Written accessibly for the theatre-going general public, this is an ideal guide to the new Scottish theatre: its people, its plays, its politics, its companies and its audiences. Directors, playwrights, journalists and distinguished theatre critics offer personal, challenging and wide-ranging insights into the last 25 years of Scottish theatre.

This book argues that Scottish theatre has, since the late 1960s, undergone an artistic renaissance, driven by European Modernist aesthetics. Combining detailed research and analysis with exclusive interviews with ten leading figures in modern Scottish drama, the book sets out the case for the last half-century as the strongest period in the history of the Scottish stage. Mark Brown traces the development of Scottish theatre’s Modernist revolution from the arrival of influential theatre director Giles Havergal at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow in 1969 through to the advent of the National Theatre of Scotland in 2006. Finally, the book contemplates the future of Scotland’s theatrical renaissance. It is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary theatre and/or the modern history of live drama in Scotland.

Challenging the dominant view of a broken and discontinuous dramatic culture in Scotland, this book outlines the variety and richness of the nation ́s performance traditions and multilingual theatre history. Brown illuminates enduring strands of hybridity and diversity which use theatre and theatricality as a means of challenging establishment views, and of exploring social, political, and religious change. He describes the ways in which politically and religiously divisive moments in Scottish history, such as the Reformation and political Union, fostered alternative dramatic modes and means of expression. This major revisionist history also analyses the changing relationships between drama, culture, and political change in Scotland in the 20th and 21st centuries, drawing on the work of an extensive range of modern and contemporary Scottish playwrights and drama practitioners. Ian Brown is a playwright, poet and Professor of Drama at Kingston University, London. Until recently Chair of the Scottish Society of Playwrights, he was General Editor of the Edinburgh History of Scottish Theatre (EUP, 2007) and editor of From Tartan to Tartanry: Scottish Culture, History and Myth (EUP, 2010) and The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Drama (EUP, 2011). He has published widely on theatre, cultural policy and literature and language.

Empathy has provoked equal measures of excitement and controversy in recent years. For some, empathy is crucial to understanding others, helping us bridge social and cultural differences. For others, empathy is nothing but a misguided assumption of access to the minds of others. In this book, Cummings argues that empathy comes in many forms, some helpful to understanding others and some detrimental. Tracing empathy’s genealogy through aesthetic theory, philosophy, psychology, and performance theory, Cummings illustrates how theatre artists and scholars have often overlooked the dynamic potential of empathy by focusing on its more “monologic” forms, in which spectators either project their point of view onto characters or passively identify with them. This book therefore explores how empathy is most effective when it functions as a dialogue, along with how theatre and performance can utilise the live, emergent exchange between bodies in space to encourage more dynamic, dialogic encounters between performers and audience.

In this cutting-edge text, Trish Reid offers a concise overview of the shifting roles of theatre and theatricality in Scottish culture. She asks important questions about the relationship between Scottish theatre, history and identity, and celebrates the recent emergence of a generation of internationally successful Scottish playwrights.

This revelatory study explores how Scottish history plays, especially since the 1930s, raise issues of ideology, national identity, historiography, mythology, gender and especially Scottish language. Covering topics up to the end of World War Two, the book addresses the work of many key figures from the last century of Scottish theatre, including Robert McLellan and his contemporaries, and also Hector MacMillan, Stewart Conn, John McGrath, Donald Campbell, Bill Bryden, Sue Glover, Liz Lochhead, Jo Clifford, Peter Arnott, David Greig, Rona Munro and others often neglected or misunderstood. Setting these writers’ achievements in the context of their Scottish and European predecessors, Ian Brown offers fresh insights into key aspects of Scottish theatre. As such, this represents the first study to offer an overarching view of historical representation on Scottish stages, exploring the nature of ‘history’ and ‘myth’ and relating these afresh to how dramatists use – and subvert – them. Engaging and accessible, this innovative book will attract scholars and students interested in history, ideology, mythology, theatre politics and explorations of national and gender identity.

The aim of the book is to explore the long-standing and multi-faceted relationship between Scotland and the societies and cultures of the European continent, in various epochs and from a large diversity of view points and problematics. The book collects most of the contributions from the IVth annual conference of the Société Française d’Etudes Ecossaises, held in Toulon in October 2005. This international conference gathered fifty European academics, working in a wide range of research fields, from social history to art history, from language to literature, from politics to civilisation and cultural studies. The interdisciplinary ambition and cross-cultural perspective of the conference are reflected in the volume. The book is divided into four main sections: links with Europe, visions of Europe, voices in Europe, and current political issues within the European Union. It illustrates the richness and complexity of the dialogue between Scotland and the continent over the centuries, and underlines the open, fluid and dynamic character of the Scottish identity.

This book explores the 'culture wars' of 1945-1970 and is the first major study of the origins and development of this leading annual arts extravaganza.

The ideal guide for students and theatre-lovers alike, the Companion explores the longstanding and vibrant Scottish dramatic tradition and the important developments in Scottish dramatic writing and theatre over the last hundred years.