Abstract
In 1969 a young, Edinburgh-born theatre director by the name of Giles Havergal was appointed as artistic director of Glasgow’s major repertory playhouse, the Citizens Theatre. Within just a few years (as we will see in Chap. 5), he and his two fellow pioneer directors, Philip Prowse, and Robert David MacDonald, had transformed the Citizens into a powerhouse of European Modernist aesthetics. Scottish theatre had, of course, seen Modernist plays on its stages before, but no one hitherto had successfully infused theatre practice in Scotland with the kind of adventurous experimentation that had characterised the early-twentieth-century European avant-garde. The impact on Scottish theatre and society was immense, and continues to be seen and felt to this day.
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Notes
- 1.
By which, crucially, I mean not a rebirth of a halcyon period in Scottish drama, but the sudden flourishing in Scotland of the modern, continental classicism of European Modernism some seventy-three years after the premiere (in 1896) of French playwright Alfred Jarry’s early-Modernist masterpiece Ubu Roi.
- 2.
Anna Bronovitskaya, ‘European Modernism’, from website of the Narkomfin Foundation: narkomfin.ru/Eng/Architecture/Modernism.aspx (accessed 15/6/2013).
- 3.
“The most important Italian avant-garde art movement of the twentieth century, Futurism celebrated advanced technology and urban modernity[…] Their enthusiasm for modernity and the machine ultimately led them to celebrate the arrival of the First World War. By its end the group was largely spent as an important avant-garde, though it continued through the 1920s, and, during that time several of its members went on to embrace Fascism, making Futurism the only twentieth century avant-garde to have embraced far right politics.” Encyclopaedia entry, The Art Story website: www.theartstory.org/movement-futurism.htm (accessed 23/1/2017).
- 4.
“Constructivism was the last and most influential modern art movement to flourish in Russia in the 20th century. It evolved just as the Bolsheviks came to power in the October Revolution of 1917, and initially it acted as a lightning rod for the hopes and ideas of many of the most advanced Russian artists who supported the revolution’s goals. It borrowed ideas from Cubism, Suprematism and Futurism, but at its heart was an entirely new approach to making objects, one which sought to abolish the traditional artistic concern with composition, and replace it with ‘construction’.” Encyclopaedia entry, The Art Story website: www.theartstory.org/movement-constructivism.htm (accessed 23/1/2017).
- 5.
“Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907/08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque who aimed to bring different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted.” Tate galleries website: www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/c/cubism (accessed 23/1/2017).
- 6.
“Dada was an artistic and literary movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland. It arose as a reaction to World War I and the nationalism that many thought had led to the war. Influenced by other avant-garde movements[…] its output was wildly diverse, ranging from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture, painting, and collage. Dada’s aesthetic [was] marked by its mockery of materialistic and nationalistic attitudes.” Encyclopaedia entry, The Art Story website: www.theartstory.org/movement-dada.htm (accessed 23/1/2017).
- 7.
“[Emerging in the early twentieth century] [t]he Surrealist artists sought to channel the unconscious as a means to unlock the power of the imagination. Disdaining rationalism and literary realism, and powerfully influenced by psychoanalysis, the Surrealists believed the rational mind repressed the power of the imagination, weighting it down with taboos. Influenced also by Karl Marx, they hoped that the psyche had the power to reveal the contradictions in the everyday world and spur on revolution.” Encyclopaedia entry, The Art Story website: www.theartstory.org/movement-surrealism.htm (accessed 23/1/2017).
- 8.
A philosophical and cultural movement connected to Existentialism, widely seen to have originated in the early twentieth century with the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it: “[Camus’s] philosophy of the absurd has left us with a striking image of the human fate: Sisyphus endlessly pushing his rock up the mountain only to see it roll back down each time he gains the top”: plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus (accessed 23/1/2017). The concept is applied to playwrights such as Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett in theatre critic Martin Esslin’s influential 1960 essay ‘Theatre of the Absurd’.
- 9.
