1Over the past decades, the concepts of nation and borders have been fundamentally challenged by major geopolitical events. In September 2014, Scottish citizens were invited to vote on a proposal for independence. Two years later, in June 2016, the entire United Kingdom was consulted via referendum on a potential exit from the European Union, the result of which triggered a period of political instability. These examples from recent European events reflect the tension experienced by the nation, caught between nationalist and supranational trends and the corresponding political discourses on frontiers, immigration, and nationality. In the case of Scotland, this redefinition of the very concept of nation had started before, with the referenda on devolution in 1979 and 1997. The results of these democratic consultations reflect on the one hand, desires for more independence (1997 and 2014 referenda) and, on the other hand, a strong attachment to supranational institutions and Europe (during the 2016 Brexit vote).
2As a public space, the theatrical stage is where representations of the nation are constructed and deconstructed, in an unceasing dialogue between art and politics. Thus, reflecting this instability, the Scottish stage similarly reinvents its relationship to the national space by playing with the very scales of space and community, from the local to the global. Space and place, constantly challenged on the stage, become objects of representation that question the multiple ways of doing, showing, and seeing theatre. The epitome of this reflection, both in its projects and its ideology, the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS founded in 2006) seeks to represent and reinvent the nation on stage. As a buildingless national theatre, a national theatre without a physical performance space, without a national stage, the NTS reinvests all types of spaces, be they real or virtual, prompting a rethinking of the presence and absence of the body on stage and giving rise to new borderless communities of 'spect-actors' to use Augusto Boal’s term. This theatre without walls is metonymic of the radical openness of Scottish theatre itself, which makes way for a postnational and horizontal representation of identity.
3This brief and non-exhaustive overview aims to sketch the main currents shaping Scottish theatre within the shifting political landscape of the past fifty years. Without seeking to essentialize or reduce the richness of Scottish theatrical production to broad generalizations, the intention is to identify key moments and figures—from the 1970s to the present day—that have played a significant role in redefining the stage as a site of national, postnational, and global engagement. These reference points underscore the evolution of the Scottish stage through both formal experiments and as thematic and ideological explorations.
4From the 1970s to the early 1980s, Scottish theatre saw the consolidation of its means of production and dissemination, centered around three key entities: one venue—the Traverse Theatre; one institution—the Scottish Society of Playwrights (SSP); and one company—7:84.
5Founded in 1963, the Traverse Theatre emerged with the goal of extending the innovative spirit of the Edinburgh International Festival (established in 1947). Similar in ethos to London's Royal Court Theatre, the Traverse became Edinburgh’s hub for "New Writing," with a strong commitment to producing original plays and nurturing contemporary playwrights. Over the decades, it has been shaped by a series of influential directors committed to new work—including founding figures Jim Haynes and Terry Lane, and then Max Stafford‑Clark, Jenny Killick, Mike Ockrent, Chris Parr, Ian Brown, and Philip Howard.
6In 1973, the Scottish Society of Playwrights (SSP) was created to defend the rights and status of local playwrights. Its aim was to strengthen the development of production spaces, local infrastructure, and resources. This association emerged in response to a need to coordinate the voices of Scottish theatre and to support local creativity against what Ian Brown, founding president of the SSP in 1973, described as “a sense of creative vacuum and the isolation of individual artists” (Brown, 2011, 7). A core concern from the outset was the relative neglect of new writing, even within institutions like the Traverse Theatre, now seen as the national new writing hub. Brown notes that in the early 1970s, the Traverse was still oriented more toward West End aspirations and European classics than toward supporting Scottish voices (Brown, 2013a, 90). In response, the SSP actively promoted emerging writers and worked to institutionalize their status. Between 1974 and 1985, it introduced a playwrights’ workshop model, inspired by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in the U.S., offering playwrights a space to present works-in-progress to an audience and receive feedback—a practice aimed at strengthening creative development and audience engagement. Importantly, the SSP also challenged fixed definitions of “Scottishness.” Rather than limiting membership to those born in Scotland, the organization adopted an inclusive model open to any playwrights living or working in Scotland, or those identifying with Scottish culture, regardless of location (Brown, 2013a, 90).
