LISTING the top 20 theatre events ever to take place in Scotland is an almost impossible task, but we have tried to come up with a selection that is rich, interesting and shaped by our own passion for theatre as part of the nation's life.
Our rules were as follows: we would try to capture a sense of theatre history, while not apologising for showing a bias towards the past half-century, a time that saw a true renaissance in theatre-making in this country. Also, this would not be a list of Scottish-made productions, but of great theatre events in Scotland, which had impact, significance and some kind of transforming power.
Many thanks to our judging panel - arts journalists Jackie McGlone, Mark Fisher and Andrew Burnet, along with Catherine Lockerbie, director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Brian McMaster, recently retired director of the Edinburgh International Festival, and Christopher Richardson, founder of that great Fringe venue, the Pleasance.
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THE GUID SISTERS, TRON, GLASGOW, 2 MAY 1989
Stamp of approval for Tremblay
SCOTLAND'S first encounter with the Montreal playwright Michel Tremblay had been Sandra/Manon at the Traverse in 1984. But the love affair began in earnest with Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman's Scots translation of Tremblay's earlier play Les Belles-Soeurs.
Vividly directed for Mayfest by Michael Boyd - now artistic director at the RSC - this was a boisterous comedy with an all-female cast of 15. It resonated powerfully in Thatcher-era Scotland. Findlay and Bowman had identified the parallels, not only between two cultures, but also between joual - the "horse language" spoken by Montreal's working classes - and the rich, coarse patter of Glasgow.
The play centred on Una McLean's spiky Germaine Lauzon, who had won "a hoor ae a lot" of gift stamps, to be exchanged for all the consumer goods her heart desired.
Required to paste them into books, she had invited friends and family to a stamp-sticking party. As the evening unfolded in a hail of bickering and gossip, the audience witnessed the rivalries, vanities and disappointments of women in a society dominated by feckless men, a lesson in the corrosive effects of poverty, and a tart meditation on the divisiveness of consumer culture.
Germaine fared badly, losing everything save a surreal shower of stamps, which engulfed her in the show's final moments.
ANDREW BURNET
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TRAINSPOTTING, CITIZENS' THEATRE, GLASGOW, 5 MAY 1994
Choose language to carry action
IT'S DIFFICULT now to divorce Irvine Welsh's era-defining account of wasted youth in 1980s Leith from Danny Boyle's witty and engaging - if somewhat sanitised - film. But it was Citizens' actor Harry Gibson who first revealed the dramatic possibilities of Trainspotting. His adaptation, staged just nine months after the novel's publication, refrained from any attempt to remodel it as a conventional play. It largely took the form of monologues, allowing Welsh's characterisation and language to carry the action. So, as directed by Ian Brown, this was a static yet thoroughly bracing experience.
Like Welsh, Gibson and Brown refused to disguise the exhilarating highs of the antiheroes' drug habits; neither did they spare us the miserable lows of cold turkey, cot death and Aids, nor the squalor of the junkie lifestyle. But regular injections of cussed humour soon had the audience hooked.
Ewen Bremner - so memorable as Spud in the film - starred as Renton, with Malcolm Shields as Begbie and James Cunningham switching between roles. The play transferred to Edinburgh and has toured the world.
ANDREW BURNET
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MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS GOT HER HEAD CHOPPED OFF, ROYAL LYCEUM THEATRE, EDINBURGH, 10 AUGUST 1987
Poetry in motion brought history to life
LIZ LOCHHEAD was already a much-acclaimed poet - sharp, lyrical, rich both in the experience of mid-20th-century womanhood and in the language and culture of the "new Glasgow" where she lived - by the time she emerged, in the early 1980s, as one of Scotland's leading playwrights, and it was as a writer about the dilemmas of feminism, and the limits of sexual freedom, that she first emerged as a fully fledged dramatist with her 1982 study of the life of Mary Shelley, Blood and Ice.
Within a few years, though, she had moved on to a powerful involvement with the effort of many Scottish writers in the 1980s to re-examine and redefine the idea of Scotland itself, its history, identity and language, and, in 1987, these two strands came together in the most powerful of all her works for theatre, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. Presented during that year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe by Gerry Mulgrew's Communicado Company, the play is a dark cabaret that swirls in a vortex of Scots and English poetry around the story of the moment in Scottish history when the nation rejected its Catholic queen for the rule of the men who led the Presbyterian revolution.
It's a dazzling evocation of an event that is still pivotal to Scotland's self-image, 450 years on - to our powerful but fractured democratic culture, our attitudes to sex and womanhood, and our continuing struggles with sectarianism. And if Lochhead's play is now one of the modern texts most studied in Scottish schools, those of us who were there can still also remember the final moment of the play's first performance - when a wind-machine began to blow the echo of the characters and their fate down through history, in the form of a playground rhyme about Mary's execution - as one of the most thrilling theatre experiences of our lives.
JOYCE McMILLAN
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THE MAHABHARATA, OLD TRANSPORT MUSEUM, GLASGOW, 13 APRIL 1988
An epic adventure that gave rise to the Tramway
BACK then it was known only as the old Transport Museum, a warehouse due for demolition on Glasgow's southside. But there was something about its industrial grandeur, its exposed-brick rawness, that caught the eye of legendary director Peter Brook when he was invited to scout for locations by Bob Palmer and Neil Wallace as they set in motion the programme that would lead to Glasgow's year as City of Culture in 1990.
Brook decreed that, with very little modification and an investment of £75,000, the building that became known as the Tramway would be perfect for The Mahabharata, his nine-hour staging of the sacred Hindu epic story of mankind. This was Brook at his most elemental, using the power of earth, fire and water to tell a mesmerising tale with the utmost simplicity. That Glasgow was the only place in the UK where you could see this world-class work symbolised the city's ambitions to redefine itself as a major European player instead of the home of razor gangs.
The ambition and clarity of The Mahabharata set the theatre world alight, paving the way for a stunning international programme at Tramway, including Brook himself with The Tempest, Carmen, The Man Who..., and Happy Days.
MARK FISHER
THE TOP 20 SO FAR
13 The Ship, Harland & Wolff, Glasgow, 15 September 1990
14 Dead Class, Richard Demarco Gallery/Edinburgh College of Art, August 1976
15 The Bloody Chamber, The Haunted Vaults, Edinburgh, 11 August 1997
16 Europe, Traverse, Edinburgh, 21 October 1994
17 Tectonic Plates, Tramway, Glasgow, 23 November 1990
18 The Path, Glen Lyon, Perthshire, 19 May 2000
19 Blackbird, King's Theatre, Edinburgh, 15 August 2005
20 Medea, Old Quadrangle, The University of Edinburgh, 23 August 1986
DO YOU AGREE?
Whatever you think of our choices, we'd love to hear your views, either by post or at www.scotsman.com/top20 where, from Friday, the whole list will be available to view and dissect at your leisure.