Bartók quoted in Peter Laki (ed.), Bartók and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 18.
- 10.
The Spanish painter (1881–1973) who would become the most famous of the Cubist artists. His paintings include Guernica (1937) a scream of outrage against the bombing of the Basque town of the art work’s title by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the Spanish Civil War.
- 11.
Austrian avant-garde composer (1874–1951) widely considered to be the father of Modernist classical music. Despised by the Nazis because he was Jewish and also on account of his musical dissonance (the Nazis labelled his work “degenerate music”), he sought refuge in the United States in 1934.
- 12.
The name given to the group of composers, most famously Alban Berg, who came under the influence of Schoenberg during the years in which he lived and taught, sporadically, in Vienna (1903 and 1925).
- 13.
The Listening Service: Breaking Free, The Second Viennese School, BBC Radio 3, 1/1/2017: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b086t9mw (accessed 1/1/2017).
- 14.
Howard Barker, ‘Fortynine asides for a tragic theatre’, in his collection of theatre theory Arguments for a Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 19.
- 15.
Service, The Listening Service.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Schoenberg quoted in Malcolm MacDonald, Schoenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 9–10.
- 18.
Spanish Cubist painter (1887–1927) who worked with Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in Paris.
- 19.
Quoted on The Art Story website: www.theartstory.org/artist-gris-juan.htm (accessed 23/1/2017).
- 20.
Which this book locates in 1969, with the arrival of Giles Havergal as artistic director of the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. As we will see in Chap. 2 of this volume and in Chap. 3, works of European Modernism appeared on the Scottish stage prior to this, but, arguably, it was not until Havergal’s arrival that a real revolution in the aesthetic practice of Scottish theatre really began.
- 21.
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), p. 6.
- 22.
Scottish playwright and, since 2016, artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh. For more on Greig see Chap. 5 of this book.
- 23.
David Greig, ‘A tyrant for all time’, The Guardian (London, 28/4/2003): www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/apr/28/theatre.artsfeatures (accessed 1/1/2017).
- 24.
Self-defined as an “interactive performance company”, Mischief La-Bas was founded in Glasgow in 1992 by the late Ian Smith and, his wife, Angie Dight. Following Smith’s death in 2014, Dight continued to lead the company as artistic director.
- 25.
A work, made in collaboration with a variety of artists in a number of art forms (ranging from street theatre to film and cabaret). Performed, in December 2017, in the Trongate area of Glasgow city centre (including in the world’s oldest surviving music hall theatre, the Britannia Panopticon), the show explored, in the words of Mischief La-Bas, “the sinister side of nursery rhymes”.
- 26.
Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse and Robert David MacDonald, who collaborated at the Glasgow playhouse during Havergal’s time as artistic director between 1969 and 2003. The opening line of the British Theatre Guide’s obituary for MacDonald (in 2004) is typical of the general and accepted description of the three men as the “triumvirate”: www.britishtheatreguide.info/news/RDM.htm (accessed 16/5/2013).
- 27.
A fact that numerous commentators attribute to the hostility towards his work among the London critical and theatrical establishment. I explore this idea in the essay, ‘Barker, criticism and the philosophy of the “Art of Theatre”’, in Howard Barker’s Art of Theatre, David Ian Rabey and Sarah Goldingay (eds.) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 94–101.
- 28.
See Christine Kiehl’s essay, ‘Staging Barker in France 2009’, in Rabey and Goldingay (2013), pp. 105–114, which considers both the general reverence for, and prominence of, Barker’s theatre in France and the season of four Barker plays that was presented at the Odéon theatre in Paris in 2009.
- 29.
Barker’s Victory was directed to great critical acclaim by the late Kenny Ireland (who had been a founding member of, and actor and director for, Barker’s company The Wrestling School) at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh in 2002. In 2006 Mark Coleman directed a production of the Barker play A Hard Heart for Strathclyde Theatre Group in Glasgow, and received many critical plaudits. Perhaps even more significantly, there have been no fewer than fourteen Barker productions at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (previously Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama): see my interview with Professor Hugh Hodgart, Director of Drama, Dance, Production and Film at the RCS, ‘Staging Barker at Scotland’s Conservatoire’, in Howard Barker’s Theatre, James Reynolds and Andy W. Smith (eds.) (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 215–224.