77:84, founded in 1971 by John McGrath and his wife Elizabeth MacLennan, takes its name from a statistic published in The Economist in 1966, which estimated that seven percent of the population of Great Britain owned eighty-four percent of the country’s wealth. Deeply concerned by this social imbalance, John McGrath was determined to reach as wide an audience as possible. This led him to redraw both the formal boundaries of Scottish theatre—by reintroducing popular performance forms such as the ceilidh in The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973)—and its geographical reach. The company made it a point to go out and meet audiences who would not necessarily travel to the theatre, by investing local venues and performing there. 7:84 therefore made use of community centres, village halls, union buildings, sports clubs, and churches—spaces that were transformed into theatre stages for the duration of a performance. The company’s aim was to present the social and historical realities of the working class to the working class, in spaces largely untouched by the more prestigious regional or national theatre institutions.
8This period produced a theatre that was predominantly male and dedicated to representing the nation metonymically by portraying a microcosm: the working-class environment of the West Belt. The 1970s were marked by the theatricalization of a reinvented language—popular, vernacular, a Glaswegian Scots specific to the proletariat. Far from the pastoral or idealised image of rural Scotland, the plays of the 1970s depict an urban and industrial reality, marked by representations of class struggle. According to Ian Brown and other critics of the period, this phenomenon has come to be known as “Clydesideism”—a dramatic writing rooted in working-class experience, described as “a school of writing concerned with Clydeside male working-class behaviour wrapped up in macho West of Scotland traditions” (Brown, 2013b, 191).
9For instance, in 1972, the decline of heavy industries such as mining, iron and steel, and shipbuilding became a growing source of anxiety in Scotland. Symbolic of this crisis was the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) shipyard, which faced closure in 1971 following the announcement of 8,500 job cuts. The events surrounding UCS notably inspired Bill Bryden’s play Willie Rough (1972), which is set in the Greenock shipyard during the period 1914–1918, when trade unionism and revolutionary socialism gained momentum. This relative historical distancing allows for a revisiting of a crucial period in the history of the Scottish working class, marked by the figure of John MacLean, communist leader of the Red Clydeside. The industrial locus of the West Belt is also found in The Bevellers by Roddy MacMillan (1973), which is set in the basement of a glass factory in Glasgow where mirrors are made and repaired. The play recounts the first (and last) day of the apprentice beveller, Norrie Beaton. The factory is threatened with closure, and the characters’ viewpoints are divided along generational lines. The threat of the industry’s dissolution echoes the threat to social cohesion within the workshop itself, where struggles for power and influence multiply with the arrival of the new apprentice.
10One of the productions that has become emblematic of the period is The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1974) by John McGrath, performed with the company 7:84 (and revived in 2019 by the National Theatre of Scotland). The first Scottish oil fields—referred to as "black gold"—were discovered in 1970, sparking a fierce campaign by the Scottish National Party (SNP) under the slogan: “It’s Scotland’s Oil.” The play undertakes a renewed representation of history by drawing a parallel between the Highland Clearances of the eighteenth century and the contemporary exploitation of North Sea oil. The production—a result of collective work on stage—develops socialist rhetoric that taps into nationalist sentiments linked to the discovery of oil. Formally, the company reinvents the fable and theatrical conventions by combining elements of music hall and popular performance, adopting a structure inspired by the traditional Scottish ceilidh, and employing a dramaturgy grounded in socialist agit-prop.
11Alongside the aforementioned names, other major playwrights of the decade are Stuart Conn, Roddy MacMillan, Donald Campbell, and John Byrne.
12The fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Empire—which reshaped the borders of a new Europe—the implementation of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power (1979–1990) and two referenda on devolution in Scotland (1979 and 1997) are among the key national and international geopolitical events that define the period from 1979 to 1999.
13Whereas the theatre of the 1970s was largely immersed in historical narratives or focused on realist depictions of the working class, the 1980s and 1990s introduced a more oblique dramaturgical approach, marked by thematic detours and narrative displacements. During this period, the internal politics of Great Britain came under intense critical scrutiny on stage. At the same time, Scottish theatre increasingly turned to international contexts to stage new metaphors and parables of national identity. Moving away from metonymic representations, these works adopted metaphor as the dominant trope, enabling more abstract and imaginative representations of the nation.
14A key development in these decades was the emergence of new voices—most notably a generation of women playwrights such as Liz Lochhead, Sue Glover, and Rona Munro—whose work contributed to a more diverse and nuanced portrayal of Scottish identity. In parallel, a new dramaturgy began to take shape through the work of writers like David Greig and Stephen Greenhorn, and theatre companies such as Suspect Culture, which articulated questions of identity through spatial, rather than strictly historical, frameworks.
