The Scottish Government’s announcement in 2003 establishing the National Theatre of Scotland was widely greeted as setting the seal on a strikingly fertile period for Scottish drama – not least by virtue of the fact that the new institution is pioneering a commissioning-based model previously untried in any other country. The adoption of this format, as many have argued, reflects the prior – and hard-won – existence of a dynamic, de facto ‘national theatre’ in the form of Scotland’s touring and building-based companies, on whose effort and investment the very proposal for an official national body was squarely based.

Historically, theatre in Scotland may have struggled in the shadow of the world-renowned English stage, as well as its own domestic obstacles, but in many respects those very adversities have helped to cultivate the distinctive strengths of Scottish drama, from its irrepressible, often subversive music-hall and variety traditions to the versatility of its actors; from its strong tradition of social engagement to the innovative ambition of today’s Scottish playwrights in exploring core contemporary themes such as identity, belonging and marginalisation.

In a rare instance of virtually unanimous consent among the country’s theatre community, the pivotal production in Scotland’s development of an authentic and self-assured dramatic voice during the 20th century was John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, premiered by 7:84 in 1973. On the part of author, actors and audiences alike, the experience was fired by the nationalist energies then firmly in the ascendant on the political scene, following the discovery of North Sea oil off Aberdeen in 1970.

It far transcended standard-issue agit-prop, however, being aptly described as a ‘ceilidh play’, after the Gaelic word for any kind of informal get-together – but one generally involving a song, tune, story or several among those present. Script and performances between them interwove urgent – and hilarious - contemporary satire, storytelling, live traditional music, pantomime, and a historical sweep at once romantic and realist. Most important of all, shining through the whole was a bravura delight in addressing so many issues, from national politics to dramaturgical conventions, squarely within a Scottish context, and in an unapologetically broad Scottish accent.

The battle to continue doing just that, in the process grappling with the shifting definitions and implications of the epithet ‘Scottish’, has centrally shaped the evolution of Scottish theatre from the 1970s into the 21st century. The word ‘battle’, in turn, might seem overly defensive, suggesting the persistence of a considerable-sized chip on the national dramatic shoulder, but theatre in Scotland, when it has flourished, has generally done so despite rather than because of its surrounding circumstances. Even so, many otherwise highly diverse practitioners in recent years have been united in the goal of making theatre that decisively transcends any such negative or resentful narrowness of scope, aspiring instead to link the local dialogue of their immediate environment into an international one.

Scotland has the dubious distinction of having banned theatrical performances as early as medieval times, when King Alexander I issued an edict to that effect in 1214 following the death of his father. The Catholic Church of those times was hardly the greatest fan of drama – then comprising a mix of court performances, pagan-derived folk plays, biblical enactments and festive pageantry - and continued to issue its own periodic prohibitions. Nonetheless, Scotland’s literary ‘golden age’ of the Renaissance period bore its share of theatrical fruit, chief among it being Sir David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, first performed before James V in 1540, and revived in a landmark production at the second Edinburgh International Festival in 1948.

The severe anti-entertainment convictions of the 16th-century Reformation, however, were followed in turn by the Union of the Crowns in 1603, with the removal to London of the Scottish court, and the banning of all theatrical ‘diversions’ throughout the British Isles in 1640, during the run-up to the Civil War. Ultimately capped by the advent of parliamentary Union in 1707, this 150-year concatenation of official hostility and economic incapacitation certainly dealt a sustained body blow to theatre activity in Scotland.

The 18th century, nonetheless, also saw a concerted creative rallying on behalf of Scottish culture among many of its famously polymathic intelligentsia, with the best remembered plays arising from this period – which also saw a general rise in theatre-going among Britain’s leisured classes – including Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd and John Home’s Douglas. The latter is especially notable in historical terms, both as having sparked a heated controversy in Kirk circles over the fact that Home was an ordained minister (which ultimately helped to spread religious influence over the theatre) and as having reportedly occasioned, upon its premiere in 1756, the famously vainglorious Scottish cry of, ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’

Between past times and present, the broader distinctive narrative of theatrical development in Scotland, as summed up with admirable pithiness by the leading academic and critic Alasdair Cameron, has been, ‘the history of a social institution with several sometimes conflicting traditions. It is a history which includes fairgrounds and pantomimes, club theatres and opera houses, fit-up companies and prestigious tours; which covers great writers and dramatic hacks; which encompasses periods of intense national pride in the stage and periods when any mention of Scottish drama was the cue for an embarrassed silence; periods when theatre in Scots or about Scotland only existed because of Englishmen or the efforts of amateur actors, and periods when Scotland had a vibrant, indigenous, professional theatre culture.’

Sandwiched between two great literary stage traditions, England and Ireland, with no major playwriting heritage of its own, Scottish drama has been additionally overshadowed by London’s centuries-old pre-eminence as a hub of the international theatre industry. Scotland has latterly achieved its most notable theatrical successes by aligning home-grown experiences and perspectives – and in particular an indigenous ‘voice’, be it in language or performance style – with all the expansive cosmopolitanism in matters of technique, subject-matter and artistic vision that befits a fully-fledged player on the world stage.

One key illustration of this has been the ongoing strand of new adaptations and translations by contemporary Scottish playwrights - including Liz Lochhead, Edwin Morgan and Hector MacMillan - of classic canonical texts into the Scots language, from Greek tragedy through Molière, Racine and Rostand to Chekhov and Dario Fo. Combining the demotic with the epic, the vigour of Scottish performance traditions with the plays’ essential timeless concerns, they also connect with several other themes of Scottish theatre history. 

The strain of ambitious internationalism, for instance, goes back at least a century, as epitomised by the first-ever Chekhov production in the English-speaking world, when the new Glasgow Repertory Theatre staged The Seagull in 1909. The same company also performed contemporary work by other British and European writers, including Shaw, Galsworthy and Gorky – together with around 30 new Scottish plays. In more recent times, this confidently integrated breadth of approach was honed to a widely-celebrated peak of excellence by the triumvirate of director-writer-performer-designers who shared the helm of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre from the 1970s onward: Giles Havergal, Robert David MacDonald (himself responsible for some 70 translations of European texts) and Philip Prowse.

Contemporary Scottish audiences have also offered a markedly warm welcome to many of today’s top international theatre practitioners, both in Edinburgh, where the International Festival and Edinburgh Festival Fringe have long provided a dynamic conduit to this wider stage, and Glasgow, where the city’s reign as 1990 European City of Culture and its aftermath has led to visits and ongoing relationships with such stellar world figures as Peter Brook, the Wooster Group, Robert Lepage and the Maly Theatre.

Over in Edinburgh, meanwhile, the Traverse Theatre, founded as a club in 1968 with the aim of sustaining the freebooting creative spirit of the Fringe in Scotland’s capital year-round, has since evolved into a world-renowned powerhouse of new writing. Although centred on the nurturing of Scottish-based talent – including such current stars as David Harrower, Gregory Burke and David Greig – it does so substantially in the context of an ongoing dialogue with writers and companies overseas. Back on the west coast, Glasgow’s Tron Theatre fulfils a broadly similar remit, albeit on the back of less specialist funding.

Despite the constant pressures of straitened public funding, Scotland’s theatrical infrastructure, at both a physical and an organisational level, is generally well-developed and relatively extensive for the country’s size – although both Aberdeen and Inverness lack producing companies on any significant scale, and much of the rural audience, especially in the Highlands, is dependent on intermittent touring visits. Further south, though, Edinburgh (with the Royal Lyceum), Perth and Dundee form a strong core triumvirate of repertory theatre, Dundee in particular having built up an exceptional track-record since establishing its resident ensemble company – the sole such set-up in Scotland – in the late 1990s. The Arches in Glasgow, which uniquely cross-subsidises its own in-house company with the profits from its club events, is another important supporter of both new writing and adroitly selected revivals, as well as promoting regular mini-festivals and themed seasons, together with periodic large-scale, multi-media projects devised to capitalise on its unique spatial and atmospheric capacities.