- 30.
In addition to directing his multiple award-winning production of Barker’s Scenes from a Execution at Dundee Rep in 2003, Hill also commissioned a Citizens Theatre Company production of the dramatist’s Lot and His God, directed by Debbie Hannan, in 2015.
- 31.
See Chap. 5 of this volume.
- 32.
Avant-garde movement in the arts that began at Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich during the First World War. See footnote above in this chapter.
- 33.
Italian playwright (1867–1936), winner of the Nobel Prize for literature (1934), and author, most famously, of Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921).
- 34.
Romanian dramatist (1909–1994) often referred to as an “Absurdist” writer. His plays include The Chairs (1952) and Rhinoceros (1959).
- 35.
Irish dramatist, poet and novelist (1906–1989). He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. His plays include Waiting for Godot (1952) and Footfalls (1976).
- 36.
English playwright and poet (1930–2008). Pinter became a Nobel laureate in 2005. His plays include The Homecoming (1964) and No Man’s Land (1975).
- 37.
Grotowski (1933–99), influential theatremaker and theorist (notably as author of the book Towards a Poor Theatre) and a major figure in the development of the European theatrical avant-garde in the twentieth century.
- 38.
Avra Sidiropoulou, Authoring Performance: The Director in Contemporary Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 11.
- 39.
Kate Ince credits François Truffaut with “launching the polemic” on auteurism in the 1950s. Introduction to Kate Ince (ed.), Five directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 1.
- 40.
The Encyclopedia Britannica locates the beginning of auteur theory in French film criticism in the 1940s. Encyclopedia Britannica online: britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/44609/auteur-theory (accessed 12/6/2014).
- 41.
Ince, p. 3.
- 42.
Encyclopedia Britannica.
- 43.
Fellini’s position as an auteur is the subject of the book-length study: John C. Stubbs, Federico Fellini as Auteur: seven aspects of his films (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006).
- 44.
Nick James, ‘Auteurism vs Bureaucracy’, Sight and Sound (London: British Film Institute, 19/9, September 2009), p. 5.
- 45.
Quoted in James Chapman, Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), p. 114.
- 46.
An influential early-Modernist, avant-garde French dramatist, Jarry (1873–1907) is the author of César-Antéchrist (1895) and Ubu Roi (1896).
- 47.
Sidiropoulou, pp. 13–14.
- 48.
Namely, to take a few examples, Cologne (Germany), Paris (France), Hamburg (Germany) and, in the case of his 2013 production of Daniil Kharms’ The Old Woman, Manchester (England) and Spoleto (Italy). See Alisa Solomon, ‘Robert Wilson’, in Martin Banham (ed.), The Cambridge Guide to Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 [1988]), p. 1202, and Stuart Jeffries’s interview with Willem Dafoe, ‘Don’t make this into a crackpot profile please’ (London: Guardian website, 16/6/2013): guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jun/16/willem-dafoe-dont-make-crackpot-profile-please (accessed 6/2/2017).
- 49.
Jeffries, ibid.
- 50.
Michael Billington, ‘D is for Director’s Theatre’, The Guardian (London: 3/1/2012): guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/jan/03/d-director-s-theatre-modern-drama (accessed 17/6/2013).
- 51.
Interestingly, in the context of Howard Barker’s comment, which appears as the epigraph to this volume, that “Scotland [is] a European country, and England [is], unfortunately, not one”, Brook selected the Tramway arts venue in Glasgow as his preferred UK venue following his departure from England for France. Brook’s relationship with Tramway is outlined in my article ‘Peter Brook takes spiritual journey back to Scotland’ (Glasgow: Sunday Herald, 29/3/2010): http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/stage-visual-arts/peter-brook-takes-spiritual-journey-back-to-scotland-1.1017054 (accessed 17/6/2013).
