Alternative Visions

Abstract

Sue Glover and Liz Lochhead were, of course, not the only dramatists to explore approaches to history alternative to those of the playwrights whose history plays came to prominence in the 1970s. A parallel generation of playwrights emerged in the 1980s with their own approaches to the representation of historical material on the Scottish stage. The two leading members of this generation dealing with historical material are Jo (formerly John) Clifford (b. 1950) and Peter Arnott (b. 1962). Others emerging at the same time, like Chris Hannan (b. 1958), have worked with historical themes, but often with dramaturgical approaches that do not substantially develop the work of the playwrights discussed in Chap. 5. Hannan’s history plays, for example, include Purity (1984), a short play about early Beethoven; Klimkov: Life of a Tsarist Agent (1984), set in the 1905 Russian Revolution; Elizabeth Gordon Quinn (1985), a traditionally structured ‘serious melodrama’, to use the playwright’s own subtitle, set in First World War Glasgow, whose dramaturgy is reminiscent of early Bryden or Conn; and The Baby (1990), set in late republican Rome, as the struggles that led to imperial Rome developed, a play to which this chapter will return in the context of Clifford’s work.