15Writers such as Sue Glover and Liz Lochhead began to be regularly staged at the Traverse Theatre, while male playwrights like Chris Hannan and Peter Arnott also contributed to the increased visibility of women by foregrounding complex female protagonists in plays such as Elizabeth Gordon Quinn (Hannan, 1985, revived by the National Theatre of Scotland in 2006) and White Rose (Arnott, 1985). Their work saw a re-signification of identity myths—particularly those tied to gender and national identity. As Triesmann notes, Glover and Lochhead wrote “from the twin sites of gender and national culture to cross discursive patriarchal modes, inflecting, and sometimes transforming, the meaning of both” (94). Glover’s The Straw Chair (1988) and Bondagers (1991), revived at the Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in 2014, exemplify this approach. Both plays use symbolic, historically distant settings to interrogate the intersection of power, gender, and identity. The Straw Chair, set in 1730 on the remote archipelago of St. Kilda, follows three women constrained by rigid social roles who, through their forced expatriation, begin to question these limitations. Bondagers, widely considered as one of Scotland’s most important feminist plays, features an all-female cast portraying agricultural workers in the Borders during the 1870s. Their status as “bondagers”—women bound to male landowners and forced into itinerant labor—embodies both literal and symbolic constraints. The play’s choreography emphasizes the physicality of their work and the communal bonds formed under oppressive conditions. Often read as a metaphor for colonialism, Bondagers draws potent parallels between the exploitation of land and of women, situating its narrative in the liminal and rural borderlands shaped by patriarchal and agricultural cycles.
Figure 1
Bondagers Sue Glover at the Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh 2014
Photography @Drew Farrell
16The subversive potential of stage space is similarly central to Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987). Set between a circus arena and a children’s playground, the play adopts burlesque and mock-heroic tones to undermine historical authority and hierarchical structures, reimagining Scotland’s national mythology through a feminist lens.
17Meanwhile, Chris Hannan’s Elizabeth Gordon Quinn offers a pointed critique of Thatcherite ideology, particularly of its infamous claim that “there is no such thing as society.” Set during the 1915 Glasgow strikes, the play centers on a working-class woman whose obsessive attachment to her wedding gift—a piano she cannot play—symbolizes her unrealized aspirations for social mobility. This unplayed piano, fetishized as an object of ownership, becomes a satirical emblem of the Thatcher-era ideal of a “property-owning democracy.” By rejecting the tropes of the traditional “tenement play” and subverting social realist conventions, Hannan interrogates the materialist and individualist values of neoliberalism and their distorting effects on working-class lives.
18One other major name of the decade is David Greig. A co-founder of the theatre company Suspect Culture, he emerged in the 1990s as a central figure in the renewal of Scottish theatre. His work is characterized by a deep engagement with themes such as displacement, identity, and borders—geographical, political, and psychological. Among other plays, Europe (1994), written in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is set in a small, unnamed border town where migrants, refugees, and transient workers pass through a disused railway station. The Architect (1996) deals with political disillusionment through the story of an idealistic architect whose utopian social housing projects have decayed into symbols of urban failure. The play probes the collapse of collective ideals and the personal and national legacies left in their wake. The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (1999) is a polyphonic and fragmented play that interweaves multiple storylines across various global locations—from a hotel room to a forgotten cosmonaut stranded in orbit. It explores themes of disconnection, rootlessness, and alienation in the post-Soviet, globalised world. Greig reflects on the failure of communication in an increasingly interconnected yet emotionally fragmented society.
- 1 “If a place can be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity, then a space whi (...)
19Suspect Culture was a major theatre company of the decade, co-founded by David Greig and Graham Eatough. From 1993 to 2009, it became one of the leading experimental theatre companies on the British stage. One of the defining features of Suspect Culture’s work was its rejection of the traditional binary between text and performance, favouring a model of collective creation. Suspect Culture’s most emblematic productions emerged during the decade 1990–2000, including One Way Street (1994), Airport (1996), Timeless (1997), and Mainstream (1999). The company’s work was particularly marked by a strong European orientation. David Greig has often acknowledged that in the early 1990s, Europeanness was at the heart of the company’s artistic and philosophical concerns: “I remember very clearly when Suspect Culture was founded, Europeanness was the big, interesting question to both Graham (Eatough, director) and I. What’s being European like?” (17) In Suspect Culture’s dramaturgy, the stage became populated by non-places as defined by Marc Augé (77)1, creating a distinctive theatrical cartography untethered from national or cultural referents.
