[Robin McAlpine Blog] A place no longer in need of approval or validation

[ALBA-Bot]

A place no longer in need of approval or validation

Artists – what are they like? Their own worst enemies. They just don’t get it. Audience want musical numbers they can sign along to on a girls night out on the town, or whatever. And what do the artists do?

It’s nutso. They put together a play about the rise of fascism in 1930s Scotland. No, not Scotland, one obscure little region of Scotland. No, not even that, just part of a region, a local area. And they create it in broad Scots, dense, no-holds-barred Scots. Not content they don’t even go to an art house theatre. Nope, they tour it round a bunch of little village halls.

It’s got feminism, and class politics and everything – and then they don’t even charge. You sign up, turn up and pay what you think it was worth on the way out the door. And from that and some limited grant funding they intend to pay everyone involved a proper wage. I mean what did they think was going to happen?

Shall I tell you? They sold out every single performance within two weeks. That’s 800 tickets. There were 200 people who didn’t get tickets and asked to be put on a waiting list. Somehow they were just about all accomodated.

That’s a thousand people saw this show, their fourth in three years (if you include their utterly wonderful reading of A Christmas Carol in Scots last year, easily the most enjoyable time I’ve spent watching people dressed in their civis sitting in a semicircle reading from bits of paper). And you know what, people are very generous. Everyone has been paid full rates.

I’ll own up that for a whole host of reasons I’ve hit a hard spot of despondency this week. I don’t even need to list the reasons any more. And I’m struggling to find something positive anywhere. I am trying really hard to resist the retreat into the purely personal. I could just sit around the house watching films with the kids and pretend the world wasn’t happening.

But on Saturday, at a performance of Braw Clan’s The Needle Room, I had the best, most uplifting time. It was great in so many ways and there is so much that it has prompted in my head. You see, the obscure little part of a region that the play was about is my obscure little part of a region. It’s where I grew up.

Actually the play is set in Lanark, but when one of the three protaganists is introduced as ‘the White Craw’, I instantly said to myself ‘oh, she’s from Carnwath’. The White Craws is the nickname for people from Carnwath – one of my closest friends was from there. I was only one of a couple of people at my performance who knew this and it was strangely affirming that my little patch could be worth telling a story about.

I want to believe that we are a rich and diverse Scotland and that we are worth something, not only when we assemble as one behind which ever public sector leader has called us to Glasgow or Edinburgh

And this was what has been on my mind and is the reason I’m writing this (not just to cheer myself up). In fact it was my question at the Q&A afterwards (Braw Clan is big on audience engagement and constantly tell us that we too are part of the ‘Clan’).

What do we do with this? Regional theatre can clearly work. In fact it can clearly work brilliantly. It can engage people with strong, literary tales of where they come from, in the language of the place they come from. It can be as thrilling as I found this, and as almost everyone I’ve ever spoken to who has been at one of their performances was as thrilled as me.

So what do we do? Do we take these works and share them with a wider audience, or do we replicate this everywhere? To put it another way, do we nationalise regional theatre or do we regionalise national theatre?

The answer from the Braw Clan team was unequivocal – they want more people in Scotland to see this work, but they want it to be here. They want people to come here, to Clydesdale, and hear stories about here. It is a wildly admirable sentiment and not as out-there as it seems.

Because from this I started to drift off into a vision of what this would look like. Imagine 20 theatre companies like this all over Scotland, researching and writing stories about what happened here. The Needle Room is part of a trilogy of plays Braw Clan has done which might be loosely considered a ‘women emancipate themselves from the stupidity of small-minded men – and tradition-bound women’.

But they are very specific – one is based on a real visit to Leadhills by Wordsworth and his party. One is based on a true story of a local woman who escaped to the US and made a minor career as a singer and movie star. This one is heavily based around the real history of nascent fascism in this area.

All three were a joy because they were stories about what I consider home, but all three told me loads and loads of things about my home I didn’t know. They use local dialect. As usual, they are universal themes but they are incredibly rooted in place.

And that’s what I’ve been thinking about since. I want to go to Newton Stewart, or Arbroath, or Bowmore, and I want to hear stories from there. I want to believe that we are a rich and diverse Scotland and that we are worth something, not only when we assemble as one behind which ever public sector leader has called us to Glasgow or Edinburgh.

But here’s the truth; I enjoy theatre but I don’t go often. Money, kids, time, competing priorities. It is not generic theatre that I am enjoying, it is specific theatre, local theatre. It feels almost subversive, almost like a rebellion to say ‘this is for us – please come and share it with us, but we’re not coming to you this time’.

We need to escape our mindset that there is a group of gatekeepers in our two big cities whom we must pay homage to before anything of value can be said to exist

And that’s where the shame comes in, because after dwelling on it I realised where my question came from. Despite me being on this website all the time trying to persuade you that Scotland is overly-centralised and turning into a corporate, urban-imagine version of a uni-Scotland which is really only one part of Scotland.

Despite me being convinced that this centralisation is strangling the life out of the country. Despite me having statistics that prove it categorically. Despite all this, still I have been trained to see validation only in Glasgow or Edinburgh. Even I was caught thinking ‘does this count if its only for us?’

This is the truth that is not spoken enough in the Scottish arts scene – it has largely been overtaken by a middle-class ethos of identity. Arts seem now only to explore the ‘journey’ (which is depressingly often ‘spiritual’) of an individual through the lens of some personal identity which, perfunctorily at the end, we are told is actually universal.

I think that there is most certainly a place in the arts for personal exploration, but after a point it turns into utter solipsism. The collective experience is absent. The locally specific feels absent too. We have created a kind of high-brow slop, a repetitive series of moves which sound awfully similar, each about an individual trying to bring you into their personal world.

That’s not what this felt like. It was no less driven by social mission – moreso if anything. When our lead character (spoiler alert) grabs an open razor she is being threatened with and, bleeding, launches into a monologue about how a girl from her social class knows more pain than the well-to-do assailant can imagine, there is a thrill whirls round the theatre. Feminism and class politics as catharsis.

And yet it is not a story of one person we are all expected to internalise as somehow our storie, it feels more like a collective tale we always all belonged to.

Yet this entire article isn’t really about theatre and it isn’t really about Scots language and it isn’t really about then predilections of the governing classes when it comes to art. Really, it is about how much we need to escape our mindset that there is a group of gatekeepers in our two big cities whom we must pay homage to before anything of value can be said to exist.

As the above thoughts clicked into place in my head, I imagine a Scotland entirely without those gatekeepers; local, regional, human, diverse and free. It was an intoxicating image – and I want more of it.

Source: A place no longer in need of approval or validation