says Simon Hart, who also directs the Aberdeen-based Puppet Animation Scotland.  “It’s an opportunity to show the best international work in puppetry, animation and visual theatre to audiences here, and it also gives our artists a chance to come together, and develop their skills and ideas.

“Beyond that, though, I do think that the Festival reflects changes in the whole of our theatre culture.  Partly, it’s that audiences are increasingly looking for “event theatre” – something with a really breathtaking physical and visual impact, and a truly distinctive style.  Our culture is also becoming more visually literate all the time; younger people now pick up visual cues at an incredibly rapid pace, and their culture is intensely visual, rather than verbal.  We discovered last year that 65% of the audience who came to see Manipulate at the Traverse had never been there before; and since Dominic and the Traverse have given us such great support, it’s good to feel that we can return the favour by bringing in a new audience.

“And then there’s also the fact that people increasingly distrust language – the human talking figure – as a medium that has been devalued by the culture of compulsive advertising and spin, in both business and politics.  There’s the idea that words lie, whereas images tell the truth.  In fact, that’s not always the case; and there are dangers in that way of thinking.

“I do believe, though, that there are limits to language, and that using a simple inanimate object, making it become something other than it is, is a classic way to evoke wonder and playfulness in people’s minds, that child-like capacity that we lose as we grow older.  Object and visual theatre is a way of getting in touch with that spirit of play again, and with the deeper emotions it can release.  So I hope it’s a process that gives people food for thought; but that it also helps to nourish the imagination and the emotions, and restore them to a central place in our lives.”

Manipulate at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, until 6 February.

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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman 30.1.10
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THE APPLIANCE OF SCIENCE.  It was one of the great advertising slogans of the 1980’s and 90’s; but it has also, in a deep sense, been the guiding principle of our whole western civilisation, during modern times.  It’s four or five hundred years, after all, since people in western Europe made a decisive turn away from superstitious and oppressive forms of religious belief, and started working with their wits to understand and improve the material world in which we live.  Roughly speaking, we stopped praying for rain, and started to grapple with the possibilities of crop rotation and artificial fertiliser; we stopped praying for good health, and started to recognise how disease was transmitted between us by tiny organisms, that could be banished by systematic handwashing and decent sanitation.  We began to understand the circulation of the blood, and the principle of inoculation; we developed steam engines and looms and turbines of a power that generated whole new worlds of wealth.

And in the last century, the pace of discovery has only increased.  From cars, aeroplanes, television and radio to microprocessors, mobile phones and the internet, technical and scientific advance has continued to transform our everyday lives.  Today, we simply take it for granted that diseases that would have killed our great-grandparents in a few months can often be cured by surgery, or made harmless by a daily dose of medication; and all this is to say nothing of the further and more mysterious reaches of particle physics, which may soon give us a universe of teleportation and mind-to-mind communication beyond our current dreams.

Yet what do we make of all this?  Increasingly, not much; for to put it bluntly, we no longer seem to like science very much, or to feel inclined to believe what it tells us.  This week, we have seen the world’s leading climate scientists on the rack, as more evidence emerges of poor fact-checking and exaggerated claims in reports published by the supposedly authoritative International Panel on Climate Change.  We have seen the General Medical Council take punitive action against Dr. Andrew Wakefield, whose claims about the link between autism and the MMR vaccine are still widely believed by many parents, who prefer his judgment to that of the medical establishment.  And we have seen yet more mocking coverage of “nanny state” advice on what constitutes a healthy lifestyle, based on medical opinion that sometimes seems to change by the hour.    As someone born in the 1950’s, I can just about remember the mood of onward-and-upward faith in science and technology that powered that Ideal Homes period in our history.

Over the last 40 years, though, that faith has largely collapsed.  In the first place, the change of mood was related to a growing sense that some of the economic and technological changes we had embraced were doing as much harm as good; wrecking communities, tearing down our cities, polluting our natural environment.   Then over the next generation, it rapidly became linked to a much wider  popular rebellion against avuncular and patronising public-sector elites; so that today, our scepticism about official science has become part of a general mood of popular rage against the entire global boss-class of politicians, bankers, world leaders and establishment scientists, from Tony Blair to the IPCC Chair, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri.

