Scotland Plays (NHB Modern Plays) E-Book

Various

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A collection of seven plays by Scottish writers, selected and introduced by Philip Howard, artistic director of Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre. A companion volume to the earlier Scot-Free. Contains: Wormwood by Catherine Czerkawska Depicts a family caught up in the Chernobyl disaster. Brothers of Thunder by Ann Marie Di Mambro A young, HIV-positive man takes refuge with a Catholic priest. Passing Places by Stephen Greenhorn A road movie for the stage. One Way Street by David Greig A one-man show set in Berlin. Quelques Fleurs by Liz Lochhead A short two-hander about a childless couple. One Good Beating by Linda McLean A blackly comic play about two siblings who take revenge on their bullying father. Lazybed by Iain Crichton Smith A man refuses to get out of bed one morning.

Leseprobe

SCOTLAND PLAYS

CATHERINE CZERKAWSKA    WORMWOOD

ANN MARIE DI MAMBRO    BROTHERS OF THUNDER

STEPHEN GREENHORN    PASSING PLACES

DAVID GREIG    ONE WAY STREET

LIZ LOCHHEAD    QUELQUES FLEURS

LINDA McLEAN    ONE GOOD BEATING

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH    LAZYBED

Selected and introduced by Philip Howard

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction by Philip Howard

WORMWOOD

Catherine Czerkawska

BROTHERS OF THUNDER

Ann Marie Di Mambro

PASSING PLACES

Stephen Greenhorn

ONE WAY STREET

David Greig

QUELQUES FLEURS

Liz Lochhead

ONE GOOD BEATING

Linda McLean

LAZYBED

Iain Crichton Smith

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

This new collection of plays testifies to Scotland as a nation of many parts, and to Scotland’s playwrights as significant players in what is widely perceived as the current cultural confidence at the end of the century. All the playwrights in this volume share a rigorous determination to avoid being seen as insular or inward-looking, preferring instead to pursue wider concerns. And while it is notoriously foolish to attempt to identify a Golden Age in a nation’s playwriting, it is hard not to connect the climate of confidence with that of political and constitutional change as the country acquires its own Parliament.

Scotland’s contemporary playwrights have a chameleon-like knack of reinventing themselves in line with cultural and political shifts. They are a robust force who remain phlegmatic in the face of a permanent series of funding crises in Scottish theatre (they are steadfastly un-self-pitying). They find their influences from far and wide – as likely from North America (the Canada/Scotland sympathy is well documented) or Europe as from England. They are always open to dramatic and literary innovations, while being fiercely protective of three distinctively Scottish dramatic traditions: the atavistic, the demotic and the vaudevillian. They share with contemporary English playwrights an impressively agile virtuosity in straddling the personal and the political – the authors represented in this volume are exemplary in this respect.

Perhaps it is the rich diversity of language and regional variation within Scotland which contributes to the writers’ fascination with dramatic language: they are certainly as interested in this as they are in form or storytelling. However, it must be said that this volume of plays contains a greater variety of dramatic voices and regional influences than it does of Scotland’s distinct languages: neither Doric nor Lallans are represented here – which is a reflection of the fact that contemporary playwrights are more likely to use the language of, say, David Mamet than a pure, uneroded Scots. This should not belie the current renascence of Gaelic playwriting, which has followed increased investment in Gaelic arts and television since the early 1990’s.

The strength of the written text in Scottish theatre (at least in the cities and Lowlands of Scotland: the oral tradition of the Highlands being quite distinct) has never been dented by followers of fashion in physical theatre. Instead, there have been a number of young theatre companies, working principally outwith theatre buildings, who have explored new ways of working with text: two such companies are KtC and Suspect Culture (represented in this volume by One Way Street) – both of them working with playwrights, but using other theatre artists to create a weave of authorial voices. Another discernible trend is the appetite which the playwrights share to develop their texts with theatre companies and thus work collaboratively.

