Scottish Drama Quotes

“There was... a very palpable fear that involving the Scottish Committee of the Arts Council could lead to a more nationalistic festival, like the Scottish Theatre Festival envisaged by Bridie in October 1946. Some members of the Arts Council's Scottish Committee were considered 'too nationalistic and difficult to work with' by the London office.”
― Angela Bartie, The Edinburgh Festivals: Culture and Society in Post-War Britain

“The return to Scots is a return to meaning and sincerity. We can only grow from our own roots and our roots are not English.”
― Alexander Reid, Two Scots Plays

“I must stop writing comic plays - even after sixty years of Shaw and thirty of Bridie, only one critic in a hundred seems to have grasped that it's possible to write comedy with a serious intention.”
― Alexander Scott

“The year is 1973 and a transit van tours the Highlands of Scotland with a show that was to become legendary in the history of Scottish theatre and emblematic of the alternative theatre movement in Britain. The play is The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil by John McGrath and the company is 7:84. That statistic in its name, added to the stamped lettering and its manifesto tone, at once nodded to the radical theatres of the European avant-garde and foreshadowed the performative aspects of later movements like Occupy Wall St, where an economic statistic also became a slogan. This modest tour of the Scottish Highlands overturned centuries-old preconceptions about the absence of a theatrical tradition in Scotland, while also making a crucial contribution internationally to our understanding of political theatre.”
― Olga Taxidou, The Oxford Handbook of Scottish Theatre