And thirdly – well, let’s be clear that scientists themselves have played a part in their own downfall.  Not all scientists lack emotional self-awareness, of course; nor is science the only profession to exert a macho appeal for those who lack emotional literacy.  Nonetheless, it doesn’t take much investigation of the exaggeration that seems to have affected some IPCC reports, or of those notorious emails among climate-change scientists at the University of East Anglia, to detect the tell-tale signs – familiar from the banking industry, the financial markets, and Tony Blair’s kitchen cabinet – of a cohesive, predominantly male group of high-achievers who have taken a certain group position, who are determined to score a victory over those who have taken a different position, and who therefore increasingly see dissent, or the acknowledgment of inconvenient counter-facts, as a sign of weakness or disloyalty.  If scientists were more aware of the likely impact on their thinking of such fierce peer-pressures, they might be able to compensate for them; as it is, they so pride themselves on their “rationality” that most of them seem unwilling even to recognise that such emotional pressures exist.

Whatever the reasons for the collapse of public faith in science, though, it’s difficult not to see it as a worrying symptom of a much wider civilisational problem.  That people should become more sceptical of the views of those in authority is undoubtedly a good thing; so is the greater openness that has, in recent decades, revealed to public view so many political abuses, and official half-truths.

What remains unanswered, though, is the question about where we go next, once every source of authority in our society has been torn down, and shown to have clay feet.  In the short term, of course, there is money to be made from the collapse of consensus, and of faith in public authority; the less people believe in government and officialdom, they more they will turn to the private sector, for everything from personal security to healthcare and counselling.

In the longer term, though, a society which no longer believes in any shared system of thought, or acknowledges any agreed basis of fact on which decisions can be made, becomes powerless either to protect itself, or to build a dynamic and progressive future.  “The appliance of science,”said Zanussi, back in 1981; “Vorsprung Durch Technik,” said Audi, as long ago as the 1970’s.  But it’s doubtful whether they would try the same appeal to science and technology with western consumers today.  And it’s difficult not to feel a sense of dangerous drift, as our society begins to turn against the very method of thought that made it what it is; and the old gangs of sorcerers and charlatans re-emerge, to fill our vacuum of belief.

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on BACK TO THE FUTURE: 7:84 REUNION AND CURTAIN UP EXHIBITION AT THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SOTLAND for Scotsman Arts 28.1.10
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IN A darkened room off the entrance hall of the National Library in Edinburgh, an emotional reunion is taking place.  It’s a reunion among old friends and colleagues, certainly; it’s 37 years since this group first came together, to help create an event that changed all of their lives, and unleashed an energy that still resonates and ripples through Scottish life and culture, almost four decades on.

Beyond that, though, it’s also a reunion between this group of people and the extraordinary piece of stage furniture around which they gather. For this is the National Library of Scotland’s exhibition space, home for the next three months to the library’s Curtain Up! exhibition, which celebrates the last 40 years of achievement in Scottish theatre.  The group of people gathered around – Elizabeth MacLennan and Bill Paterson, John Bett and the legendary Gaelic singer and actress Dolina MacLennan, and  director and producer David MacLennan, now famous as the man behind Glasgow’s Play, Pie and Pint lunchtime theatre phenomenon – includes almost all of the cast members of 7:84 Scotland’s legendary founding production of The Cheviot, The Stag, And The Black, Black Oil, the mould-breaking radical  “ceilidh play” which first went out on tour in the spring of 1973.

And the centrepiece of the exhibition – around which they circle, giving it the odd affectionate prod to see if it’s still in working order, before they move next door for a 90-minute panel discussion and debate about the 7:84 experience  – is the  extraordinary piece of stage design known as “the pop-up book”; the giant eight-foot by ten-foot book of pop-up sets conceived by the show’s writer and director, the late John McGrath, built by sculptor and fiddler Allan Ross, and painted for the first tour of The Cheviot by the artist and future playwright John Byrne. The book’s dimensions were dictated by the size of the roof-rack on the company’s transit van, where it had to survive months of rugged Highland touring through wind, rain and storm, covered by a tarpaulin.  And after a hair-raising history, during which McGrath’s wife and lifelong artistic partner Elizabeth MacLennan had to salvage it from more than one rubbish skip, the book has finally come to rest with its new owners in the National Library, although the building has yet to find a shelf large enough to accommodate it.

