Ksenija Horvat Scottish Women Playwrights against Zero Visibility New Voices Breaking Through Women playwrights have always been an important creative force in Scottish theatre, and though they may have been in minority, their voices rose above the social constrictions of the society they lived in. In the past centuries, many wrote anonymously, mostly for family entertainment, but there were also those who had their plays published either under their own name or a pseudonym. One only has to remember Joanna Baillie (1762-1835), native of Bothwell in Lanarkshire, whose historio-biographical play De Montford was produced at Drury Lane in 1800, with Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble in the main roles. A century later, the authors such as Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999), Ada F. Kay (aka A. J. Stewart) and Ena Lamont Stewart (1912-) were hailed as representatives of a small but significant number of women dramatists whose work focused on the positionality of women in family and society at large. These dramatists wrote about domesticity, femininity and gender struggle in predominately patriarchal Scottish society long before early feminist movements began to identify and systematise their ideological agendas Out of the three, Naomi Mitchison is better known as a novelist and a poet, however, she also wrote plays which nowa- days often take the back seat to her other writing output. Like many of her contemporaries, she had a keen interest in Scottish history and published a collection of History Plays for Schools (1939). In the aftermath of the world war, many authors turned to historical and social themes trying to make sense of the changing world around them, and revisit the way Scotland’s past was perceived at home and abroad. Ada F. Kay turned to these topics, gaining international acclaim with The Man from Thermopylae (1959), a powerful allegory on the human condition KSENIJA HORVAT set against the background of ancient Spartans’ fateful battle Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh. against Persian armies in 479 BC, and March Home Tomorrow | 143 ÉTUDES ÉCOSSAISES 10 (1964). One of the most significant women authors in the post- war Scotland, her work was rarely performed after the late 1950s. Ena Lamont Stewart, a prolific author with the pendant for plays with a socialist bite, suffered similar fate. In her early plays Starched Aprons (1945), and Men Should Weep (1947) Lamont Stewart explored the lives of working class women in Edinburgh’s closed society, was only revived in the 1970s after her play Business in Edinburgh received dramatised reading at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow in 1970, and in particular after her 1976 revision of the original setting of Starched Aprons to an earlier era of 1920s, in order to emphasize the nostalgia of the piece, was produced. Her popularity was finally cemented by the revival of Men Should Weep in May 1982 by 7: 84 Scotland, and directed by Giles Havergal. Lamont Stewart’s, Kay’s and Mitchison’s plays are inherently embedded in the state of Scot- tish psyche, and are a powerful testament for that time’s quest for national and social identity. Soon, they would be joined by another woman playwright whose appearance on the Scottish theatre scene in the 1960s marked stylistic and thematic change. Concerned with individual struggle of a woman to be recognized in phallocentric society, she brought onto the stage personal considerations, from female perspective, through powerful metaphors and linguistic and structural innovations. This playwright was Joan Ure (aka Elizabeth Clark nee Carswell). Joan Ure challenged in her plays patriarchal preconceptions by stepping away from a naturalistically-based linear narrative and focusing on the positionality of the feminine in her plays such as Something in it for Cordelia (1971), Something in it for Ophelia (1971) or Take your old rib back, then (1979). It remains unclear what exactly stirred a strong response from amongst the ranks of critics and practitioners, her irreverent use of classical texts as a starting point, or the fact that this was a woman writer breaking taboos and removing her female characters from the domestic/marginal sphere making them central protagonists of her dramas. Somehow it always seemed that Ure’s writing was before her time, and her experimen- tation with different styles, such as lyricism of movement, surreal settings, her experimentation with lyrical styles in dramatic language, and her feminist themes were often met with suspicion and disparagement. In reality, Ure was never censorious of or adverse to men in her plays, she merely sought 144 | SCOTTISH WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS AGAINST ZERO VISIBILITY to explore the nature of human identity and relationships on all levels, in order to expose the falseness of the clichés of femininity firmly entrenched in both social and literary context. She was a proactive figure in theatre circles in Scotland, and was, together with Ada F. Kay