Ecosse: Theatre of dreams

To some it will seem a low-key way to bring a dream more than a century old to fruition. No champagne gala, no black tie and no speechifying. But then that’s the point. Home isn’t just a group of shows: it’s a statement designed to say that the new National Theatre of Scotland doesn’t belong to any one place or any one class. The project is bold and original. It is also, potentially, horribly worthy — an attempt to be all things to everyone. In that sense, some would argue Home is a more accurate symbol for the new national theatre than even its creators realise.

It is less than three weeks to go before the big day and Vicky Featherstone, the company’s 38-year-old artistic director, is in the Scottish Opera rehearsal rooms in Elmbank Crescent, Glasgow. A lot of people in Scotland’s theatre community probably envy her: the £4m annual budget; the status of the national company. But she also has, perhaps, the most exposed job in Scottish arts. She has 10 shows to oversee immediately, a first year’s programme to organise, and a tiny staff given the NTS’s output.

In addition, she is co-directing an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s terrifying children’s book The Wolves in the Walls. Isn’t she feeling the pressure? “I’m quite good at multitasking,” she says calmly, opening the Tupperware box that contains her lunch.

Much has been made of the fact that the NTS will have no ensemble of its own (apart from the four actors who make up its young company). It will have no central building. A small office in Easterhouse, Glasgow, will contain the administration, while most of the company’s work will be done in collaboration with Scotland’s established theatre companies. While the NTS is expected to have its own artistic vision, it will also, effectively, be helping to fund other Scottish companies.
Never mind Home: does the lack of a home for her company bother Featherstone?

“I don’t think I would have applied for the job if there was a building. Because having a building becomes about the building, it’s never about the work. In terms of funding it’s a millstone round your neck. It would have caused, huge, huge, huge problems.”

If there’s a downside to the NTS’s lack of a building, perhaps, it is that there’s no focal point for the public imagination to lock onto. Philip Howard, the artistic director of Edinburgh’s Traverse theatre, still isn’t convinced and believes that one day the NTS will have a permanent base. “I’m about the only person in Scotland who thinks that if we’re going to have a national theatre, it may as well have its own building. I get looks of daggers when I say that. But a lot of the best work comes from people working together in the same place.”

In truth, though, investment in bricks and mortar was never going to be politically acceptable — especially after the saga of the parliament building. A brief look
outside Scotland seems to justify Featherstone’s talk of millstones. When Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre complex was constructed on London’s South Bank in the 1970s, the estimated cost more than doubled between conception and completion (what does that remind you of?). Even now, Ireland’s national theatre, the Abbey, is convulsed by crisis as it considers moving to a new home, while at the new National Theatre of Catalonia, you could probably stage a whole season of new plays for the cost of cleaning the copious windows.

One of the buzzwords for the NTS, then, is “light-footedness”. In military terms, it’s the light artillery rather than heavy armour. “We can decide to do Tutti Frutti, and we can do a one-person show wandering around Glasgow with 10 audience members,” says Featherstone. “It’s as legitimate for us to do a massive, three-year-in-development co-production with the National Theatre in London or work with a single musician in Shetland.”

Featherstone’s previous job, at the touring company Paines Plough, confirmed that she was one of Britain’s brightest directors. But what she has proved since she took up her new post in November 2004 is that she is also a masterful politician, skilled in leading from the front. She has picked her way around the banana skins and pitfalls unique to the job, hardly putting a foot wrong.

It helps that she is, in many ways, an outsider, born in Surrey, educated for a few years in Alva, Clackmannanshire and then India. She has worked in Scotland, but she comes without the baggage that one of the grand old men of Scottish theatre — a Giles Havergal, Kenny Ireland or Hamish Glen — would have brought to the job.

It’s a sign, perhaps, of Scotland’s increasing cultural maturity, post-devolution, how little opposition there has been to the idea of an Englishwoman taking the top job. “I feel quite confident of my right to do my job without being Scottish. My nationality may have been an issue for some people, but if it was they certainly haven’t said anything to me,” she says.

Perhaps it will become an issue if Featherstone fails to deliver (look what happened to the German-born Scotland football manager Berti Vogts). But she is keen enough to assimilate anyway: talking of bringing up her two children as Scots in Anniesland, where she lives with her husband, a writer for television.

Featherstone can talk the talk. But can she walk the walk? The first year’s programme will inevitably be read as a manifesto. What you might take from it is that there’ll be little time for heritage theatre (no Bridie, no Barrie). Contemporary Scottish writers are well represented. Siobhan Redmond stars in Chris Hannan’s modern classic Elizabeth Gordon Quinn. David Harrower is translating Schiller’s Maria Stuart, while a new Anthony Neilson play (as yet untitled) will debut at the Edinburgh festival, where his The Wonderful World of Dissocia was so successful in 2004.

But the presence of Grid Iron’s Roam — a site-specific piece at Edinburgh airport — makes the point that the NTS isn’t going to be just about the undoubted literary talent at Scotland’s disposal. Gregory Burke’s Black Watch, a piece of verbatim theatre about the regiment, is also a sign that the new theatre isn’t afraid to get political. And the stage version of John Byrne’s television series Tutti Frutti — a co-production with His Majesty’s Theatre Aberdeen — shows that Featherstone recognises the importance of the big crowd-pleaser, though Robbie Coltrane will not reprise his lead role from television.

Of course, many cheerleaders would love to see Hollywood stars such as Coltrane, Ewan McGregor, Dougray Scott and Tilda Swinton return to the Scottish stage. Billy Boyd, who reached a worldwide audience in The Lord of the Rings, is in the Glasgow production of Home; for the Edinburgh version (uncast as yet), the producers have been looking for at least some household names.

