She had the eternal youth
that an inquiring
mind possesses
Judith Jaafar
Wake up, Arab world
Weekend
Remembrance:
Revealing the secrets
of a university jotter
Kenneth Roy
Was the editor of SR
right or wrong about the M5 accident?
Tim Coulson
and others
Among the leaderless young in Zuccotti Park, a glimmer of hope
Leonard Quart
Shocked and saddened
by the personal animus
of a literary critic
Catherine Czerkawska and Tessa Ransford
Why not gay marriage? We have a tradition of religious liberalism
Christopher Harvie
The new edition of SRB includes an essay on the history of BBC Scotland by SR editor Kenneth Roy
To read it, click here
A visionary has smeared
his argument with the
bile of personal animosity
Robert Livingston
George Gunn is a skald. That bardic quality infuses everything he writes, from poetry to plays to essays. So it’s hardly surprising that he should be a past master at the gentle art of flyting. But what can be exhilarating in performance can curdle on the computer screen. There are so many good and true arguments in George’s essay on the state of Scottish theatre (10 November) that it’s sad that he has to undermine their force by falling into crude caricature and vulgar character assassination.
Reading his account of my organisation, HI-Arts, and of myself as its director, I wasn’t sure whether to be more amused or amazed. Read this innocently, and you would think HI-Arts was some sort of arts version of the KGB, and myself a cross between a cultural commissar and Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Not exactly a realistic picture, though it is true that I own a white cat. Mind you, I don’t come off the worst: there is something misogynist, chauvinist and downright nasty about George’s grossly distorted picture of one theatre director as the wife of an RAF Lossiemouth pilot who indulges her interest in Beckett, when the artist in question is in fact a highly respected Italian actor and director who works regularly with the Piccolo Teatro di Milano and who has created opportunities for Moray-based performers to work in front of large audiences in Italy. But that’s George’s way: never allow accuracy to get in the way of a good flyting.
George is absolutely on the money about the constant struggle to argue for the validity of theatre made in the Highlands. That is what HI-Arts has been doing for the last 15 years and more. George considers our efforts a failure. That depends on your definition of ‘failure’. In the past decade HI-Arts has directly brought over £1 million to companies and theatre practitioners based in the Highlands and Islands. Our only ideological basis for doing this has been to help to sustain a working theatrical community in the region.
The current North of Scotland Touring Fund, which George so disparages, will make possible eight new productions, by eight different companies, all made in the Highlands and touring to 80 different communities in the Highlands and Islands, including a new network of local promoters in the Western Isles.
HI-Arts doesn’t ‘control’ that fund, any more than we controlled the preceding ‘Highlands and Islands Producers Fund’ which operated for a decade. Nor we do ‘top slice’ those funds for our own needs – on the contrary, our existing funding meant that all the money in those two funds went to the creation and touring of work. Nor does HI-Arts control which work is funded. Decisions on both those funds have been made by selection panels made up of theatre professionals and promoters, in which company HI-Arts is only ever one member. And George fails to mention that Grey Coast benefitted on a number of occasions from that funding.
Nobody can – or is asked to – buy their way into Northings, which HI-Arts established eight years ago to create a unique online archive about cultural activity in the Highlands and Islands.
To rebut all George’s errors and distortions in this way would be tedious for the reader, and would only result in a form of virtual ping-pong, where George refutes my refutations, and so on ad infinitum. But I cannot let one calumny go unchallenged. George states that if a theatre company wants a review in our online journal, Northings, it has to pay for the privilege. Now, there may be the rare occasion when the subject of a review is asked to assist with a reviewer’s travel expenses – that is standard practice even among national newspapers. But all the fees for Northings’ reviewers are paid by HI-Arts. George should know that – on occasion, he has been one of them. Nobody can – or is asked to – buy their way into Northings, which HI-Arts established eight years ago to create a unique online archive about cultural activity in the Highlands and Islands. With 15,000 unique visits a month, and a high rating on Google, Northings gives a highly visible online profile to individual artists and to companies from Yell to Campbeltown. No doubt George considers that a failure as well.
Creating and touring rural theatre is expensive. A very rough calculation of the public subsidy for each of the eight NSTF productions would be around £100 per ticket sold. As a crude comparison, the subsidy per ticket sold for the Screen Machine mobile cinema, which presents over 500 screenings a year to some 25 remote communities, is just £4. That is not a reason for not doing it, but it is some explanation of why it is hard to do, and even harder to sustain.
