The Theatre in Scotland
BY 113IES BRIDLE
(Author of Tobias and the Angel, The Anatomist, &c.). rilHE only conclusion one can draw from the facts -I- and figures is that the population of Scotland is too busy acting to go to the theatre. Dundee has unashamedly " gone talkie." Aberdeen, in response to a public outcry, has preserved its Theatre Royal and is now leaving it severely alone. Glasgow. and Edinburgh have been favoured beyond their deserts. An excellent repertory company called the Masque Theatre is filling the gaps left by the touring companies justifiably afraid of crossing the Tweed. The citizens have the oppor- tunity of seeing capably acted versions of Shaw, Pirandello, Tehekov, Barrie, Aldous Huxley, Masefield, Neil Grant and others, an opportunity of which they avail themselves in very small numbers indeed. Recently, I believe, the company has made a small profit in Edin- burgh, but Glasgow makes short work of that. A week or two ago a really brilliant Back to Methuselah was played to a mere handful, a proportion of which had obviously drifted in by mistake. In Glasgow, at any rate, a glimmer of intelligence is apt to kill even musical comedies, and Bitter Sweet and Tantivy Towers were failures. The curiously ill-assorted names of J. M. Barrie, Carl Brisson and Ruth Draper have still drawing power, and the strange attraction of the Barretts of Wimpole Street packed the theatre with an audience appreciative of crinolines but of little else. Take us for all in all, however, we are what the Americans call a " hick" territory so far as good plays well acted are concerned. The part of just Lot in the cities of the Plain has been assumed by the Scottish National Theatre Society in Glasgow, and two repertory theatres, one professional and one amateur, in Edinburgh. They are but evilly supported, as are one or two other attempts to keep the drama alive by coterie activities.
On the other hand, every town and country district from Wick to Gretna has more amateur dramatic clubs than it can hold, and actors come to the annual Olympiads of the Scottish Community Drama Association in thousands. The newspapers are full of hints on pro- duction, and lecturers on dramatic art declaim without ceasing. A recent and healthy sign of the times is the secession of the S.C.D.A. from its parent body in London.
It is difficult to read such Heavens. Those who say that the Talkies have killed the Theatre may point to the fact that the rise of rural dramatic societies coincides with the death of the rural cinema ; but the amateur movement is as lively in the towns as in the country places. We are still faced with the contradiction of an enthusiasm for plays and for acting them existing with a complete indifference to the finished article.
This contradiction is not confined to Scotland, but it is doubtful if conclusions valid for other countries can be drawn in that singular land. It is a country liable to sudden religious, political and artistic upheavals, and it takes them very seriously when they arrive. And it has never had a Theatre of its own. In the art of the stage it has been a province of southern England, with intervals when it burned the houses of damnation to the ground and would have no play-acting at all. Even the pioneer Glasgow Repertory Theatre depended upon plays which had been franked by intelligent London audiences, and no Scottish dramatist came forward with a really serious contribution. It was otherwise with our religion. We left England alone and imported our religion from Europe and acclimatized it. We did the same with our politics long before the present Nationalist Movement was broached. Our curious halting uneven skewbald literature owes little to England. Indeed, we may claim to have revived that nation's interest in lyric poetry, in biography and in criticism at one time and another, to say nothing of the novel. Both nations have depended upon Europe for music (if the prac- titioners of the bagpipe are excluded), but Scotland. can pride herself on a certain amount of independence even here. As for the Fine Arts, the last important conti- nental conflagration but one lit a bonfire in Glasgow and the walls of our educated rich still glow with the works of Lavery, Hornel, Macaulay Stevenson, Walton and others of the school to the exclusion of all " out- siders."
It may be, then, that our indifference is an indifference to second-hand goods, and that our enthusiasm is the result of 'an impulse to found a native drama. It will be interesting. The traditional Scottish method of making contact with the Continent is not, so far, apparent. There is no native school of general writers on which to draw. The Scottish Renaissance remains, in the meantime, the standard of a rather irritatingly superior little clique. This is a description, not a criticism. All pioneers are irritating and superiority is their besetting vice ; and the clique may be in the right keeping its telescope trained across the North Sea. Be that as it may, it hasn't contributed to drama and shows no sign of doing so. What has happened in the past dozen years is the emergence of a few native play- wrights with a definitely Scottish orientation. John Brandane can put the smell of the heather over the footlights. Donald Maclaren can paint a Teniers of rural Scotland. Joe Corrie's sketches of pithead life have a startling vitality. There are, perhaps, ten others, all technically well-equipped, all using the life around them, none of them a copyist, and none of them, except Corrie, prolific. To them may be added a powerful ally in Gordon Bottomley. Most of these have been sponsored by the Scottish National Players in tiny five-night runs. If Scottish drama ever has a history, it will be accounted to those Players that they did what they could ; but, alas, the sons of the comfortable Maecenas of the 'eighties are too often cocknified little vulgarians whose patronage of the arts reaches no further than the Peeping Tom delights of a " musical " show. And as for their
daughters . !
Well, the arts have arisen and flourished before without the intervention of patrons, literary circles or foreign schools ; and if something is growing out of the soil, not even the national characteristic of pedantic criticism and unwearied carping will kill it. We must hope for the best. It is true that most amateur acting and playwriting has the same relation to the art of the theatre that painting chrysanthemums on tambourines has to pictorial art. But the amateur actor need not always be a figure of fun, and he is the less ridiculous when he is a unit of a nation striving to express its soul.
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