Scottish theatre in the late twentieth century was a vital, challenging and diverse cultural industry. It was an active participant in a period of huge social, cultural and legislative change, reacting to the election of Tony Blair’s New Labour government and the devolution referendum in 1997, followed two years later by the election campaign in Scotland and the opening of the first Scottish parliament for 292 years. In a country with a population of a little over 5.1 million, a parliament in Edinburgh made government a more tangible and personal thing than ever before – Scotland’s politicians were more accountable and the electorate more involved in the processes of government. As a consequence of the constitutional changes within the nation, the ‘imagined’ nature of Scotland also changed. Scottish culture had been much preoccupied with issues of colonialism, marginalism and parochialism, but in a context where at least some aspects of political independence had been achieved, the dynamic shifted from aspiration and desire to definition and responsibility.

Writing for the Scotsman in the aftermath of the devolution referendum, Scotland’s leading playwrights, David Harrower and David Greig, were challenged by the creative potential of this new environment:

The speaker of these words is Alma King, the actress whom Royce Oliphant — the title character of Leonard Merrick’s theatrical novel The Actor-Manager (1898) – loves but does not marry. Merrick knew the London theatre world from the inside. He, like Oliphant at the novel’s opening, had been a jobbing actor with literary aspirations, and he writes feelingly of the mutual loneliness of two young actors who hoped for more when they entered the profession. Out of work and penniless, Alma has recently understudied the role of Hilde Wangel in Ibsen’s The Master Builder for the Independent Theatre Society. Her vision of aliterary drama chimes with Oliphant’s, and the novel as a whole tests that vision against the realities of the late nineteenth-century theatre. Alma vanishes from the story for a prolonged period, touring to South Africa with a second-rate company and a repertoire of pot-boilers. Oliphant, by contrast, rises meteorically when he takes over the leading role in his own play (based on the notorious case of the Tichborne claimant), marries the beautiful Blanche Ellerton and becomes an actor-manager. ‘Only no Brand, Royce’, Blanche cautions, ‘if you’re going to open the campaign with Brand because you want to play the part, we shall be doomed’ (240). Not yet bold enough to stage Ibsen, Oliphant opts for a poetic play from a French author (Maurice Maeterlinck in the disguise of Sylvain Lacour) ‘laid on an imaginary island, and the period was described simply as “The Past”’ (243). It is a succès d’estime, which Blanche, with her eye on the empty stalls, considers the French for a failure.

The theatre was uniquely alluring to women of the Victorian period. Itwas one of few professions accessible to women, holding out the prospect of a career that would be active, disciplined and — at least for a lucky few — remunerative. Life in the theatre also gave women a voice, for on stage they could speak while others sat waiting in suspense for their next word — including men, who in most other settings compelled women to silence. This control over audiences, over men in particular, often proved intoxicating to Victorian actresses. On the other side of the footlights, stunned Victorian men often became infatuated with women of the stage even as, paradoxically, they felt imperilled by them.

This fascination with the stage could be experienced powerfully and enviously by women who had no connection with the theatre at all. Florence Nightingale, for example, expresses it in Cassandra when she calls the opportunity of being a professional the supreme attraction of the life of an actress, much more than the opportunity to achieve fame or wealth. Amateurism was the fate of most women, however talented, singing or drawing ‘as an amusement (a pass-time as it is called)’, denying themselves a vocation to sacrifice their lives to the needs of a husband and children. But the actress was different:

Written records relating to the post-Restoration and early eighteenth-century development of theatre outside London are relatively scarce, but from the available source material a picture emerges of entrepreneurial London actors determined to bring the drama to an increasingly numerous and demanding provincial audience. Whilst theatre outside London thus maintained a strong link with the capital, the relationship was a complex one, not least because the political and social conditions under which provincial companies operated differed considerably between Ireland, Scotland and England. In order to highlight these important variations a separate section will be devoted to each.

Ireland

In Ireland the post-Restoration theatre operated under conditions similar to those of the London patent houses; that is, under the protection and control of a royal patent granted in 1661. The patentee was John Ogilby who had been the Irish Master of the Revels at Dublin’s vice-regal court before the Interregnum. In 1637 he had erected a small playhouse in Werburgh Street for the benefit of the vice-regal court and resident English government officials. When, in 1660, a new viceroy was established in Dublin, Ogilby lost no time in getting himself reappointed to his old post at the Irish Revels Office, taking care, at the same time, to obtain a royal patent which gave him the right not only to present plays and operas, but also to erect and license theatres anywhere in Ireland and to license other performers. Ogilby began his second tenure by erecting a new theatre situated in Smock Alley, the Werburgh Street playhouse being, by now, too dilapidated for use.