- 52.
Billington, ‘D is for Director’s Theatre’.
- 53.
The 2012 production of Barker’s play Scenes From an Execution at the National Theatre in London was the first time the company had staged his work. This despite high-profile productions and festivals of his theatre in such countries as Australia, Finland, France, Portugal, Slovenia and the United States.
- 54.
Barker in Mark Brown (ed.), p. 199.
- 55.
Such as “metrosexuality” and a more liberal attitude to sexual expression and the naked body.
- 56.
Announcement of Hill’s appointment at the Citizens, (London: Daily Telegraph website, 18/3/2011): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-news/8391086/Dominic-Hill-is-announced-as-Artistic-Director-of-Glasgows-Citizens-Theatre.html (accessed 17/6/2014).
- 57.
See Chap. 5 of this book.
- 58.
Critic Brian Logan refers to John McGrath, the founding artistic director of both the 7:84 England and 7:84 Scotland theatre companies as “Britain’s Brecht” (London: The Guardian website, 15/5/2002): http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2002/may/15/artsfeatures (accessed 29/6/2014).
- 59.
Trish Reid, Theatre and Scotland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 10–13.
- 60.
Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’, in John Willett (ed.), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), p. 37.
- 61.
Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London: Verso, 1998), p. 3.
- 62.
Brecht, p. 37.
- 63.
Brecht, p. 37.
- 64.
Benjamin, p. 4.
- 65.
Eric Bentley, The Brecht Commentaries (New York: Grove Press, 1987), pp. 59–63.
- 66.
Ibid., p. 60.
- 67.
Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children (London: Methuen, 1996), p. 108.
- 68.
Bentley, p. 59.
- 69.
See Chap. 3 of this volume.
- 70.
Phyllis Hartnoll, The Theatre: A Concise History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), p. 240.
- 71.
From the website of the Scottish Theatre Archive: http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/STA/search/resultspe.cfm?NID=1786&EID=&DID=&AID= (accessed 29/11/2013).
- 72.
The Scottish Theatre Archive has no record of the year of the Pitlochry production of Señora Carrar’s Rifles. The National Library of Scotland’s theatre programmes archive indicates that it took place in 1965: www.nls.uk/collections/british/theatres/theatre.cfm?startRow=121&T=75 (accessed 29/11/2013).
- 73.
In 1967, the Citizens staged two distinct Brecht productions: The Visions of Simone Machard (in February and March) and the UK premiere of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (performed at the Glasgow theatre in September and October, before transferring to the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh). The latter, which was directed by Michael Blakemore, starred Steven Berkoff and Leonard Rossiter.
- 74.
Interestingly, this production was directed by the above named theatre auteur Robert Sturua.
- 75.
7:84 toured with a production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 1991. The production marked the professional debut of the actor David Tennant. See davidtennanttheatre.webs.com/resistiblerisearturo.htm and team-tennant.com/interview/id106.html (both accessed 29/11/2013).
- 76.
See National Theatre of Scotland webpage about the actor: nationaltheatrescotland.com/content/default.asp?page=s545_6 (accessed 16/6/2014).
- 77.
See Chap. 4 of this book.
- 78.
Established in 2002 by theatremakers Ian Cameron and Tim Licata: plutotlavie.org.uk (accessed 16/6/2014).
- 79.
Banham (ed.), p. 634.
- 80.
Simon Murray, Jacques Lecoq (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 103.
- 81.
Ibid., p. 103.
- 82.
Franc Chamberlain and Ralph Yarrow, Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 4.
- 83.
Jacques Lecoq, Theatre of Movement and Gesture (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 126.
- 84.
In the interviews in Chap. 5 below, playwrights Zinnie Harris, David Harrower and Anthony Neilson, whilst, to varying degrees, accepting the key premises of this book, talk interestingly about their work evolving from a personal artistic drive, rather than a conscious, conceptual reference to the aesthetics and theories of Modernism.