The plays in this collection show a breadth of subject-matter which stretches far beyond the borders of Scotland – maybe the first benchmark of confidence among a nation’s playwrights. Wormwood by Catherine Czerkawska (Traverse, 1997) was written in response to the tenth anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl, in the Ukraine, on 26 April 1986. The play is based on meticulous research into the events which led up to the catastrophe, including the testimony of survivors and victims; but it is fuelled throughout by the quiet anger of the playwright herself who lives and works in Ayrshire, a part of Scotland affected by the radioactive cloud which spread westwards over Europe. Czerkawska, pregnant at the time, describes this as ‘a great force coming towards us which we could do nothing about’.

Wormwood avoids anti-nuclear hectoring by focusing sharply on the flawed logic in the human design behind safety systems; Czerkawska is fascinated by the the potential for disaster in a nuclear environment ‘given a particular set of demands on human fallibility’. The setting of the play is Pripyat, the workers’ dormitory town adjacent to the Chernobyl plant – but also a moment frozen in time through which the characters move backward and forward. Czerkawska skilfully interweaves the personal and the political: she identifies the good fortune felt by workers employed at the plant, and the irony of Kiev, the centre of power, demanding a surge of electricity on the night of the disaster. More importantly, she homes in on the experience of one family through the eyes of Natalia, a scientist and the family’s only survivor, and through Artemis, a contemporary deus ex machina. The real achievement of the play is twofold: first, the chain of events at Chernobyl finds dramatic expression in the conflict between the characters; and, secondly, Czerkawska finds a rare poetry in the science, much of it taken from oral testimony: the heavy metallic taste on Tanya’s tongue, the sheer beauty of the nuclear fire, the swaying of the flames, the dragon.

Ann Marie Di Mambro’s Brothers of Thunder (Traverse, 1994) avoids classification as simply an ‘AIDS play’ or ‘Gay Play’ by submerging the issues in strong, steadfast characterisation and a passionate insistence on themes of reconciliation and forgiveness. Within her basic setting of church and bedroom, Di Mambro keeps a shrewd eye on the theatrical possibilities of the church as an auditorium and, conversely, the audience as congregation. She recognises the liturgy and ritual of the Roman Catholic Church as an ideal framework in which to examine some of the thornier questions of sexuality and personal responsibility common to cleric and layman alike.

James (the priest) and John (the young man dying of an AIDS-related illness) twist and turn as the biblical ‘brothers of thunder’ of the title, before Di Mambro deliberately and boldly injects Simon (a Californian playboy), virus-like, into their hermetically sealed world – and so creating the unlikeliest of trinities. Part of the play’s success is that, like Czerkawska’s Wormwood, the anger at its heart is so carefully controlled that its incisiveness is all the more effective. When the play was revived in Glasgow eighteen months after its Traverse premiere, one critic opined that it seemed more timely now, which was, it seemed to me, a curiously back-handed way of recognising that Di Mambro had been ahead of her time all along.

Passing Places by Stephen Greenhorn (Traverse, 1997) is, in many ways, the ultimate Scotland Play. In telling his story of two young lads from Motherwell who escape the psychopathic Binks and little town blues, and discover much else in the Highlands, Greenhorn achieves a seamless dissection of Scotland and all the differing nations therein. Subtitled ‘a road movie for the stage’, the play combines the classic filmic form with what is a classic Scottish journey: from the industrialised, maligned, nominally powerful Central Belt to the supposed wilderness and Brigadoon atmosphere of the Highlands. In a Scottish road movie, the Going West of the American Dream is, of course, replaced by a Going North; the surfing ‘paradise’ of Thurso becomes a new ultima Thule.

Alex and Brian discover two important things early in their journey, about Scotland and about themselves: first, it’s a bigger and more disparate country than they had bargained for. They visit Skye, where you’re as likely to find a Canadian as a Scot; they encounter Ukrainian as well as Gaelic; on the same day as Alex sits on the gable end of a ruined croft, they pass Dounreay nuclear power station (Scotland’s own ‘radioactive dustbin’) and meet a man on the far north coast who works for a Californian company via computer: the Electric Croft. Secondly, and with even more significance for the play’s emotional heart, it takes each of them the length of the play to stop feeling like ‘the wrong person in the wrong place’. Constantly bemused by the seething mix of nationalities and influences in the Highlands, and his own sense of dislocation in general, Alex complains of feeling like a foreigner in his own country, and compares himself and Brian to the mountains of Sutherland: he feels they are nothing to do with anything and wonders how they got there in the first place.

