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 over the last few weeks has been both a displacement activity and entirely existentially necessary to me. If there is no theatre, I have no work. Othello’s occupation’s gone. I have no purpose.

What makes me most profoundly afraid, probably, is that theatre will come back…and come back without me.  This has made me assess my assets with a sense of some urgency. What is there in my back catalogue that can be adapted, can be used.  What do I care about enough to seek new commissions to write about? 

That “back catalogue” now includes current and delivered commissions…five new scripts as well as all the old ones, many of them underused.  If I can create the feeling among my peers that I am indispensable, then I have a ready-made stream of product to show them.  But I know nothing.

Likewise, I have number of ideas and areas of interest which might be of interest to someone in “the business” but there is no one to talk to I haven’t talked top in Scottish Theatre, and I am pretty much unknown outside of that circle. 

I quipped early on in this crisis, I remember, that it was entirely possible I had just retired at the end of March and I didn’t even know it yet.  Well, it’s June now, and despite an ongoing commission for the National Theatre of Scotland…to be produced wha kens how or when…the joke I made then seems less and less jocular all the time.

Hence, at least in part, my concern for the sector as a whole. I have, after all, spent my working life doing what I do, I I hadn’t bargained for being all done with it just yet.

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