FEATURE
FACE
T H E FACT 3
Alastair Mabbott talks to TEST DEPARTMENT in the largest enclosed space available in Scotland as they prepare for the most ambitious production of their ten-year career, and learns the dangers of looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses.
DAVID HARROLD
t this time of year. in any Scottish town i The first significant study of the phenomenon. f centre. one can‘t escape the tartan gift and the seed of Test Department‘s big 1990 show. l shops and craft centres coining it in by The Second Coming, was the book The Heritage selling tourists an easily-assimilated, Industry by academic Robert Hewison. ()ne entirely bogus version of history. Most writer who has approached the subject since then j of us have spent all our lives with the 3 is distinguished Scottish journalist Neal f haggis—and-tartan imagery and, generally Ascherson. whose political columns made such an i because we‘ve little choice, can dismiss it. But in impression on the percussion-based f the 1980s. the Heritage Industry moved up a gear music-theatre group that they approached him to l ‘ i nationwide. Shut-down factories re-opened as write the script. ; ‘industrial museums‘, propagating a subliminal. ; Perched on the axle ofsome old locomotive
Orwellian deception. wheels on the site of The Second Coming in [
The List 31 August [3 September lWll13