Along the way, the boys’ rite of passage is drawn deftly and movingly. Most of the characters are limited in their ambitions: Binks wants to exchange Lanarkshire for Hawaii, but he’ll still be drinking Buckie. Brian imagines seventeen words for dogshit in Motherwell, while Alex maintains that ‘beautiful’ is not a word he can say out loud. Behind the banter, the play is as shy of overt, self-advertising emotion as Alex is himself, but the undertow is all the more heartfelt. Greenhorn roots the boys’ yearning in their direct experience of boredom and hardship (which gives the play its grounding), without ever dulling the sheer, exuberant comedy. The familiar gritty realism of the boys’ dilemma is never portentous, and so, as (in true road movie style) the journey refuses to end but, rather, heads ever further north, the emotion is all the more unexpected.

One Way Street by David Greig (Suspect Culture, 1995) is another play which avoids wearing its heart on its sleeve, rendering its emotional impact all the more surprising. If the germ of the play is the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s insistence that the story of his life should be a street map – more a geography than a biography – then the text, as devised by collaborative company Suspect Culture, presents a literal and metaphorical journey through East Berlin as the anti-hero John Flannery writes his anarchic travelogue: through the historical layers of this city, and indeed through his life. Greig creates a young everyman for his own generation, who flees his suffocatingly silent family in Lancashire, a family where ‘words decay’, to become a writer. But this writer cannot avoid tainting his travelogue with his own anxieties and anger as the journey through Berlin turns increasingly into a post mortem of his fractious affair with Greta, a young German woman.

Flannery’s flight from Burnley to Berlin mirrors Greig’s own fascination with post-War Europe: Greta is an East Berliner, who is steeped in a culture where friends and relations are always leaving for the West (for her, Friedrichstrasse Station is a ‘hall of tears’), who knows all about living at a crossroads of Europe; Flannery and Greta fall in love during a demonstration to protect squatters on the point of eviction, and through her he becomes, briefly, a revolutionary manqué. This story of a singularly ordinary Englishman thrust into the melting pot of Europe is told by a variety of characters, but only one performer, and bears all the hallmarks of the pioneering collaborative approach to text by Greig and his principle Suspect Culture partner, Graham Eatough.

Quelques Fleurs by Liz Lochhead (Nippy Sweeties, 1991), like One Way Street, has a monologue format, but two characters, compulsive shopper Verena and offshore oilman husband Derek. It is a ‘talking heads’ play which remains resolutely dramatic through a skilful narrative interplay between the two characters: Verena moving forward in time from Christmas to Christmas as Derek moves backwards. Verena is not new to Quelques Fleurs: she was originally written for actor Siobhan Redmond (a long-term collaborator of Lochhead’s), and then honed to monologue perfection in Lochhead’s own performance poetry (viz. True Confessions and New Clichés, Polygon 1985), the woman who ‘basically’ found herself listening to the central heating turning itself on and off, and who now finds dramatic expression in a play. Quelques Fleurs has been produced in a number of versions while Lochhead developed the characters, but this published text is the final one.

Lochhead finds an extraordinary kind of poetry in Verena’s material obsessions: she is a doyenne of designer Christmas trees (‘less is more’), but can’t abide real ones because of pine-needle-drop. Verena’s patter sails along, peppered with a liturgy of brand names and domestic details, plus hilarious recreations of her family and friends (even shopping with Moira McVitie on the fateful day), while Derek (a mere offstage character in the original Verena monologues) drinks himself into oblivion on the Aberdeen-Glasgow train – until eventually their dual time-frames collide. Lochhead illustrates a very particular kind of emptiness while at the same time remaining unfailingly hilarious, before she wrongfoots us at the end.