20Other names of playwrights of the period include Simon Donald, David Harrower, Stephen Greenhorn, Gregory Burke, and Nicola McCartney.
21The period from 1999 to 2014 marks the advent of a double devolution: political, with the establishment of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, and artistic, with the creation of the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) in 2006. This context raises several key questions:
What form can a national theatre take in an era of globalisation? What role does it play within the existing cultural landscape? And what vision of national identity does it offer?
22The National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) was founded in 2006, following sixty years of campaigning for the establishment of a national theatre in Scotland. The NTS does not define itself in terms of physical or geographical space, nor in terms of architecture: it is not a building rooted in an urban location. Rather, it is best understood as a conceptual label—a brand—that provides funding and coordination for organisations and structures (often pre-existing) involved in the creation and dissemination of Scottish theatre. This model is thus based on the idea that the “national” production of Scottish theatre does not privilege a single location or a single centralising institution—potentially elitist by virtue of its geography or programming—but rather emerges from a multiplicity of distinct peripheral structures that make up the Scottish theatrical landscape. The cultural and economic power represented by the creation of the NTS is relocated to a conceptual space—one that honours both centre and periphery.
23The National Theatre of Scotland’s inaugural production, titled Home, was launched in 2006 as a multi-site, nationwide theatrical event that perfectly embodied the company’s founding principles. Rather than being staged in a single flagship venue, Home was performed simultaneously in ten different locations across Scotland—including Shetland, Dundee, Glasgow, and the Borders—each version uniquely tailored to its local context. Conceived as a decentralised, collaborative project, Home brought together local artists, communities, and venues, affirming that Scottish national theatre was not about a singular building or a centralised institution, but about a network of places, voices, and stories. This inaugural season made a clear statement: national identity in theatre could be plural, mobile, and community-based, rather than fixed or top-down.
- 2 See for instance Berton-Charrière, Danièle. “Commitment, Identity and Dreams of Independence in Con (...)
24The Scottish independence referendum of 18 September 2014 marked a pivotal national moment, initiating a broad civic debate on questions of political governance and identity. The theatre stage—as the space where representations of nationhood, power, and identity are imagined and contested—naturally became a key actor in this political moment. Amongst a profusion of cultural productions2, two dramaturgical projects stood out for their unique and paradoxical approach: The Yes/No Plays by David Greig created on and with Twitter (now X) and then staged at the Traverse Theatre (2014), and The Great Yes, No, Don’t Know, Five Minute Theatre Show (2014) produced by the National Theatre of Scotland.
25Both projects were conceived and developed on virtual platforms, relocating the independence debate to the intersection of theatre and digital/social media. In both form (online, virtual) and content (polyphonic, participatory), they reinvented civic engagement through a democratic cultural practice. The online format (years before the Covid crisis made it a more common feature of theatre production and reception) allowed for the creation of a utopian community, a new social body beyond borders. Importantly, in these performances—which dramatise the question of Yes or No—the focus is not on taking a definitive stance, but rather on the act of participating in the debate itself. What is staged is engagement as a process, not an authoritative, didactic conclusion—pointing toward an aesthetic of participatory performance.
26Other names on the Scottish stage since the 2010s include Anthony Nielson, Zinnie Harris, Morna Pearson, Frances Poet, Linda McLean, Kieran Hurley, Rob Drummond.
27Between 2014 and 2024, the Scottish theatre scene has been notably shaped by a renewed racial and gender consciousness, with a surge of plays engaging critically with issues such as slavery, racial justice, gender identity, and the overall representation of minorities on stage. This period reflects a broader societal reckoning with systemic inequalities, as theatre practitioners and audiences alike demand more inclusive and diverse narratives. Simultaneously, the Covid-19 pandemic profoundly disrupted traditional modes of production, representation, and reception of theatre, accelerating the adoption of intermedial practices. Scottish theatre has embraced digital platforms, hybrid formats, and innovative multimedia techniques, transforming the ways stories are told and experienced.
28Chris Hannan’s What Shadows (2016) explores the legacy of Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, which notoriously condemned immigration and warned of racial conflict in Britain. The play juxtaposes Powell’s ideological convictions with the contemporary repercussions of his rhetoric, as in 1992 Rose Cruickshank, professor at Oxford University and the daughter of Caribbean immigrants is looking for answers to this speech. The central and opening question of the play is “how to talk to people we hate” (Hannan, 5) thus examining how identity, race, and nationalism continue to shape British political discourse. Staged amid the intensifying debates surrounding the Brexit referendum, What Shadows gains additional resonance as it interrogates the historical roots of xenophobia and the politicisation of British identity.