Oh What a Lovely War premièred at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London on 19 March 1963. Its transfer to Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End in June was a landmark in British Theatre; a theatrical methodology that had been thirty years in the making had finally arrived in the cultural mainstream. European theatre with an overt political provenance had been kept at a distance by the innate conservatism of British culture between the two world wars, and in the immediate post-war period. Although Brecht was belatedly fashionable in British theatre (following the Berliner Ensemble visit in 1956), his methods were ingrained into Theatre Workshop. As the company’s co-founder and director Joan Littlewood told Kenneth Tynan, they had known ‘all about Bertolt Brecht in the thirties’.

Fewer people had heard of Erwin Piscator, but he too was a formative influence. No other British collective got nearer than Theatre Workshop to Piscator’s 1929 account of epic documentary theatre: ‘In lieu of private themes we had generalisation, in lieu of what was special the typical, in lieu of accident causality. Decorativeness gave way to constructiveness, Reason was put on a par with Emotion, while sensuality was replaced by didacticism and fantasy by documentary reality.’ Piscator’s plays of 1927, Rasputin, the Romanoffs, the War and the People that Rose against Them and The Good Soldier Schweik, set a standard for Theatre Workshop. In contrast, British treatments of warfare –whether in West End plays or popular film – have usually been naturalistic.

A shortlist of European plays before Ibsen and Shaw still regularly revived today by amateurs and professionals would include many of the works of Shakespeare, a number by Molière, one or two each by Racine, Wycherley, Congreve and Farquhar, and four other plays first produced in the eighteenth century: Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773), and Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777). The greatest actor of the eighteenth century, the most pictured man in Europe in his time, arguably created the conditions whereby Shakespeare’s works entered today’s repertoire and Goldsmith and Sheridan conceived their three contributions.

David Garrick (1717–79) arrived in London from his native Lichfield in spring 1737 in the company of his teacher and lifelong friend, Dr Samuel Johnson (1709–84). Garrick registered as a law student at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and soon was assisting his older brother Peter in the wine brokering business of their Huguenot forebears. But he also pursued his interest in theatre, begun even before his first remembered appearance as Sergeant Kite in Farquhar’s TheRecruiting Officer at age 12, on the grounds of the cathedral near where his family lived. It was one thing to perform in amateur theatricals as a boy, quite another to consider a trade like acting, so less genteel than the law or vintnery, a trade whose practitioners were still legally defined – like their Elizabethan predecessors – as vagabonds and sturdy beggars. Garrick only gingerly and gradually discussed his ambition in letters to his older brother. In London, he gained the notice of Henry Giffard, the manager of Goodman’s Fields Theatre, which competed with Drury Lane and Covent Garden – the only two theatres in London since the Licensing Act of 1737 which could perform plays for paying customers – by the ruse of charging patrons for concerts during which free ‘rehearsals’ of plays might occur.

The previous chapter has given some sense of the enormous impact of the translation movement during the 'Abbāsid caliphate, which rendered Greek works of science and literature into Arabic. The translation of what we would now consider to be properly philosophical works was only a small part of this movement. Translation of philosophy went hand in hand with the translation of more “scientific” texts, such as the medical writings of Galen and the astronomical and mathematical works of Euclid, Ptolemy, and others. Under the 'Abbāsids the most important group of translators, in terms of sheer output and the quality of their translations, was that of the Christian Hunayn ibn Ishāq (808-873 C.E.), and his son Ishāq ibn Hunayn (died 910 C.E.). Hunayn and his school produced many translations, including of works by Plato and Aristotle (especially the logical corpus); particularly important to Hunayn himself were translations of Galen, which formed the basis for Hunayn’s own treatises on medicine.

A second, slightly earlier group was that gathered around the person of Abū Yūsuf Ya‘qū b ibn Ishāq al-Kindī (died about 870 C.E.). Al- Kindī’s circle did not produce as many translations as the Hunayn circle, yet some of the works they did translate were of immense importance in determining the Arabic reception of Greek philosophical thought. It is quite likely that the choice of which texts to translate was guided in part by the philosophical concerns of al-Kindī and his collaborators.

