Negotiating Identity in Contemporary Playwriting
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by White Rose E-theses Online Negotiating Identity in Contemporary Playwriting Morven Crombie Hamilton Ph.D. University of York Department of Theatre, Film and Television January 2014 Abstract In this dissertation, I discuss the process of playwriting in Scottish dialect: why Scottish writers choose not to write in Standard English; how and why they choose their specific dialect; what problems lie in the writing of dialect plays; and what problems may arise in performance and production. Following on from that, I also investigate why Scottish playwrights often find themselves excluded from English theatres - particularly from the London stage - and what cultural stereotypes seem to fuel this problem. I have examined Scottish dialect plays and playwrights’ accounts from the 1940s onwards, as well as considering the critical response to these plays. In the light of this contextual background, I also analyse my own personal experience as a playwright over the course of my PhD by Practice at the University of York, and my experience as a Glaswegian playwright at an English university in a traditional English town. My dissertation begins by discussing why Scottish playwrights choose Scottish dialects, focussing in particular on the idea of language survival and resistance to English hegemony. I examine the merits and effects of urban and rural dialects, investigating why rural dialects are now largely neglected and why urban dialects are vital to representations of class and city life in modern Scotland. I scrutinise the problems of writing dialect, and the lack of official spelling and prevalence of profanity in urban dialects, which present particular problems. Audience reception will also be considered, examining the idea that non-Scottish audiences struggle to understand the dialect, and subsequently struggle to understand its humour. Finally, I consider audience responses towards Scottish dialect. 2 List of Contents Acknowledgements...................................................................................................... p4 Dedication......................................................................................................................... p5 Author’s Declaration................................................................................................... p6 Dissertation: I. Introduction..................................................................................................... p7 II. Defining the term ‘Scottish playwright’............................................. p13 II. Why choose to write in a Scots dialect?............................................. p16 i. An instinctive choice?.................................................................... p16 ii. The decline of written Scots...................................................... p18 iii. The playwright’s response....................................................... p22 iv. Peer Pressure.................................................................................. p26 III. The selection of particular Scots dialects......................................... p27 i. Writing in rural dialects............................................................... p29 ii. Writing in urban dialects........................................................... p34 a) Urban as Authentically Scottish............................... p34 b) Urban dialect as a Class Issue................................... p35 c) Urban dialect and Specifically Urban Issues...... p37 IV. Problems with Scottish Dialect Plays in Writing.......................... p39 i. Unified Spelling................................................................................ p40 ii. Profanity............................................................................................ p46 V. Problems with Scottish Dialect Plays in Reception....................... p49 i. Understanding the Play................................................................ p50 a) Dialect.................................................................................. p50 b) Humour............................................................................... p52 VI. The exclusion of Scottish plays from English theatres............... p55 i. Stereotyping Scotland as Parochial Highlands................... p58 ii. Scots Playwrights and Insularity............................................. p61 iii. Incomprehensibility and Scottish plays............................................ p63 iv. Portraying Scottish Plays as Urban Nightmares............................ p67 VII. The national frame and wider applications................................... p72 i. Applying Scotland’s case further afield................................. p72 ii. Discussing Scots playwrights within a national frame.. p74 VII. Conclusion.................................................................................................... p79 VIII. References.................................................................................................. p86 Portfolio.............................................................................................................................. p101 Supporting Evidence for Portfolio....................................................................... p116 Play: Filthy Little Explosions.................................................................................. p201 Play: Lorenzo Amoruso was a Catholic Too................................................... p269 Play: Fox’s Children...................................................................................................... p333 3 Acknowledgements This Ph.D. could not have been written without Professor Mary Luckhurst: her guidance in both playwriting and academia in my time in the Theatre, Film and Television Department has been invaluable. Thanks must also go to Professor Duncan Petrie, for his invaluable knowledge of Scottish film, and to Neil McPherson, for graciously and speedily answering any and all questions I could have asked about Scots playwriting at the Finborough Theatre. 4 Dedication This Ph.D. would have been absolutely nowhere without the love and support of Linda Hamilton, Archie Hamilton, and Tom Bruggenwirth. Even Dad’s Big Book of Clichés can’t describe how much I love you all. 5 Author’s Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own work: the dissertation and accompanying portfolio and plays are the result of my research and playwriting practice over the course of the three years of my Ph.D at the University of York. I have not submitted this work for any other degree at the University of York, or at any other institution. 6 I. Introduction As far back as the 1600s, good Scottish playwriting has been unfairly labelled as the needle in the proverbial haystack. Former Glasgow Herald editor Christopher Small, for instance, once likened finding modern Scottish playwrights to finding ‘snakes in the history of Iceland’ (1977, p.iii). This idea stems largely from a misguided yet often repeated view of the Scottish Reformation, which argues that the Calvinists and the Church of Scotland completely suffocated Scottish playwriting during the Scottish Reformation, resulting in a three hundred year silence in Scotland.1 We can look, for example, at Dawson Scott who suggests that the Scottish Reformation ‘deliberately squeezed theatre out of public life for more than 300 years’, and left us ‘with no theatrical heritage to speak of’ (2008, p40). I do not deny that Calvinism had some impact on Scottish theatrical output, but this particular view of the Reformation substantially exaggerates the problem. As Reid says, it is a ‘seductively simple’ narrative, which leaves us with the absurd suggestion that Scottish playwriting somehow miraculously sprouted out of the ground ‘fully formed’ in the 1930s (2013, p4). In fact, the history of Scottish playwriting is much more complex. For a start, this version of history fails to take into account the fact that playwriting and theatrical performance still existed even during the Reformation, as documented by Findlay (1998) and McGavin (2007). Even if we did acknowledge that some suppression occurred, however, it would still be a serious misjudgement to say that Scottish playwriting somehow spontaneously reappeared midway through the Twentieth Century. There is a variety of easily identified Victorian-era Scottish playwrights, for a start. The most obvious of these is J.M. Barrie (1860-1937), an unquestionably successful Scottish playwright, who Hutchison rightly points out is unfairly overlooked by British theatre historians, on entirely ‘dubious textual grounds’, for lacking a sense of purpose in his writing (1998, p214). In disproving this supposed three-century 1 For more on the construction of this somewhat artificial version of history, see Reid (2013, p4) and Carruthers and MacDonald (2013, p143) 2 See Scullion, 1998, p81. 3 See Findlay (1998), Scullion (1998) and Bell (1998) for thorough coverage of Scottish 7 silence, we might also name David Crawford, a popular writer of comedies in the Eighteenth Century2, or William Clark in the Seventeenth Century, whose successful play Marciano; or, The Discovery was performed to great success at Holyrood House (Findlay, 1998, p63). Like many Scottish playwrights and performers from the 1600s through to the 1930s and 40s, these dramatists seem to have fallen under the radar.3 From the early Twentieth Century onwards, however,