IT'S an impossible task, of course, to try to list the top 20 theatre events ever to take place in Scotland, which is maybe why it has also been so much fun.
No matter how brilliant your panel of judges - and ours was - the whole enterprise constantly stumbles over the big truth that the art of standing up in public to tell a story through words and action is as old as humanity itself, so that its beginni
ngs can never be known, and that even when we know that a major theatre event took place, a vital element of that event, in this most live and transient of art forms, disappears for ever when it passes beyond living memory.
So how did we set about making our choice? First, we drew up a few rules, then we tried, over a week of intense debate, to produce a list that would be rich, interesting, and shaped by our own passion for theatre as part of the nation's life, even if the choice could never be definitive. The rules were these. First, that we would try to capture a sense of theatre history, and would not confine ourselves to shows seen within living memory. Second, that we would not apologise, nevertheless, for showing a strong bias towards the last half-century, since the founding of the Edinburgh Festival, a time that has seen a true renaissance in theatre-making in this country, and the emergence of Scottish theatre as a real force on the world stage. Third, that this would not be a list of Scottish-made theatre productions, but of great theatre events which took place in Scotland and had a lasting impact here. We could never, for example, have excluded Peter Brook's mighty Mahabharata at the Tramway in 1988, with all its multiple meanings for Glasgow's re-emergence as a global city of culture. And fourth, that we were looking not for artistic perfection, but for impact, significance and the sense of an event with some kind of transforming power.
Of course, like all the best rules, ours were made to be broken; there are more brilliant, beautiful, exciting and significant shows excluded from this list than I could begin to mention here. But here, after much sweat and some tears, is our final choice, appearing on these pages over the next five days, for your provocation, amusement and - we hope - delight. The Scotsman and myself, as chairwoman of unruly proceedings, owe a huge debt of thanks to our gallant judging panel: arts journalists Jackie McGlone, Mark Fisher, and Andrew Burnet, along with Catherine Lockerbie of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Maggie Kinloch of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, former Edinburgh Festival director Sir Brian McMaster, and Christopher Richardson, the founder of that great Fringe venue, The Pleasance. And now, it's over to you, to debate, protest and enjoy.
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MEDEA, OLD QUADRANGLE, EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY, 23 AUGUST 1986
A spectacular star on the rise
THE Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa was not new to the Edinburgh Festival, nor was his leading actor Mikijiro Hira. They had stunned Festival audiences the previous year with a brooding, bloody Macbeth. But their furious interpretation of Euripides's tragedy exceeded expectations.
Ninagawa - who was already becoming a Festival legend and a sought-after international director - drew on both Asian and European traditions. In the tradition of both Japanese kabuki and ancient Greek theatre, the cast was all-male.
Hira played the abandoned wife who slays her children in an act of terrible vengeance, while male actors also played the chorus of Corinthian women, dancing and strumming stringed instruments in a vain bid to avert disaster.
Although the costumes, make-up and presentation were exotic, Ninagawa's triumph lay in the recognisable humanity of his heroine and the immediacy of her predicament. "The pity of it is expressed with great beauty," wrote Allen Wright, the then arts editor of The Scotsman.
The production also marked the theatrical debut of the Old Quad, which has consistently proved one of Edinburgh's most exciting venues.
At the conclusion of the drama, Medea ascended over the museum block, borne aloft by Helios's crane-assisted chariot, in one of the most spectacular exits ever effected at the Festival.
ANDREW BURNET
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BLACKBIRD, KING'S THEATRE, EDINBURGH, 15 AUGUST 2005
Controversy takes flight and soars to accolades
WHEN David Harrower's Blackbird opened in Edinburgh on 15 August 2005, it brought together three powerful strands of development in Scottish theatre over the previous decade. For the director, the mighty German star Peter Stein, it marked a new creative step in his long collaboration with the Edinburgh International Festival, until then marked by breathtaking classic productions, including his great Julius Caesar at Ingliston in 1993, and his fabulous Cherry Orchard of 1997. For the Festival's director, Sir Brian McMaster, it represented the richest flowering of his increasingly bold policy of commissioning new Festival work from young Scottish artists. And, above all, for the playwright David Harrower, it brought a long-awaited and richly satisfying second stage success, following his debut play Knives In Hens, which opened at the Traverse in 1996, and became a cult hit in studio theatres across Europe over the next five years.
Set in a workplace canteen somewhere in England, Blackbird is a spare yet piercingly vivid two-hour dialogue between Una, a woman of 27, and Roy, in his mid-fifties, the man who had an abusive relationship with her 15 years before. Treading firmly yet with immense integrity through one of the most explosive and controversial subjects of our time, the play explores the dark borderlands between love, desire and abuse, and faces up to the devastating depth of the emotional damage involved. Stein's brilliantly controversial production pursued the dialogue with a tremendous, detailed dynamism and care, before opening up into a breathtakingly theatrical final scene that offered a glimpse of the power and depth of the emotional forces unleashed.
The text of Blackbird was nominated by the Saltire Society as one of the six best Scottish Books of the Year in 2005, Stein's production went on to play successfully in London's West End, and last month Blackbird won the London Olivier Award for Best New Play of 2006.
JOYCE McMILLAN
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THE PATH, GLEN LYON, PERTHSHIRE, 19 MAY, 2000
The joy of the path less travelled
YOU can question whether Angus Farquhar's remarkable midnight ramble counts as theatre at all - "environmental intervention" is the term the Glasgow director prefers - but The Path stands as a crystallisation of the work of NVA, a company that grew out of the industrial drumming of the industrial music group Test Dept in the 1980s, mutated into extravagant performances in warehouses and docklands in the 1990s and found most recent form in 2005 in The Storr, a night-time hike through a site of special scientific interest on the Isle of Skye.
To see The Path, audiences had to travel by minibus to a mystery location in the southern Highlands. Dropped off in the dark, they followed a string of tiny bulbs illuminating a walk over the mountain.
The star of the show was the landscape of Glen Lyon itself, but it was enhanced en route by a band of Portuguese drummers, a light show picking out the features of a waterfall, Tibetan sherpas, a tree hung with ribbons, vague human figures picked out in the distance, a Tibetan nun singing an a cappella lament and echoing voices of the glen's residents.
Whatever you'd prefer to call it - theatre, art, sponsored walk - it was a unique experience.
MARK FISHER
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TECTONIC PLATES, TRAMWAY, GLASGOW, 23 NOVEMBER, 1990
Forming a new cultural alliance
NOTHING better epitomised the ambition of Glasgow's year as City of Culture than the Tramway's line-up of Peter Brook, the Wooster Group, Communicado and more. Of all those fabulous shows, the one with the most lasting impact was by a 32-year-old newcomer from Quebec City.
By 1990, Robert Lepage was establishing an international reputation with productions such as Polygraph and The Dragons' Trilogy, but he was virtually unknown in Scotland. That all changed with Tectonic Plates, a show about drifting, coincidence and collisions, jumping from the 1960s to the present day with nods back to 19th-century romanticism. Set in Venice, it was staged in a pool of water with the actors perching on grand pianos like floating land masses. In Glasgow, Lepage added five "Celtic" actors to his French-Canadian company. Among them was John Cobb, who went on to found Benchtours and Théâtre Sans Frontières and is now working on Lepage's Lipsynch.
Lepage would return to Scotland with other productions, always playing visionary games, influencing everything from Suspect Culture to the National Theatre of Scotland's Black Watch as he went.
MARK FISHER
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 full list - and the reasons for each of our choices - will be available to view and dissect at your leisure.