British theatre in the second half of the twentieth century was probably more consistently volatile than at any other time in its long history. This is not surprising. After an initial collapse, the number and diversity of types of theatres and companies grew substantially, especially from the 1960s to the 1990s. Moreover, as theatre was still the art form most directly engaged in the public sphere through its face-to-face encounters in the live event, that growth gained energies from the huge cultural, social, political, economic and technological transformations that coursed around the globe as the millennium drew closer. Yet simultaneously the significance of theatre was subject to growing uncertainty and doubt, not least among the ranks of its practitioners. As other cultural forms – including performance – became ubiquitous, British theatre, despite its growth, seemed to lose much of its traditional authority in society. Then in the digital age that emerged in the final three decades of the century perhaps it faced its nemesis. The seductions of the new media not only vastly outstripped the theatre numerically, they also became insinuated into the production-consumption circuits of the live event itself, maybe inflecting its perceptual-cognitive processes with subtle confusions. When Nicole Kidman slipped out of her dress in The Blue Room, David Hare’s version of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde at London’s Donmar Warehouse Theatre in 1998, did the audience simply enjoy a mega-film-star in the raw, so to speak, or did the powerful qualities of her filmic persona make a kind of cross-media palimpsest of her flesh, especially as she was set on a ‘stage [that] shimmers in blue light and neon signs, with film captions and crackling electronic sounds to signal the time taken before orgasm’?

The writings of al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) mark a critical stage in the history of Arabic philosophy. He is noted for his classic, The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-falāsifa), an incisive critique largely of the metaphysics and psychology of Avicenna (d. 1037). At the same time, he is also noted for adopting Avicennian philosophical ideas. This at first sight seems paradoxical, if not downright inconsistent. In fact, he adopted them after reinterpreting them in terms of his Ash'arite occasionalist perspective (to which we will shortly turn), rendering them consistent with his theology. This reinterpretation is not without intrinsic philosophical interest.

Al-Ghazālī was a renowned Islamic lawyer (faqīh), speculative theologian (mutakallim), but above all an Islamic mystic (sūfī). In his autobiography, written a few years before his death, he states that it was the quest after certainty that motivated his intellectual and spiritual journey and that he finally found this certainty in direct mystical experience, dhawq, a technical Sūfī term that literally means “taste.” Although trained in the Ash‘arite school of speculative theology, kalām, to which he contributed two works, he was also critical of this discipline. This has raised the question of whether his mysticism was at odds with his theology, which included the reinterpreted, assimilated, Avicennian philosophical ideas.

1988: the style and substance of ‘New Times’

In 1988 three events took place that characterised the Zeitgeist of the decade and marked as clear a break with the cultural and theatrical practices of the 1960s and 1970s as the Conservative Party victory in May 1979 had signalled in British politics. Firstly, in October the magazine Marxism Today produced an overview of the impact of recent developments in industrial capitalism on global economies and societies: it provocatively entitled its survey ‘New Times’. This followed hard upon its response to the successes of the ‘new’ and ‘radical’ Right, whose figureheads were President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: a revised programme for the British Communist Party, which the Morning Star newspaper described as the ‘final abandonment of … Marxist-Leninist principles’. Secondly, that same month the style magazine The Face published its ‘Killer 100th Issue!’, offering 200 pages of quintessentially post-modern bricolage, in which Becks beer sponsorship was effortlessly sutured to harrowing images of famine victims, and lists of sound-bites haphazardly juxtaposed London’s Docklands with Japan and Reagan with Trouble Funk, the ‘hippest groove on the globe’. Its art director, Neville Brody, had famously described this wilful deconstruction of journalistic and narrative coherence as ‘Every typeface tells its own lie’.

In the autumn and winter of 1660–61, London play-goers witnessed a theatrical revolution. Women had begun performing in public playhouses, and before long they displaced the young men who had been trained, in the Elizabethan tradition, to play women’s roles. Their impact would be far-reaching. In the winter of 1663–4, the first play by an Englishwoman to be performed publicly, Katherine Philips’s translation of Corneille’s La Mort de Pompée, was presented in Dublin. Other women followed Philips, though seldom in great numbers. Meeting resistance in ways that female performers did not, female playwrights never became a powerful presence, although a few women were signally successful.