One Good Beating by Linda McLean (Traverse 1996) has the rare virtue of knowing its own length and yet, within thirty-five minutes, conjures up a remarkably vivid picture of one merciless family and three lives. The play belongs to a Scottish vernacular tradition epitomised in this century by Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep, but, in this case, stripped bare of every domestic excrescence barring tea, and plonked inside and outside a coal shed. The jagged, athletic dialogue contains a dense clutch of emotions which leave a bigger dent than a play thrice its length.

The character of Murdo in Lazybed by Iain Crichton Smith (Traverse, 1997) is, like Liz Lochhead’s Verena, a development from an earlier creation of the author’s, notably in his collection of stories Thoughts of Murdo (Balnain 1993). Lazybed is the story of a man who cannot or will not get out of bed one morning, for ‘metaphysical reasons’: the impotence of the Will. The play is steeped in the culture and imagery of Scotland’s Gàidhealtachd: Crichton Smith was born on the Isle of Lewis in 1928, with Gaelic as his first language. This incarnation of Murdo owes something to Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859), whose title character similarly prefers to stay in bed, from which he holds court to a panoply of Russian archetypes. Both are anti-enterprise figures in their way – Oblomov, the estate-owner, is impossibly ignorant of the modern needs of his rural tenants, while Murdo, the crofter, cannot wield a spade in an age of toryism and spiritual vapidity. The difference, of course, is that Murdo is ‘metaphysical’ while Oblomov is slothful.

Crichton Smith’s Murdo is a spirited cross between a humanist everyman and an absurdist autobiography, though the dramatic character is much less cartoonish than in the book. Behind Murdo’s retiral to bed, philosophical investigations and irritable contretemps, there is depression and breakdown, but Crichton Smith renders this resolutely comic and, along the way, allows himself several well-aimed assaults (always shrewd but never spiteful) at the ridiculousnesses of modern life. Many familiar pre-occupations from Crichton Smith’s œuvre are infused in the play: the deep mother-son bond, mistrust of the intellectual, and belated, transcending discovery of love and marriage (Murdo learns to accept life through his encounter with Death). Similarly, his status as one of Scotland’s great twentieth-century poets is well evidenced by the signature images of the play: from the blue vase – a sort of mock-philosophical paradigm – to the mouse and the owl (‘Nature red in tooth and claw’).

The publication of these seven plays follows a recent campaign to ‘re-brand’ Scotland in marketing terms, a campaign to investigate what the country means to the wider world – was this a chance to question the Brigadoon image so relentlessly peddled by tourist boards to international visitors? The culmination was a public ceremony at Edinburgh Castle at which a new logo (Scotland the Brand) was unveiled – in a tartan swirl. So Scotland is now a trademark as well as a small Northern European country. These seven playwrights say more about Scotland, and with greater value, than a new tartan logo, even if they do not command quite the same fee. Scotland’s writers remain its best weapon against such kitsch – and the Traverse will continue to pursue vigorously both its role as Scotland’s new writing theatre, and its dedication to furthering the climate of confidence for playwrights in Scotland.

Philip HowardTraverse Theatre, May 1998

WORMWOOD

Catherine Czerkawska

Catherine Czerkawska was born in Leeds of Polish/lrish/English parentage, moved to Scotland as a child, and studied at the Universities of Edinburgh and Leeds.

Her theatre plays include Heroes and Others (Scottish Theatre Company) and Wormwood (Traverse), and her published poetry includes White Boats (with Andy Greig) and A Book of Men (Akros) which won an Arts Council New Writing Award.

Her radio work includes: O Flower of Scotland (winner of Pye Award), Bonnie Blue Hen (winner of Scottish Radio Industries Club Award); for Radio 4: The Peggers and the Creelers, Running Before the Wind, The Curiosity Cabinet. For television: Shadow of the Stone (STV) and Strathblair. Her books include: Fisherfolk of Carrick, Shadow of the Stone, The Golden Apple.

She is currently under commission to the Traverse for The Pebble House.