So will Scotland’s exiled stars be returning home? In some cases, yes, says Featherstone. But only if they are right for the part: the message is that the NTS is not in the business of celebrity for celebrity’s sake.

Besides, there are other ways of raising a profile and attracting the widest possible audience. Neil Murray — the NTS’s executive director and Featherstone’s right-hand man — says the theatre has already been in talks with BBC Scotland about collaborating and will probably talk to STV too. Touring is high on his list of priorities— not just around Scotland’s regions but internationally. The implication is that a successful NTS will be about more than just plays and players: it will serve as a calling card for Scotland and its culture abroad, just as the RSC and London’s National Theatre do.

That stands to benefit even those who’ve never stepped inside a theatre in their life.

In the honeymoon period before the NTS launch, it can be hard to imagine the rancour once caused by the very idea of a National Theatre of Scotland. Take this letter from a Francis Gallagher of Bellshill, which appeared in The Sunday Times in 1993, just as the notion of the NTS was gaining steam.

“A national theatre would be a waste of money,” he wrote. “It would draw together the worst of all possible worlds. Run by a masonic clique (à la Citizens), churning out socialist pseudo-working class crap (à la 7:84), headed by an extinct volcano (Tom Fleming or John McGrath), all in a language (synthetic Scots or urban demotic Glasgow) that nobody speaks or understands.” They don’t rant like that any more.

Within the theatre world there was suspicion too, as the NTS dream worked its way through a chain of working parties and independent reports. Where would it be based?

Would it suck money away from the established companies? Wasn’t more funding for existing companies more important than creating a new one? Should a national theatre be about new work or preserving the theatrical tradition?

A consensus was reached in 2001, encouraged by a new commitment from the executive. By and large that hard-won sense of common purpose has stuck. But that doesn’t mean
everyone is completely sanguine about the new order or that the fault lines in Scotland’s theatre community have been completely papered over.

The playwright Liz Lochhead was on the new theatre’s steering group, set up in May 2002. She is a supporter of the principle of the national theatre, and was last year appointed one of several NTS associates (alongside the actor Alan Cumming and the Oscar-winning composer Craig Armstrong). But while Lochhead admires Featherstone — “a clever, wonderful, director” — she finds it hard to suppress anxieties about the direction the NTS may take.

One concern is about Home itself. “I can see it ticks a lot of the right boxes politically, but for somebody who lived through the 1960s, it’s no big deal seeing shows in strange places. And there’s a bit of me worries that people coming out, by taxi or whatever, to Easterhouse might smack of poverty tourism.

“What would have excited me more would have been something big and Scottish and wonderful, for example, Edwin Morgan’s Cyrano de Bergerac. But that’s just personal taste. Home might be fabulous. I hope I’m proved wrong.”

Lochhead has another concern. She fears for those theatre companies that might not get the patronage of the new national. Will they find themselves living on scraps?

“Several theatre practitioners young and old who I’ve spoken to have worries,” she says. “I don’t think many people are talking frankly about this because they want to get work from the NTS, just like I do. I’m expressing what they’re afraid to say. I’m not afraid to put my head above the parapet.”

Time will tell whether such concerns are justified. What seems almost inevitable, though, is that the new funding arrangements for the arts recently put in place by the executive will have a huge effect on Scotland’s regional and repertory theatres.

One influential figure on Scotland’s arts scene believes a shake-up is overdue. One implication is that companies who fail to embrace the executive’s concerns about accessibility and education may find themselves frozen out.

Does that mean companies could go to the wall?

“I think that inevitably it will involve casualties, before three years are out,” says the insider, who prefers not to be named. Should that prediction come true, it
will hardly be the National Theatre of Scotland’s fault. But it is unlikely to make Featherstone’s job any easier.

“I know things may get harder politically,” she says. “But when I wake up in the middle of the night — which I do every night at the moment — it’s only ever because I’m worrying about the work.”

She runs her hand over one of the fantastic papier-mâché wolf masks from The Wolves in the Wall. There may be wolves along the road waiting to snap at her. But like Little Red Riding Hood, or the heroes of her own show, it’s a fair bet that she’ll have the last laugh.

“I think the idea of a roving national theatre with no fixed base is probably very sensible. It allows more resources to go where they’re needed — into the work. I think the co-production model can be very fruitful and it’s easy to forget the talent in the regions: Trevor Nunn was at Coventry, Laurence Olivier was at Chichester. I wish it every success.”

Cameron Mackintosh, theatrical impresario

Brian Cox, actor

Where can I see Home?

Aberdeen: A derelict building comes to life. 48 Logie Place, Feb 21-26

Dundee: McManus Galleries turns into a 1950s nightclub. Feb 24-25

Glasgow: Witness a dramatic siege. 25 Soutra Place, Feb 25-26

Wick: Matthew Lenton directs. Caithness Glass Factory, Feb 23-25

East Lothian: A mystery tour starting at Brunton theatre, Feb 23-25

Inverness: Inspired by local families. Arts in Motion Creation Centre, Feb 23-25

Stornoway: Dark secrets in a doll’s house. 14 Church St, Feb 23-25

Dumfries: By Graham Eatough. Loreburn Hall, Feb 23-25

Edinburgh: Children’s view of First Minister’s Questions. Queens Hall, Feb 25

Lerwick: Funny business with fiddlers. NorthLink Ferry, Holmsgarth Terminal, Feb 23-27

See www.nationaltheatrescotland.com