There had been female performers and playwrights in England in the early seventeenth century, but not in a public, commercial context. In the élite, protected environment of the court, female members of the royal family and court ladies appeared in elaborate entertainments known as masques and performed occasionally in plays. Whilst they enacted characters and spoke lines in plays, their function in masques was chiefly decorative and ceremonial: lavishly costumed, and displayed amid elaborate scenery, they joined in the dances that concluded these productions. Writing court masques in the 1630s, William Davenant learned how to display female performers and deploy stage spectacle – experience that he put to good use with his female performers in the Duke’s Company in the 1660s.

Like the women who performed at court, early female dramatists were also amateurs functioning within an élite, protected environment. Plays by aristocratic women were likely read aloud, perhaps even given amateur performance, in private households. Plays by three women – Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Elizabeth Cary Countess of Falkland; and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle – were published between 1592 and 1668.

The Ismā‘īlī attitude toward philosophy and the philosophers was decidedly ambiguous. They tried consistently to deny that philosophers, in particular the ancient Greeks, possess an authority in any way superior to that of the legislating prophets of their own tradition. Despite an admirable skill with, and even mastery of, mathematics, physics, and logic, the practitioners of philosophy, in their view, had achieved almost nothing that they had not taken from a prophetic source. Ismā‘īlī rejection of philosophy, however, covered less the content of that philosophy than the contributions claimed for individual thinkers. For the Ismā‘īlīs, the philosophers, on their own, were capable of little except personal speculations that yielded them mere opinions - often mutually contradictory ones at that. Anything that was true in philosophy depended in the end on the sure guidance of divinely inspired prophets; without it the work of philosophers, no matter how brilliant and profound, produced a result ultimately lacking validity and real value.

Nevertheless, Ismā‘īlī thought in its formative period would be simply unintelligible without philosophy, most especially Neoplatonism, which so permeates the works of the main figures that what they said is incomprehensible otherwise than by reference to a classical Greek background. These writers had clearly imported and used various elements of philosophy, not merely in vague generalities, but in specific terms and a technical language that derived more or less directly from translations of ancient texts. Although the works they wrote to explain their Ismā‘īlīsm were not as a whole strictly speaking philosophical, many portions of them are in reality small treatises of philosophy.

The history of philosophy in Arabic goes back almost as far as Islam itself. Philosophically interesting theological disputes were underway within two centuries of the founding of Islam in 622 C.E. At the same time some important scientific, medical, and philosophical texts from the Greek tradition were being studied and used in the Syriac tradition, with Aristotelian logic being employed in theological debates. By the third century of the Muslim calendar (the ninth century C.E.), a great translation movement centered in Baghdad was in full bloom. In response, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish philosophers writing in Arabic began to make important contributions to a tradition of philosophizing that continues alive to the present day. Debates and contests on logic, grammar, theology, and philosophy by Muslims, Christians, and Jews took place at the caliphal court. The structure and foundation of the cosmos, the natures of entities in the physical world, the relation of human beings to the transcendent divine, the principles of metaphysics, the nature of logic and the foundations of epistemology, and the pursuit of the good life in ethics - in sum, the traditional issues of philosophy, old wine, albeit in new skins - were debated with intensity, originality, and penetrating insight.

This was the beginning of what one might call the classical or formative period of philosophy in Arabic, which goes from the ninth to the twelfth centuries C.E. During this period, authors working in Arabic received and reinterpreted the philosophical inheritance of the Greeks, especially Aristotle. This process culminated at the end of the classical period with the massive body of commentaries on Aristotle by Averroes. But the formative period involves more than just the continuation of the Greek philosophical tradition.

The first ever Royal Command Performance of Variety took place in the presence of George V and Queen Mary at the Palace Theatre, London, on 1 July 1912. The acts included singers, ventriloquists, comedians and sketch artistes; jugglers, magicians and minstrels; classical ballet dancers and ‘Tiller Girls’. The programme looked back to the robust and lively Victorian music hall, and forward to the new technologies of entertainment. It featured acts representing the rich seam of British popular performance in the first half of the twentieth century. Some started out in the music halls of the late nineteenth century – stars of pantomime and musical theatre – and some were to find fame in film, sound recording and radio.