Yet there’s a sense that the pop-up-book’s journey is not over; for what it does – as it sits in the exhibition hall, among a loosely-organised blizzard of other material from the NLS’s huge theatre archive – is to raise a whole series of questions about how to integrate the story of an art-form as live and ephemeral as theatre into the history of a nation, and into its archive record.  On one hand, the material gathered here is tremendously interesting and resonant to anyone who has personal memories of the shows that left behind these fragile material traces, not only in the vast 7:84 archive of John McGrath’s personal papers and records which is held here, but in other major NLS collections, including the entire archive of Traverse Theatre playscripts, programmes, photographs and company records, dating back to the 1960’s.

In theatre, though, it’s always the live human experience that matters, rather than the object or the text on the page; which is why the evening swoops onto a whole new level of energy when a packed audience gathers in the boardroom next door, and chairman Jim Naughtie ushers the 7:84 team onto the tiny stage, to discuss their story with Bob Tait – the man who, as editor of Scottish International magazine, staged the first reading of the play at a conference in March 1973 – and with Isobel Macphail, of the Assynt Crofters’ Trust.

“I don’t like looking back, really,” says Elizabeth MacLennan, still glamorous in her eighth decade. “I think theatre always has to be re-inventing itself.”  And although she proves herself no mean archivist – producing from her bag a copy of the very pop-up book of Pinocchio that she and McGrath were reading to their sons when the idea of the pop-up set was born – she and her fellow-panellists still seem strongly focussed on the present and the future, as they talk about the multiple meanings of the 7:84 experience.  Bob Tait urges the audience to think about the politics of the show, and about the way it negotiated the ideological gap between nationalism and socialism in Scotland, still unresolved to day.  Bill Paterson recalls the sheer speed with which John McGrath would recycle that morning’s headlines into the evening’s show, and is sure the same could be done today; and up-and-coming playwright Alan Bisset is inspired on the spot to work with David MacLennan on an update one of 7:84’s later shows – possibly The Game’s A Bogey, McGrath’s famous tribute to Red Clydesider John Maclean.

And at the back of the room, the National Library curators and staff stand and smile; because they know that this kind of event – this living link between the material in their collection and the life of Scottish theatre today – is essential to bring out the full meaning of the artefacts, and to save them from any suggestion of dusty nostalgia.

“We feel that it’s not generally known that we hold such a big collectiion of really contemporary material in this area,” says the NLS’s exhibitions manager Jackie Cromerty. “So we hope that this exhibition will encourage people involved in theatre to recognise the amount of vital contemporary material we have, in terms of the history and development of theatre in Scotland.  And also that it will encourage other people who use the library to appreciate just how significant theatre is as a living part of our culture; and just how much it has changed and developed, over the last generation.”

The Curtain Up! exhibition is at the National Library of Scotland until 3 May, with further panel discussions on the Birth Of The  National Theatre of Scotland (9 February), and on the Traverse Theatre (8 March).

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on THE CURIOUS LIVES OF SHAKESPEARE AND CERVANTES at Adam House, Edinburgh, for The Scotsman 25.1.10
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2 stars **

IF SHAKESPEARE and Cervantes still matter, it’s surely because of their work, rather than the detail of their lives.  That’s the paradox at the heart of Asa Gim Palomera’s homage to these two great writers, which played briefly in Edinburgh last week.  Like most shows of its kind, it takes for granted our interest in the artists; and that presumption seals it off into a world of bourgeois tribute drama, a little arch and knowing, very prettily costumed, and largely inconsequential.

Palomera’s interest in these two great lives was triggered by the fact that although Cervantes was 17 years older than Shakespeare, both apparently died on the same date, 23 April 1616.  Otherwise, though, they had little in common; and the resonances between their lives are unlikely to be much illuminated by a script that mashes up selected details of their biographies, and quotations from their works, with the odd lurch into incongruous modern street-speak, and sudden bursts of music from 20th century shows based on their work – Kiss Me Kate, West Side Story and Man Of La Mancha.

David Dawkins turns in an attractive performance as the stoical Cervantes, while for some reason Scott J. Gordon plays Shakespeare as a flouncing upper-class twit.  But if the overall effect is often embarrassing, there is some pleasant music for guitar and cello to while away the time; and the three young women playing assorted wives, mothers, mistresses wear their gorgeous 17th century costumes with enough style to keep the audience happy for 80 minutes or so, on a wet January night.

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