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