29A compelling example of this convergence between identity politics and digital innovation is seen in the National Theatre of Scotland’s double bill Eve and Adam (both produced in 2017), which boldly address transgender identity. Eve, co-written by Jo Clifford and Chris Goode, features Clifford herself in the title role, drawing on her personal experience as a trans woman. Adam, written by Frances Poet and directed by Cora Bissett, is based on the real-life story of Adam Kashmiry, a transgender man born in Egypt and exiled to Glasgow, where he was finally able to transition. Kashmiry plays himself in the production, lending the work a powerful authenticity.
30One of the play’s most innovative moments, titled “The Tree of Knowledge,” features an interaction where Adam types a question on his computer, prompting a digital choir of transgender voices to emerge on stage. The screen flickers to reveal faces and voices of trans individuals worldwide, sharing their experiences and knowledge in a chorus that is both harmonious and discordant. Uniquely, this choir is not a pre-recorded montage of actors but consists of over 120 volunteer transgender participants from around the globe—spanning the United States, Russia, Denmark, Slovenia, Australia, and the Netherlands—who contributed videos and stories as part of the AdamWorldChoir project. Inspired by Eric Whitacre’s virtual choirs, this groundbreaking multimedia integration creates a globally networked performance space, amplifying diverse trans voices, making visible a dispersed, borderless community in a moment of technologically mediated solidarity. The National Theatre of Scotland hailed it as the world’s first digital trans choir—a landmark integration of technology, identity, and performance that redefines the theatrical representation of transgender experience.
31In parallel with this exploration of gender, a wider racial awakening has also taken hold in Scottish theatre, prompting a critical reassessment of the national canon and the historical narratives it has long upheld. This reckoning has led to new cultural productions that confront the legacy of slavery, colonialism, and systemic racism—not as marginal or "Black history," but as central to Scottish and even Western histories. Plays such as Jackie Kay’s The Lamplighter (originally a BBC radio play in 2007, published in 2020), May Sumbwanyambe’s Enough of Him (2022), Liz Lochhead’s Medea (2022) and Rona Munro’s James IV: Queen of the Fight (2022) challenge audiences to reconsider how identity, race, and belonging are remembered, represented, and restored. These works do not simply reclaim historical narratives; they also function as cautionary reflections on the cost of historical amnesia and the risks of repetition.
32Within this broader context, Lament for Sheku Bayoh (2020) by Hannah Lavery emerges as a particularly resonant example. Lament for Sheku Bayoh responds to the 2015 death of Sheku Bayoh, a Black Scottish engineer who died following police restraint in Kirkcaldy, a case emblematic of ongoing racialised violence and institutional failure in Scotland. Co-produced by the Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, the National Theatre of Scotland, and the Edinburgh International Festival, Lament premiered as a work-in-progress in 2019, was adapted into a film during the COVID-19 pandemic, and subsequently revived for live performance in 2021.
Figure 2
Lament for Sheku Bayoh
Image by Mihaela Bodlovic
33The play acts as a counternarrative to dominant Scottish discourses that, as Neil Davidson (2018) contends, construct a “myth of racial harmony” and silence structural racism. Lavery explicitly frames the play as a “provocation,” challenging this national mythos and demanding acknowledgment of systemic racial injustices. Structurally, Lament revisits verbatim strategies, and deploys music and repetition as a central aesthetic and political device. Drawing on performance theory—particularly Schechner’s concept of “restored behavior” and Colbert’s notion of “behaved restoration”—the play uses reiterated testimonies, legal documents, and media reports not merely as reenactment but as acts of restorative justice and re-humanization.
34The plurality of themes, aesthetics, and formal experiments that constitute contemporary theatre in Scotland—such as immersive practices, participatory theatre, telematic performances, verbatim theatre, and site-specific productions—can also be found on the broader British stage. Far from being insular or peripheral, Scottish theatrical practice is decidedly avant-garde in its exploration of the multiple ways of making, presenting, and perceiving theatre and identity. Attempting to identify an idiosyncratic essence of Scottish theatre, or to define a specific form of "Scottishness" within its plays, risks reducing and constraining its richness. Rather than a marginal or minor theatre, Scottish theatre is resolutely contemporary, both in practice and in ideology. The model of the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS)—a theatre without walls—stands as a metonym for this radical openness, seeking to articulate a postnational, horizontal vision of identity, carried by a multiplicity of voices.