Conclusion: The Future of a Renaissance

Abstract

In March 2016 The Guardian newspaper published an article by Matthew Lenton, artistic director of Glasgow-based theatre company Vanishing Point. In the piece, Lenton, an English theatremaker who has been based in Scotland since the 1990s, discusses what he considers to be the dominant, or at least most important, features in contemporary Scottish theatre. The coincidence of his observations with the arguments put forward in this book is remarkably close. “As someone influenced by European theatre and little interested in the English tradition of playwriting, Glasgow and Scotland felt like a great place to be. It still is,” writes Lenton. The director suggests not a hostility to theatre in London (a city whose theatre, not least the commercial theatre in the West End, so often subsumes live drama in England, at least in the discourse of the London-dominated UK/English media) but, rather, an internationalism in Scottish theatre that refuses to privilege London, as a theatre centre, above other centres in Europe and the wider world. Late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century Scottish culture is, he observes, “outward-looking, internationalist, uninterested in cultural museum pieces and focused on the new.” Such readings of contemporary Scottish theatre are key to, and constant in, the case put forward in this work. Moreover, Lenton’s identification of the lineage of Scotland’s contemporary theatre fits perfectly with that proposed by this work: