25TH BIRTHDAY
STAGE INVASION 1985 was a landmark year for The Traverse theatre. Peter Arnott, Chris Hannan and Jo Clifford recall working there to Mark Fisher
I n the months running up to the launch of The List, Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre enjoyed one of its busiest and most acclaimed seasons. Directors Peter Lichtenfels, Jenny Killick and Stephen Unwin turned out eight in-house productions all with an outward- looking European sensibility. At the same time, they ushered in a generation of Scottish playwrights. White Rose by Peter Arnott, 23, was
about a female Russian fighter pilot in World War Two; Elizabeth Gordon Quinn by Chris Hannan, 27, was about a woman who refuses to accept her working-class status during the Glasgow rent strike of 1915; and Losing Venice by Jo Clifford, 35, was about a Spanish attempt to colonise Venice in the 17th century. Big, bold and visionary, the plays changed the face of Scottish theatre.
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PETER ARNOTT: WHITE ROSE Opened 22 May, 1985
‘All three plays were resisting the sense of limited possibility. They were a response to Scottish theatrical storytelling and saying, “This can do more than we thought.” There’s no reason a Scottish theatre can’t be about the world: White Rose is a Scottish play about Russia. Or if you’re writing about Scottish history, you can do what Elizabeth Gordon Quinn does and subvert the genre it looks like it’s part of. White Rose is über-Brecht, because that European tradition belongs to us too, like Losing Venice, which was a picaresque, epic, lunatic tale.
‘In 1985, it felt that, even if we were impotent politically, in the cultural sphere we could say, “More is possible.” We had a sense we could write about anything and engage an audience. With Michael Boyd at the Tron, that sense of possibility spread out a bit and now, with the National Theatre of Scotland, there’s an assumption of grown-upness about Scottish theatre that wasn’t there in 1985. That season at the Traverse was the best of the way Scottish theatre has developed since – that way of doing things became the way we’re still doing things.’
20 THE LIST 23 Sep–7 Oct 2010