Acts of Disunion

Of the many curious things that lie between the folds of the Fringe programme, consider this one. This year’s Festival takes place mere weeks before Scotland makes its biggest decision in 300 years. On 18 September the country will be asked, should it become an independent nation?

And yet, of the 910 theatre productions on offer, only eight seem to be bothered about it. That’s two less than the number of productions of Hamlet.

The sheer size and proximity of the vote appears to have warped the theatre programme to the point that the centuries-old fractious family life of royal Danes has a tighter grip on the theatrical imagination than the imminent break-up of the United Kingdom.

So what’s going on? The comedy programme is rammed with independence gag-fests. Have playwrights collectively lost their nerve? David Greig, one of Scotland’s foremost dramatists, doesn’t think so. On the contrary, he never expected many independence-themed plays this year anyway.

“If you wanted that you should have been looking three years ago,” says the writer of the hits Midsummer and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. “Writers are very good at sensing the zeitgeist, seeing things we didn’t quite realise were on the horizon. Or you could come in five years’ time when there will be loads of stuff reflecting on the referendum and all this crazy time we’re living through.”

If, as Greig suggests, the high winds of theatrical expression are to be found in the years surrounding a major event like the referendum then this year’s theatre programme is the eerily calm eye of the storm.

With a relatively clear playing field, how then is this cluster of shows facing up to its monumental subject matter? Greig has one idea, which might explain further why many have shied away.

“Right now the only thing you can really do if you are writing theatre about the referendum is effectively propaganda,” he says. “Propaganda has a bad name, for good reasons. But the truth is it is perfectly reasonable to do shows that push your particular point of view. But it’s not really what the bulk of artists do. They don’t work that way. And if they do it is a one off.”

Mention propaganda to Alan Bissett and he gleefully admits that his play, The Pure, The Dead and The Brilliant, is most definitely that. The author, playwright and keen tweeter has been one of the loudest cultural voices trying to get people to vote yes.

“All art is propaganda,” he says. “Any artist presents a view point of the world. There is no such thing as apolitical art. The difference with propaganda is that these things are front and centre and isn’t embarrassed by it either.”

With no blushes or apologies, The Pure, The Dead and The Brilliant imagines what would happen if a cast of Scottish mythological creatures—including the Banshee, Selkie, and a demon called Black Donald—crossed over from the fairy kingdom to try and convince people to vote no. “And their tactics curiously mimic the Better Together [pro-Union] campaign,” says Bissett.

He believes that theatre can certainly sprinkle a bit of fairy dust over the audience’s voting intentions.

“A play can go to places that politicians can’t, can say things politicians can’t, in a way that connects with people more directly. It’s not like they’ll go from being completely against independence and are now fervently for it – that’s unlikely to happen. But one thing that a play can do is make people realise the emotional truth of the story in front of them, that they naturally wanted to believe that independence could be possible, and this has just confirmed it for them.”

Where Bissett is deploying the depth charges of satire and humour to convince people to vote yes, David Hayman is using pained, probing realism to needle the conscience of the average Scot. And by average Scot, he means life-long Labour voter. Such is the party’s hold on Scotland, 1959 was the last year it did not win the most Scottish votes in a Westminster election.

The Pitiless Storm is a one man show written with Chris Dolan. Hayman plays Bob Cunningham, a “died in the wool, tribal Labour supporter” who is receiving an OBE on the eve of the referendum. Cunningham is considering voting yes, going against the wishes of a party who he feels has betrayed him.

Hayman, star of ITV’s Trial and Retribution, has gone through a similar dark night of the titular storm. He was once a Labour member, still refers to it as “the people’s party”, and refers to fellows as “comrades”.  But after the UK’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and the ideological disappointment of New Labour, he now finds himself speaking at radical independence events. He hopes that his beloved party can find its lost soul in an independent Scotland.

And he hopes that The Pitiless Storm will help articulate the confusion and conflict many Labour supporters are feeling about the referendum. “I’m not doing it for people to scurry off and vote no,” he says. “I'm hoping they're going to go home, think about it and ultimately vote yes. Therein lies the power of theatre. If it changes people’s minds or helps clarify the confusion in their minds, that is all to the good.

“Theatre is a powerful weapon. It is important for us to make a creative contribution, not just a political one.”

So, that’s two approaches: cheeky satire and needling realism. Other plays, such as MacBraveheart: The Other Scottish Play, deliberately swither between farce and pretentiousness because their writers too swither over which way to vote.

But what of Scottish theatre’s other leading lights? What has the gravitational force of the referendum done to their art?

Let’s return to David Greig for a moment. Rather than create a new play to convince people to support the independence that he too craves, he, along with director and actress Cora Bissett (Roadkill, Glasgow Girls) and writer Kieran Hurley, are planning to bottle the energy, ideas and enthusiasm of the grassroots independence movement and offer it up for passers-by to take a swig. All Back To Bowie’s, their daily lunchtime event in St Andrews Square, is independence moonshine.

Billed as “a daily hour of gentle thought and hard daydreaming,” it is a cabaret of ideas, music, reviews, polemic and discussion about Scottish independence, a place for those visiting from south of the border or further afield to get a glimpse of what Scotland has been blethering about for the past few years.

“The referendum has blown off the roof of what politics is,” says Greig, with double-espresso enthusiasm. “What the referendum has done is ask, if you were starting a new country from scratch, what would you do? That makes you ask other questions. It is a way of thinking about the world that this moment is allowing and people are leaping on it with vigour. So Bowie’s, to me, is the place to be to get that atmosphere, to get that feeling. We will be modelling yes.”

The National Collective, one of the strongest cultural movements for independence, is doing something similar in the evenings at the Scottish Storytelling Centre.

Finally, what of the no vote? Is anyone giving it a voice, singing the praise of the union on stage? Apparently not. Greig paints a delicious counterfactual picture of why this may be. “If we had been living in an independent Scotland for 300 years and the proposal was we join a union, you would find Unionist cabarets, Unionist plays and Unionist parties. The union would be the change, the assignment, the new idea, the opportunity.”

And so, it appears the playwright’s ultimate guiding ideology is neither independence nor unionism, but restlessness. Come back in a few years and see where that insatiable curiosity has taken Scotland.