Little Tich, a comedian, vocalist and actor, had begun his lengthy career in 1880 as a blackface minstrel performer, at the age of 12. Four feet tall, and with his trademark 28-inch long boots, he became a star of the music hall. He performed for over seventeen years at the Tivoli Theatre in the Strand, where, in 1907, he was one of the ‘Five Harrys’ (his real name was Harry Relph; the other four were Harrys Lauder, Tate, Fragson and Randall). He was also a regular in pantomime at Drury Lane, appearing in 1891 on the same bill as Dan Leno and Marie Lloyd in Humpty Dumpty. For the Command Performance he appeared as ‘The Gamekeeper and His Big Boots’.

Natural philosophy, or physics, occupies an ambiguous position in the encyclopedia of ancient learning. It is primarily an ontology of the sensible world, and is thus inseparable from metaphysics. Aristotle’s physical inquiries, for example, can only be understood in the light of the discussions of substance, potentiality, unity, and the Prime Mover that we find in his Metaphysics. But natural philosophy is not only an ontology of the sensible world. It does not aim solely at explaining what we might call the “semantics” of the sensible world. It also tries, in some cases, to set up “syntactic” rules that allow us to describe a given idealized category of phenomena. The contrast between ontology and mathematical physics is an example. But as we shall shortly see, the “syntax” need not be mathematical.

In classical Islam, there was a multiplicity of physical theories. We may mention, among others, the atomism of the “rational theologians” (mutakallimīn), Avicennian neo-Aristotelianism, Averroist “orthodox” Aristotelianism, and the infinitesimalism of some geometers. Does that mean that any effort to distinguish unitary features of a single natural philosophy is doomed to fail? On the contrary, although there was a multiplicity of schools, the physical debate was nonetheless focused on certain fundamental problems. This means not only that certain questions were recognized as particularly significant by all the schools, but also that the answers proposed to them proceeded from some basic intuitions that were held in common. These shared intuitions may thus be viewed as typical of the classical period, even if points of disagreement were more evident to those embroiled in the controversy.

In defending Henry Irving against William Archer’s criticism that he neither spoke nor moved naturally on stage, Edward Gordon Craig forges a critical language which encourages us to reformulate our perceptions of what mattered in late eighteenth— and nineteenth-century acting. His words provide a fitting epithet for those actors whose physicality, presence and fire enlivened a stage increasingly under pressure to follow a potentially reductive route towards realism and restraint. For Craig, the artificial and the natural were in opposition, yet strangely complementary. Indeed, from the late eighteenth century onwards discussions of acting were often conducted in binaries: the real versus the ideal; art versus nature; inspiration versus study; passion versus mannerism; imagination versus observation. Behind such debates lies the influence of Diderot, whose Paradox of Acting, in which he argued that consistently good acting depended on intellect rather than sensibility, engendered the heart-versus-head debate. They find more sophisticated expression in the dramatic criticism of James Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt and G. H. Lewes, while they are subsequently formulated in the Coquelin—Irving—Boucicault discussions of acting in the second half of the nineteenth century and in William Archer’s Masks or Faces?

On 21 February 1896, in the Great Hall of the Polytechnic Institution at 309 Regent Street, London, the first cinema audience in Britain saw a moving picture show – the Cinématographe – of the films of August and Louis Lumière. The show, lasting approximately seventeen minutes, was projected onto a screen 6 feet by 4 feet 6 inches and showed some ten ‘actualities’, including scenes of a landing stage, boating, bathing in the Mediterranean, a collapsing wall and the arrival of a train in a railway station. In some ways, this event might be seen as the achievement of a project begun some 125 years beforehand by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740-1812) at Drury Lane. However, Michael Booth cautions that the arrival of film ‘was not at all the culmination of a teleological process in which the theatre struggled clumsily towards the divine glory of cinematic realism, but simply one of the many responses of an increasingly sophisticated entertainment technology to the demand for pictorial realism’. Loutherbourg’s project was to present ‘realistic’ and pictorial images of places and events that his audience would recognize as authentic and topographically accurate. In doing so, he considerably expanded scenographic subject matter to include scenes of significant and noteworthy landscapes, scenes of current events and scenes which presented exotic and far-away places that few in the audience had seen and that were the result of his considerable study and research. This had the effect of endowing theatre and scenography with a sense of purpose and authority that was quite new in the eighteenth century. Since much of this material seemed suited to the travelogue, his project began to make the theatre a ‘window on the world’.