Dundee Rep is CATS pyjamas (again)
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008On Sunday, June 15, Glasgow’s splendid Òran Mór venue played host to the annual Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland (CATS). The event was programmed as part of the city’s West End Festival (WEF) and was, by popular acclaim, the best CATS gathering since the awards began in 2003. Tremendous though the previous events (hosted on Sunday afternoons in Stirling, Dundee and Pitlochry) were, there was a special buzz about the evening ceremony in Glasgow, which was held within hours of the WEF’s famous parade.
The awards were introduced, with characteristic grace and aplomb, by Joyce McMillan of The Scotsman; the doyen of Scotland’s theatre critics, and (with Mark Fisher of The Guardian) co-convenor of the CATS. The evening was given a very Glaswegian sparkle by the superb father and daughter guest stars Johnny and Maureen Beattie. Maureen, who appeared recently in the ensemble of the RSC’s Histories season, and is revered in Scotland for her superb performance in Liz Lochhead’s adaptation of Medea, talked warmly of her early days in Scottish theatre, and of her father’s role in securing her first Equity card.
For his part, Johnny proved that you can take the man out of the music hall, but you can’t take the music hall out of the man (the veteran comedian and actor is currently starring in Scottish TV soap River City, which he refers to as “my pension”). It takes a lot to get a Scottish theatre crowd to give their undivided attention when the house lights are up, particularly when there’s free booze going around, but Johnny’s inimitable charm and comic timing had them crying out for more of his reminiscences of some of the best gags of the great Scots comic Chic Murray. Graham Norton could have arrived on stage with Jonathan Ross, and all eyes would have stayed on Mr Beattie.
As to the awards themselves; as in 2004, it was Dundee Rep (the kind of theatre which might be called, with a certain disdain, “regional” by some people in London; and, I daresay, also by a few folk in Edinburgh and Glasgow) which got the CATS cream. Nominated no fewer than 13 times, for four shows, across nine of the awards’ 10 categories, the Tayside company’s superb presentation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (co-produced with the National Theatre of Scotland [NTS]) finally lifted four gongs: Keith Fleming and Gerry Mulgrew, jointly Best Actor, for the younger and older Peers; Naomi Wilkinson, Best Design; Dominic Hill, Best Director; and the ensemble and company for Best Production.
The recognition of Hill was a reaffirmation of the very high regard in which the London-born director’s work is held within Scottish theatre; he also took the Best Director and Best Production awards, for his presentation of Howard Barker’s Scenes from an Execution for Dundee Rep, at the 2004 CATS. His recent appointment as director of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh is an exciting prospect, as is his first Edinburgh Fringe programme (for which he directs Zinnie Harris’s latest play, Fall). The success of Peer Gynt was also a deserved vote of confidence in the NTS’s programme of co-productions.
Elsewhere on the awards list, Amy Manson’s Best Female Performance award (for her role as The Stepdaughter in the Lyceum, Edinburgh/NTS/Citizens’, Glasgow co-production of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author) was earned against the toughest possible competition. With superb performances from Alison Peebles (Winnie in Dundee Rep’s Happy Days), Kirsty Bushell (Harper in the Headlong/Lyric Hammersmith/Citizen’s, Glasgow co-production of Angels in America) and Sally Reid (Norma in Borderline’s The Wall), Manson can be sure that she won the most hotly contested of this year’s awards. Theatre audiences can expect to hear a lot more of Ms Manson in future.
In children’s theatre (an area in which Scottish theatre is particularly strong), despite strong competition from the panto/Christmas show tradition, there could only be one winner. Wee Stories theatre company’s Caledonian take on a famous Hans Christian Andersen tale, retitled The Emperor’s New Kilt (another co-production with the NTS), was popular family entertainment at its very best; complete, as it was, with exceptional use of music, wonderfully imaginative and colourful design, a nervous eagle called Glen and singing sporrans.
If there was a category in which we, the judges, weren’t exactly spoiled for choice this year, it was Best New Play. There is a lot said about play writing in Scotland these days; hardly surprising when the Scottish stage can boast such authors as Liz Lochhead, David Harrower, Gregory Burke, Anthony Neilson, Zinnie Harris and David Greig. However, it has to be acknowledged that Scotland, for a variety of historical reasons (not least the fact that we had a more thoroughgoing Protestant Reformation than England had), has very little by way of a theatre tradition to speak of; England’s national Bard, William Shakespeare, is, first-and-foremost, a playwright, Scotland’s, Robert Burns, is a poet.
Scottish theatre is undergoing what I call “a sort of Renaissance”. The developments are exciting, but should not be over-stated. The infrastructure still does not receive adequate financial and political support, and this is reflected in new theatre writing, which, too often, lacks ambition and scale. The winner of the Best New Play in this year’s CATS - Alan Wilkins’s sub-Barkerian Carthage Must Be Destroyed for the Traverse - is a case in point. Although a refreshing departure from the contemporary and domestic plays which have appeared too often at the Traverse in recent years, it was a mere four-hander. How, we are entitled to ask, can a national theatre culture flourish if its playwrights are not offered the economies to write on a grander scale?
That said, Scotland’s MacMolière tradition (itself a reflection of our relative lack of plays of our own, historically) was celebrated in the awards, with Liz Lochhead’s superb adaptation of The School for Wives (wonderfully retitled Educating Agnes) for Theatre Babel receiving a richly deserved nomination for Best New Play.
As I have written elsewhere, any critic worth their salt must have mixed feelings about taking part in the judging panel for awards such as the CATS. Awards can be a blunt instrument. The most innovative and challenging work can often split the judges, leaving it with no chance of recognition. Collective decision making, by its very nature, involves some painful compromises on the part of the individual critic.
One takes part, however, because they are a celebration of excellence, however imperfect. Let that be called “elitism”, should the fake democrats of populism and cultural relativism choose to call it that. Excellence, after all, is what every great artist strives to achieve. If, as a body, a judging panel is able to recognise excellence (particularly emerging excellence) without recourse to social or political prejudice and with an understanding of theatre economies (respecting the potential greatness of a theatre of poverty), it is a body worth being part of.
The CATS panel, in all its argumentation and messy diversity, is, I believe, such a body. That is why the CATS have quickly become an established and important part of the Scottish theatrical calendar. Long may they continue!
CATS website: www.scottishtheatreawards.org