and Ena Lamont Stewart, involved in the formation of the Scottish Society of Playwrights in 1973. Ure felt that despite the presence of a number of women playwrights, Scottish theatre was still largely dominated by men. In an interview with John Mc- Groarty at the Traverse in May 19931, she reflected Helene Cixous’ remark that going to the theatre was like witnessing her own funeral. Ure was not alone in her interest in gender and social politics, many Scottish women playwrights have investigated the themes of social responsibility and the contra- diction between one’s individual desires and social obligations in their roles as wives, mothers and daughters. The canonised perception that family was seen as woman’s greatest achie- vement was rejected by Ure as sacrificial, oppressive and barren. Sue Glover (1943-) was going to comment on this per- ception in her play The Seal Wife (1980), through her character Rona: RONA. Babies don’t stop you being on your own. They grow up and away and fend for themselves2. With the appearance of Sue Glover in the early 1980s, after she had spent most of the previous decade writing for radio, the idea slowly began to crystallize about opening a school of women playwrights. Soon the foundation of Edinburgh Play- wrights Workshop followed marking the 1980s, in the eyes of some, as a sort of a renaissance period of women’s playwriting tradition in Scottish drama. It was in this decade that 7: 84 Scotland revived Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep, and the need to give voice to unspoken histories of women and re-tell history from a female viewpoint gave rise to appearance of significant women playwrights such as Liz Lochhead (1947-), Marcella Evaristi (1953-), Ann Marie di Mambro (1950-), Sharman Macdonald (1951-), Rona Munro (1959-), Anne 1. Reproduced in J. McGroarty, Downie, and Aileen Ritchie. This dream of a unified school or «Interview with Joan tradition of female playwriting in Scotland never implied any Ure», Theatre Scotland, 2, 1993, p. 25. singularity of style and content. On the contrary, the strength 2. S. Glover, The Seal Wife (unpublished was always in their plurality, expressing the whole range of manuscript), 1980, p. 52. different experiences and preoccupations. Firmly rooted in | 145 ÉTUDES ÉCOSSAISES 10 socialist tradition, these plays dealt with pertinent social issues, they created revisionist histories by questioning the well- trodden Burnsian, Scottesque, tartan-clad image of Scotland’s past, and they set out on a search for Scotland’s identity, its position and function in modern world. They explored these themes from female perspective, having as their main aim not only probing into what it means to be Scottish, but more distinctly, into what it means to be white, Scottish, female and working-class. In some cases, men were removed from the stage to enable female voices to tell their own stories. Often these stories were told through non-linear structure and poetic language, going back to historical tales and oral tradition of storytelling, the authors would include dreamlike, chimerical, fairytale elements, repetition and fragmentation to show the women’s dislocation from modern world. In terms of style, for example, Liz Lochhead, Marcella Evaristi, Rona Munro, Fiona Knowles (the so-called The MsFits) and Morag Fullerton began their work in theatre by using the genre of revue. Writers such as Lochhead and Jackie Kaye explored the relationship between poetry and drama, such as in dramatised readings of their collections and specially devised work, and Glover and Munro used folk tales as the starting point and inspiration for their deconstruction of traditional female types such as maiden, strumpet, mother and hag. Sue Glover had her stage debut in 1980, when Tom Galla- cher, then writer-in-residence at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, commissioned her to write her first full-length play, The Seal Wife, for the Little Lyceum. From the outset, her playwriting has been heavily influenced by Scottish storytelling tradition and Scottish landscapes. Glover has always placed emphasis on the language, infusing her plays with strong mythic, chimerical elements, and using folkloric and historical elements to tell women’s stories and to deconstruct clichés imposed by the rigid patriarchal structures. In her plays Glover is always concerned with the protagonists who live on the margin of the society, and who are uncomfortable in their own skin. In The Seal Wife (1980), she employs the Nordic legend of the selkies, the seal- people, to give strong criticism of women’s position being only seen through her domestic situation. Rona, the young seal wife, is uncomfortable in her role as a wife and a mother, and her final rejection of her family is a strong metaphor for nature vs. nurture concept, the final myth/reality paradox between who 146 | SCOTTISH WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS AGAINST ZERO VISIBILITY these protagonists are and what they are seen to be by the society in which they live.