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Scottish Theatre: Back to Normal? That Train has left the Station. Time to get Real.

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  A lot of people in Scottish Theatre, as in the wider culture, are still behaving as if “getting back to normal” is some sort of option for our industry and our wider society. There is no such place as “normal” any more, if indeed there ever was. What there was, an eternity and six months ago, was an amalgam of pragmatic, political and self interested arrangements and negotiating points with audiences, tax and lottery payers and local, national and Union governments. The terms and dimensions of those arrangements and negotiations have been smashed to bits. The funding solutions that are predicated on there being a way back to what no longer exists are  fundamentally flawed and distract us from real possibility with a chimera. The rules are going to be different. If people of good faith and public purpose, and not merely the usual set of sharp elbowed bastards, want to INFLUENCE those rules, they have no option but to start from the ground up, and from first principles.  Our task,
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What the Performing Arts in Scotland Can Be Doing Right Now Even Though They Can't Perform

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  While there are and have been various initiatives by individual producers, as a freelancer, I feel very strongly that to effect a better future, or anything resembling one, we need to make a continuous and collective public and political case for the performing arts as a public good.  I do not believe we can do that unless we think, talk and act collectively as soon as is humanly possible. My immediate recommendation then, is for a future focussed "commission" to be created and supported by the Scottish Government, in cooperation with the Federation of Scottish Theatre as our currently best placed industry wide organisation and with Creative Scotland as well as representation from the “national” performing companies. This commission must start, I think, with an honest confession that the system was already broken.  The model of the old Scottish Arts Council has been eroding in esteem and actuality for fifteen years or more. Lottery funding has more or less entirely take
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Integration and Separation in Scottish Theatre – we need to get collectively organised to be individually effective.

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I am one of the lucky ones.  At the end of March I was writing for/working with The Lyceum, Perth Rep, the Citz, the National Theatre of Scotland and Raw Material Arts on four different projects that ALL connect to each other.   I have also worked with Dundee Rep, the Traverse, the Playwrights’ Studio and Oran Mor in the last 12 months. So I have an immediate and ongoing connection with them all, but then so does almost everyone I know who works as a freelancer…actors, musicians, directors, designers...Again, like all of them, I know absolutely nothing about what comes next in the industry I work in even now, and have done for thirty six years.  So while I feel very much involved with what happens to any and each of them, while they constitute a unity in my working life, there is, as far as I know, as yet no common plan for performing arts in Scotland to get through the consequences of the pandemic, let alone emerge healthily on the other side. I know that the Federation of
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How to Spend £107 Million

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First, don’t get too excited. This is money that is replacing lost income…not a windfall. It’s primary use, as with the Scottish Government’s ten million announced on Friday, (which is part of this total) is supporting the infrastructure of the entire heritage and museum sectors as well as performing arts venues.   This is safe guarding already existing "national treasures" as the Minister put it. And quieten that Calvinist suspicion and guilt. Of COURSE it’s at least in part a carve up (Andrew Lloyd Webber called Culture Minister Oliver Dowden by his Christian name in a press statement) But across the board, this is only to tide us over till the new financial year. This is money that has already, morally speaking, been earned. What it is not, and what indeed seems to have rapidly suppressed and removed from the agenda, is a possibility for change. On the other hand, a concrete lobbying job about real and not just wished for money can now be undertaken to ensure
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Pandora

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PANDORA’S BOX PANDORA’S BOX                                  Pandora’s Box is a place of delights. Every time you open it, you find something rich, strange and surprising…Pandora’s Box the series is a place where the studio based television drama is re-invented. Where the small screen does not attempt to be a window on the world. Rather, it is a doorway into the mind. Inspired by such “portmanteau” shows of the past, such as Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads and shows of the recent past like “Inside No 9”, in every 30 minute episode, Pandora will present from her “studio” a completely self- contained drama…sometimes funny, sometimes scary, sometimes poignant, but always strangely hopeful. Deriving from the first influence comes an emphasis on character and situation…and a strictly limited palette of performance suitable to current restraint on production. From the second comes a ruthless attention to form and playful
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Personal on the 21st of June

I have written and posted the last distillation of my views on strategy for the Scottish Theatre sector, at least until someone engages with me seriously. I will promote these essays I’ve done on social media. They have become my task in the last three weeks at least in part because the future of my existing work, all the scripts, as well as my current commission for NTS, is so radically uncertain. This radical (as in rooted) uncertainty is in some ways just an intensification, of course, of my usual situation: I never know the future more than a few weeks or months ahead.   I am completely reliant on my own self-belief, and the belief that the work I and my colleagues do is of importance to people…at least of sufficient importance for them to fork out the occasional twenty quid for a ticket and a couple of drinks. So at the one time, I feel both familiarity and vertiginous insecurity.   And am consequently creatively entirely paralysed.   I can’t even read. The campaigning ov
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Reposting "The Veil of Ignorance and Lifting the Lockdown"

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It is now a notorious truism that it is a lot easier to impose “lockdown” than to end it.  You don’t need to understand how society works in order to shut it down, you just have to shut it.  But it turns out that you cannot re-open it without considering in what order in which to do that…and that the order of opening implies an understanding, even a consensus about the ordering of the things that make a society work. And now that we're on the point of re-imposing elements of lockdown (a lockdown that for some people never really started, and for others has never really ended) another fascinating mirror is being held up to our nature?  What really matters to us?  What matters most?   Will we, like Caliban, rage at the sight of our own ugly face in a mirror? Back in March, we made value judgements between the rate of infection and societal coherence. To give an obvious example, the hospitals were not shut down. The emergency accomodation and isolation of the sick by National He
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