- 85.
Barker in Brown, p. 196.
- 86.
Ibid., p. 197.
- 87.
Asked if he is offended when people connect his work to Modernism, he replies, “Not at all, as I don’t understand it.” Ibid., p. 197.
- 88.
“In an artist like Kafka, I sense a predecessor,” he says. Ibid., p. 197.
- 89.
“I love Bartók”, he comments, “I try to write the way he composes.” Ibid., p. 170.
- 90.
An artist acclaimed for his writing and reviled for his fascism and anti-Semitism, who is described by Barker as “an outright collaborator with the Nazis, a racist and a right-winger[…] but an incredible writer, a brilliant writer.” Ibid., p. 152.
- 91.
Barker talks about his admiration for these four poets in an interview with Nick Hobbes published in the programme for Dundee Rep’s production of his play Scenes From an Execution in 2004, and re-published on the website of Barker’s theatre company The Wrestling School: thewrestlingschool.co.uk/twspages/barker.html (accessed 20/12/2016).
- 92.
See note on postmodernism later in this chapter.
- 93.
Like the Portuguese Modernist poet Fernando Pessoa, who, in addition to writing under his own name, wrote under four heteronyms,* each of which had his own biography and writing style, Barker has worked under heteronyms in numerous roles, including photographic artist, biographer, theatre designer and theatre composer. *See Poems of Fernando Pessoa, edited by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998), p. 3, pp. 7–8 (on Alberto Caeiro), pp. 35–36 (on Álvaro de Campos), pp. 125–126 (on Ricardo Reis) and p. 209 (on Bernardo Soares).
- 94.
Andy W. Smith, ‘The Photographic Practice of Howard Barker’, in James Reynolds and Andy W. Smith (eds.), Howard Barker’s Theatre (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 110.
- 95.
Karoline Gritzner, ‘(Post)Modern Subjectivity and the New Expressionism: Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, and Forced Entertainment’, Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 18 (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 2008).
- 96.
Elisabeth Angel-Perez, ‘Reinventing “grand narratives”: Barker’s challenge to postmodernism’, in Rabey and Goldingay, p. 39.
- 97.
Such as in the flight of a twentieth-century jet fighter plane over a nominally medieval situation in The Castle and the sudden arrival of a body of water, from which Chekhov emerges, in (Uncle) Vanya.
- 98.
His radical reimaginings of events within the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, in Victory, or the aftermath of the Nuremberg trials in 1945–1946, in Found in the Ground.
- 99.
Plays such as Zinnie Harris’s Further than the Furthest Thing (which radically reimagines events on the mid-Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha during and after the Second World War) and David Harrower’s Knives in Hens (a very non-naturalistic imagining of a pre-industrial society).
- 100.
Such as Jean Anouilh, for example, the unquestionably Modernist theatre artist whose work famously included a radical adaptation of Antigone by Sophocles.
- 101.
Scotland-based theatre director and founder member, with playwright David Greig, of the Glasgow-based experimental theatre company Suspect Culture (1993–2009). See interview with David Greig in Chap. 5 of this volume.
- 102.
English dramatist (1971–1999) whose plays include Blasted (1995) and 4:48 Psychosis (which premiered posthumously in 2000).
- 103.
Well-known English actor, comedian and screenwriter.
- 104.
From The Suspect Culture Book, quoted on the website of publisher Oberon Books: oberonbooks.wordpress.com/tag/howard-barker (accessed 25/1/2017).
- 105.
See discussion of performance art in the Eighties in the interview with Neilson in Chap. 5 of this book.
- 106.
See Greig’s comments regarding Eatough’s attraction to European Modernism and hostility to theatrical naturalism in Chap. 5 of this volume.
- 107.
The other two being Harold Pinter and Edward Bond.
- 108.
Sarah Kane quoted in Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 92.
- 109.