For my dear dad,JULIAN WLADYSLAW CZERKAWSKI1926-1995a scientist who knew how to imagine

Wormwood was first performed at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh on 16 May 1997, with the following cast:

ARTEMIS, youthful though not necessarily young

Forbes Masson

NATALIA, a young science graduate

Meg Fraser

VIKTOR, an engineer, Natalia’s fiancé

Stephen Clyde

STEFAN, a fire-fighter. Older than Viktor

Liam Brennan

TANYA, his wife and Natalia’s older sister. A schoolteacher

Anne Marie Timoney

ANTON, Stefan and Tanya’s only son. Aged 12 or 13, he is mature for his years.

Anthony O’Donnell

Directed by    Philip HowardDesigned by    Angela DaviesLighting designed by    Renny RobertsonAssistant director    Rosy BarnesMusic by    Jon Beales

It would be suitable if all the characters spoke with Scots accents, rather than assuming some kind of RP. It is worth bearing in mind that these are Ukrainians, and their whole demeanour should have a certain energy – overlain also with a caution because of the political situation in which they find themselves. But above all they should not sound too English.

Many thanks are due to Philip Howard, the actors and everyone else involved in this production – all of them for so much invaluable help, collaboration and advice, and to family and friends who were prepared to talk and to listen. Thanks, also, to all at the Traverse for nurturing the play, and supporting the playwright, especially Ella Wildridge, John Tiffany and the actors who took part in script workshops.

ACT ONE

The stage is very light and bright. Some years have passed since the Chernobyl disaster, and we are in the town called Pripyat, which was built close to the plant, for the convenience of the workers. It was, in many senses, a model town: a good place to live.

The set should suggest – perhaps – a children’s playground, with swings, miniature roundabout, seesaw, etc. There are wooden park benches at the rear of the stage, and to either side. Perhaps too a picnic table which could be moved and used as necessary. There may be scattered toys: a trike, a doll, a football etc.

There is an air of decay and desolation about the whole place, emphasised by the almost dazzling light. This is not a place that has suffered destruction so much as total abandonment. To quote from an eyewitness account describing Pripyat, five years after the disaster: ‘Not a window was broken. The paint on the doors had begun to fade, but in the years since they were last hurriedly closed, none had been damaged. In the fairground, a Ferris Wheel stood motionless, and red and blue dodgem cars were scattered across the floor as though the electricity had only just been turned off.’

The whole place should have the sinister air of a moment frozen in time.

ANTON enters. He is a boy of about thirteen: tall, quite mature looking but with the occasional gesture of childhood still lingering about his actions, his speech. He wanders about, as though slightly confused about where he is and why. There should be a certain detachment about him. He finds the football and begins to fool about with it, hesitantly at first, and then with more surety and enjoyment.

ARTEMIS enters and kicks the ball back to ANTON. ANTON stops, picks up the ball and watches him, clutching it close to his chest.

ARTEMIS is thin, anonymous, and smooth. He should have something of the precise, physical and yet faintly menacing air of a conjuror. At this point the audience should have no idea who he is.

ANTON wanders away, still preoccupied, still holding the football, giving it the occasional bounce, glancing back at ARTEMIS. ARTEMIS sits down on one of the benches, takes out a cigarette and lights it, blowing out the smoke luxuriously.

NATALIA enters. She is a woman in her early thirties, smartly but simply dressed. She looks around her at the empty playground and then approaches ARTEMIS, surprised to see him.

ARTEMIS. Excuse me . . .

NATALIA (coming over to him, but unsure of herself). Good morning . . .

ARTEMIS. Can I help you?

NATALIA. Are you one of our party?

ARTEMIS (amused). Your party? What party would that be?

NATALIA. We’re meant to be going in today . . .

ARTEMIS. Ah, that party. No. Not me.

NATALIA. You must be one of the scientists. Aren’t you? I mean nobody else would . . . (At a loss.) Why are you here then?

ARTEMIS. So you’re going in are you?

NATALIA. I think so. At least, I thought so . . .

ARTEMIS. But now you’re not so sure.

NATALIA. I suppose I’ll have to go in. I can’t change my mind now.

ARTEMIS. Won’t it be dangerous? For a young woman like you . . .