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She was one of the oustanding young Scots of her time and I don’t suppose her name means much any more. It was Maggie Jordan and, in 1970, young myself, I asked the star of the Traverse Theatre to set down on paper her feelings about being an actress – actor, as she would be called now.
Maggie began her article for ‘Scottish Theatre’ magazine – the one that Trevor Royle wanted a committee to run – by recalling her childhood in Motherwell: her rejection of it, her longing for another way of life, her refusal to accept that her ‘drab, miserable, skimping, emotionally crippling existence’ was the only one, the difference between what her late father had wanted and what he got (‘worlds apart’), her own determination to break free. ‘I wanted to change the direction of people’s lives,’ Maggie wrote. ‘I believe that is what theatre can do. It can heal sores, it can reveal that all of us feel pain and fear and guilt, it can illuminate unbearable dilemmas, and perhaps show us how to cope with them. Above all, it can make people happy’.
Maggie thought theatre should play an important role in the community. She wanted it to be an essential part of everyone’s life and visualised how it could replace ‘all the mind-mangling systems’. She longed to see groups coming into being with their own theatre, expressing something of their very own community – or lack of community.
Like so many gifted people in the theatre and media, she left Scotland to live and work in London. As my old friend Mary Marquis once said: ‘You have to go to London at some point’ – for professional advancement or personal freedom or to fulfil a natural human curiosity. I never did take the high road south, but I certainly don’t reproach the people like Maggie who did. My big regret, a lasting one, is that Scotland was not big enough – big enough in heart, in spirit, in opportunity – to retain the brightest of my own generation.
The source of my doubt is unconnected to nationalist aspirations and policies, many of which are admirable. It is simply a reflection of how things are; how people are; how society has changed. As long ago as 1969, the year of Maggie Jordan’s rise to prominence on the Scottish stage, when Fulton Mackay launched the ill-fated Scottish Actors’ Company, he was among the first to articulate the growing reality of the situation. It was, he said, no longer possible to have a full-time company of high quality based in Scotland, creating and nurturing a repertoire of plays, for the best people would not be pinned down. They were everywhere – in London, New York, Hollywood, or wherever the most enticing work took them.
The old boundaries were disappearing, a new and more mobile world was emerging, and the most that could be hoped, Mackay believed, was to bring the Scottish actors together in Glasgow or Edinburgh for short seasons. Even that modest ambition proved impossible; the company dissolved without ever having achieved a distinctive style. If Fulton Mackay’s perceptive analysis was true then, it is true many times over now.
But I don’t see this world without boundaries as a bad thing. It can be a source of intellectual energy. It can lead to a widening of horizons and an awakening of new ideas. For Scotland, if we are prepared to embrace it, it can be a life-enhancing two-way traffic.
For every Scot heading off with a rucksack, as Maggie Jordan headed off with hers, there is someone travelling in the opposite direction – travelling hopefully towards us. But towards what?
The wonderful experience of the Young Scotland Programme in the last 10 years has taught me that the young people of modern Scotland will just as likely come from Bristol or Brisbane as from my native Bonnybridge. We don’t ask them when they fill up the application form how long they intend to stay here. We don’t demand to know at the door if they are settlers or colonists. We don’t ask to see their birth certificates. I hope our world is bigger and better than that. I’m banking on it. Otherwise we are not the open and inclusive society that I have always instinctively – perhaps with misplaced faith – believed we were.
Earlier this week I wrote in defence of the ‘colonists’ – Alasdair Gray’s offensive term. Soon after the piece appeared, a well-known political activist emailed complaining, among other things, that Creative Scotland had appointed to its staff someone from Nigeria who had worked for the ‘British’ Council (his emphasis), an organisation devoted to the promotion of ‘British culture’ (whatever that is). It is possible that the person from Nigeria did a poor job, as my correspondent alleged, but the thought that her place of origin, or her former role working for the British Council, should necessarily have disqualified her from a senior post in Scotland suggests a deeply alarming mindset. Are the people of Scotland now to be defined and judged by where they are from and by the company they once kept? Are we, to borrow Maggie Jordan’s phrase, so ’emotionally crippled’ – and so narrow; and so sour – that it has come to this? Is this really the brave new Scotland we wish to create?
Of course it’s convenient to blame the colonists for more or less everything. They are such an easy target after all. But wait. It was not the person from Nigeria who prevented us, decade after decade, from setting up our own theatre groups in our own communities. We prevented it ourselves, by our own inertia, our own want of practical idealism. If theatre can make people happy, as Maggie believed, as I believe, it has always been within our own power to spread human happiness. I have mentioned before the work of Isabel McCue, a bereaved mother, in setting up Theatre Nemo for prisoners and people who are mentally unwell; Sir Harry Burns, Scotland’s chief medical officer, has applauded it as an example of how communities can help themselves.
But where are the others? The community drama movement, once so vital, has dwindled into insignificance. Maggie’s dream is largely unfulfilled. If the native-born Scots believe that this is anyone’s fault but our own, we delude ourselves. We seem to be deluding ourselves at the moment.
Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review
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