The widow of the regicidist judge John Bradshaw and the lead role in the play.
- 110.
Kane quoted in Graham Saunders, About Kane: the Playwright and the Work (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), pp. 48–49.
- 111.
Ibid., p. 49.
- 112.
Which is noted earlier in this chapter.
- 113.
See epigraph to this book.
- 114.
Barker’s position in Scottish theatre goes beyond his appreciation by and/or influence upon artists such as Graham Eatough, David Greig, Zinnie Harris, Dominic Hill and Hugh Hodgart. For example, when I interviewed Ewan Downie, joint artistic director of the above-mentioned group Company of Wolves, for the Sunday Herald in January 2017, he referenced Barker as an influence, saying, “For me the creative process always starts with an irritant[…] It’s what[…] Howard Barker calls ‘the sand in the oyster’s gut’.” ‘Ahead of the pack’ (Glasgow: Sunday Herald, 15/1/2017): www.heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/15024373.Ahead_of_the_pack__Company_Of_Wolves_director_Ewan_Downie_on_The_End_Of_Things_PLUS_Manipulate_festival_highlights (accessed 21/1/2017).
- 115.
Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (Cambridge Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 1999).
- 116.
For example, in my review of Scottish performance artist Jenna Watt’s piece How You Gonna Live Your Dash, I commented: “Watt has gone in a self-consciously postmodern direction. Her show interlaces briefly narrated moments from people’s testimonies (George quits his job, John goes to Sri Lanka) with uninspired, meaningless stage imagery (a few miniature fireworks are ignited, Watt appears to fly in the face of health and safety regulations by blowing purple powder from a funnel all over her face)[…] When Phil Collins’s song Against All Odds is the most emotive thing in your show, you should know you’re doing something wrong” (Glasgow: Sunday Herald, 7/2/2016): www.heraldscotland.com/news/14259112.Theatre_review__How_You_Gonna_Live_Your_DashPlatform__Glasgow/?c=0ctmhong7dwco6flxr (accessed 23/1/2017).
- 117.
Suzy Gablik quoted in Alex Callincos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 12.
- 118.
Callinicos’s parenthesis.
- 119.
Quoted in Callinicos, ibid., p. 12.
- 120.
Contemporary, American Minimalist composer and musician.
- 121.
Russian Constructivist artist, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer (1891–1956).
- 122.
French Cubist painter, collagist and sculptor (1882–1963).
- 123.
Quoted in Pinter’s Nobel Prize for literature acceptance speech in 2005: www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html (accessed 23/1/2017).
- 124.
An American cultural critic and historian who specialises in music, particularly jazz.
- 125.
Ted Gioia, ‘The Trial by Franz Kafka’, Postmodern Mystery website (23/8/2011): www.postmodernmystery.com/the_trial.html (accessed 29/1/2017).
- 126.
Quoted in Gioia, ibid.
- 127.
See American philosopher Daniel Dennett’s paper to the World Congress of Philosophy, ‘Postmodernism and Truth’ (13/8/1998), on the website of Tufts University, Massachusetts: ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/postmod.tru.htm (accessed 29/1/2017).
- 128.
Postmodern Mystery website.
- 129.
In her introduction to John McGrath’s book Naked Thoughts That Roam About, of which she is the editor, Nadine Holdsworth describes the basis of McGrath’s theatre thus: “[McGrath] went to Paris during the uprisings of May 1968, an experience that strengthened his belief in, and commitment to, the formation of a vigorous counter-culture to inform and mobilise opposition against the class basis of British society” (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002), p. xv. This is an accurate description of the framework for the oeuvre of a man who is widely considered to be the most important figure in post-Second World War Scottish theatre, and a great influence upon such companies and theatremakers as Wildcat, David MacLennan, David Anderson and Martin McCardie.
- 130.
Havergal, from interview with Mark Brown (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, 14/11/2012).
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Brown, M. (2019). Preface: Defining Our Terms. In: Modernism and Scottish Theatre since 1969. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98639-5_1
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