As companies like Illyria demonstrate every summer, it is possible to present touring rural theatre on a commercial basis, but only in the larger centres of population, with the most popular titles (‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’), and at open air locations which can accommodate audiences of several hundred. And, sometimes, the end result, as in this year’s ‘Twelfth Night’, is something that plays to the lowest common denominator, like a bad student production.
A typical piece of funded Highland theatre would be Mull Theatre’s recent production of Hamish MacDonald’s ‘Singing Far into the Night’. A new play about the little-known Invergordon mutiny, by an Inverness writer, produced by an Argyll-based company. And a superb production it was too – something I can say with no fear of being accused of favouritism as HI-Arts was not involved in funding any part of it. Now, it’s not impossible that a central belt writer and company would have chosen this subject, but if they had, it would have been very different. If you doubt that, I refer you to Northumberland Theatre Company’s excruciating attempt at staging ‘Whisky Galore’ last year.
So like George I believe that theatre making in the Highlands really matters. Is such theatre making in crisis? Of course it is – but as George acknowledges, so is theatre everywhere. But his reductionist view of what constitutes ‘theatre’ leads him to paint a bleaker picture than the reality. If you want evidence that there is life in ‘Highland theatre’ you only have to compare it with the rest of rural Scotland. There are more active professional companies in Moray alone than in the whole of the rest of rural Scotland, outside the Highlands and Islands. George denies this, arguing that there are really only one and a half’ such companies – Mull Theatre and Dogstar. I think the creative individuals behind Wildbird, Right Lines, Skinny Dip, and Out of the Darkness – to name just four Moray-based companies – would dispute that calculation.
Similarly his definition of ‘theatre’ seems to exclude dance, thus allowing him to leave out of his calculations the Creative Scotland flexibly-funded Plan B, and the Moray-based Bodysurf Scotland, as well as the remarkable Argyll-based classical company, Ballet West. And he gives no mention to that extraordinary mix of talents and skills that coalesces around the Easter Ross-based Arts in Motion, which has managed to strike a remarkable balance between funded and commercial work for some two decades now.
Professionally, with the team at HI-Arts, we try to help artists and arts organisations to find a way to make work, and something of a living, in the very imperfect circumstances in which we all find ourselves.
Back in the late 90s, when HI-Arts held the first meetings that grew into what is now the Highlands and Islands Theatre Network, I joked that we needed to hand out tin helmets and flak jackets, such was the level of unease and suspicion between the different companies. Now, collaboration and cooperation are the norm, with the same performers and technicians working with a wide range of companies. Yes, there have been failures along the way, and, at least in terms of audience numbers, the 2007 festival Drama na h-Alba (despite George’s openness to Gaelic he can’t be bothered to spell this title properly) was indeed one of them, but not because it was ‘run by people who knew or cared little for either theatre or the Highlands’.
The chair of drama at na h-Alba was Ian Brown, at that time based in Pitlochry, a performed and published playwright and a previous head of drama at the English Arts Council. The steering group was made up of theatre professionals, and the bulk of the organisation fell to the director of Theatre Hebrides and to a freelance who, though not himself a theatre professional, was a former head of Highland libraries. And though I may have filled the role of an ‘arts bureaucrat’ for many years now, my own background includes a degree in drama, the staging of Jo Clifford’s first play at the 1980 Edinburgh Fringe, stints as a stage manager and a film and TV extra, and five years programming and promoting professional and student theatre at the Crawford Arts Centre. Nobody was doing all this work out of anything other than a fervent belief in the power of theatre as an art form.
George Gunn is an eloquent advocate for that art form, and for its relevance to the Highlands. As I said at the outset, I share a lot of his views and support a lot of his arguments. George, like all skalds, is a visionary – he wishes the world to be other than it is. Personally, I share much of his idealism. Professionally, with the team at HI-Arts, we try to help artists and arts organisations to find a way to make work, and something of a living, in the very imperfect circumstances in which we all find ourselves. I understand that, for George, this makes us complicit in a system he despises. He may well have a point, and one that I don’t dismiss unthinkingly, but he vitiates the force of his argument by smearing it with the bile of personal animosity and disappointment.
