Revealing Hidden Histories: Seven Changing Perspectives

Abstract

Plays by Stewart Conn, Bill Bryden, Hector MacMillan, John McGrath, Donald Campbell, W. Gordon Smith, and the present author contributed to 1970s and later revisionary approaches to the presentation of Scottish history on stage. These dramatists resisted, revised, revitalized, and reimagined the imperatives underlying the work of McLellan and his contemporaries. All engage in playwriting that in distinct ways subverts the more conventional approaches, both to dramaturgy and history, found in the work of their predecessors. Each in his history plays (all the produced historical playwrights in this decade are men) reacts to varying degrees against their predecessors’ practices, explores fresh dramaturgical approaches and initiates new perspectives. In particular, this generation of playwrights used the modes of historical drama to explore radicalized versions of (mainly) Scottish history, interrogating established assumptions. They all exposed and explored hidden history—that is, counterhistories, repressed, invisible, or marginalised—whether social, religious, or political. In this, they raised questions of modern Scottish identity and the robustness of its icons. Their work was underpinned, explicitly or implicitly, by the pioneering work of such post-war historians as Gordon Donaldson and Archie Duncan. These, employing modern historiographical principles, revisited and researched anew the nature of Scottish history, and so its society. Other playwrights represented Scottish history in single plays in that decade, including Jack Ronder (1926–79)—Cocky (1970), about Lord Cockburn’s Edinburgh, following in form Tom Wright’s (1923–2002) There was a Man (1965) about Robert Burns—and C. P. Taylor (1929–81)—Columba (1973), using dance to explore the spiritual temptations of sainthood—but these dramatists returned to historical topics. Each was individual in use of language and dramaturgical innovation, but all, to varying extents and in different ways, experimented in staging techniques, while several sought a means of writing popular theatre.