Is "the thistle of Scottish political drama" flourishing?

Two shows on the telly, apparently unconnected. The first, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil was broadcast on BBC Alba the other night, while two episodes of the second, Borgen, were shown on BBC4. The Cheviot was written by John McGrath and performed across Scotland during the 1970s by the 7:84 theatre company. Unfortunately, the play hasn't been made available on iplayer to view again, for those who missed it. By contrast, Borgen is a Danish political drama from the folk behind The Killing, focussing on the struggles and machinations of Birgitte Nyborg, a political leader in Denmark's proportional electoral system just before and in the aftermath of a general election. 

So what is the connection? I've been thinking lately about Scottish political drama, whether on telly or on stage, and both Borgen and The Cheviot speak to that interest in their distinct ways.  "What is it that makes Scotland a place with such a fertile soil for the thistle of political theatre to flourish?" asks Oran Mor's David MacLellan in a blog for the National Theatre of Scotland. Serendipitously, MacLellan also starred in the 7:84 production of the Cheviot. The piece was written in anticipation of an event held in the parliament in the middle of December past, discussing Scottish theatre and politics. MacLellan's piece is brief, and I didn't attend the subsequent discussion, but is worth briefly examining for the highly characteristic (and in my view, profoundly flawed) account of Scottish social class it promotes. Its general features ought to be familiar to most of you.

MacLellan's takes it for granted that Scotland is a fertile site for political theatre, and offers an account of why he believes it to be so.  His basic thesis appears to be that political theatre would be inhibited by a dominant bourgeoisie, envisaged as individualistic, selfish, thirled to authority and clergy (blame the Episcopalians!). Social class in Scotland, suggests MacLellan, is like a stick of rock. If you chip off the thin, shiny gloss of the middle classes, you discover within a rich, telling seam of working class authenticity. And insofar as there is a discernible bourgeoisie in Scotland, it is self-involved, sparrow-sized, and inauthentic. He writes...

"Class differences between Scotland and England could hardly be more pronounced. Scotland is essentially a working class country where the terms yeoman or gentry have no resonance. Our middle class has historically always been very small and, if it multiplied to some extent during the 19th century, the strangulated vowels of Kelvinside and Morningside are testimony to its collective insecurity. Scratch the average middle class Scot outside Edinburgh’s New Town legal fraternity and you will find within a very few generations a product of the working class. Add to this largely proletarian stew the seasoning of Calvinism, where the individual may converse with God on equal terms without the mediation of Bishop or priest, and you have the beginnings of an audience receptive to ideas, who share a view that there is such a thing as society and who have a personal, ethical and political interest in its outcomes."

I was immediately reminded of Christopher Whyte's notion of the "textual invisibility" of the Scottish middle classes, as enthusiastic producers and consumers of fictions in which they are not represented, their significance denied, minimised, marginalised. We needn't look too far to find recent political examples of this curiosity at work. Quoth Whyte...

"One may posit a demand on the part of the Scottish middle class for fictional representations from which it is itself excluded; a demand, in other words, for textual invisibility. This would connect with the widespread perception of the Scottish middle classes as 'denationalised', as less Scottish in terms of speech and social practice than the lower classes. The task of embodying and transmitting Scottishness is, as it were, devolved to the unemployed, the socially underprivileged, in both actual and representational contexts."

One is immediately struck by how hackneyed and implausible MacLellan's account of the Scottish bourgeoisie is. The "legal fraternity in the New Town"? In terms of members of the Faculty of Advocates, and of the High Courts, we're talking about around 1,000 people at most. Only a handful of those could afford to stay in the stately Georgian homes in the New Town, or derive from families who've been in the law for generations. That's the "unscratchable"  bourgeoisie in a nation of over 5,000,000?  It's an absurdity.  Interestingly, such simple images are, I find, familiar stock-stuff.  In the Ken Stott adaptation of Ian Rankin's The Black Book, Inspector Rebus investigates, amongst others, a patrician Edinburgh MSP Daniel Raeburn.  I haven't read the book, but on the telly, Raeburn is played by David Robb, who specialises bourgeois characters running from the suave to the stern; barristers, army officers - and in his youth, the ill-fated Germanicus in I Claudius (1976). A privileged scion of the New Town, Raeburn cuts a respectable, stuffy figure, boasting an ambitious, cold-eyed and haughty gin-wife, and bears no discernible resemblance to any contemporary Scottish politician I can think of. He is a hackneyed  echo of some pre-1997 Tories perhaps, but difficult to envisage in Holyrood as is.

So what makes something like Borgen possible, but a Scottish equivalent difficult to envisage? Denmark, a country of five million people, with a unicameral national parliament, seating 179 MPs is not obviously more interesting than Scotland.  Perhaps it is a question of Holyrood lacking the political maturity required to envisage counterfactual alternative stories and a perceived lack of drama in the histories which have actually unfolded since 1998, discouraging pieces like the Blair-Brown inspired The Deal (2003) or the New Labour spin-inspired The Thick of It from Armando Ianucci. Put it another way. What sort of character could a dramatic, fictional First Minister be? What sources of narrative, of tension, corruption and struggle might one identify in the Scottish political landscape?

Could it be that one of our problems - encouraged by the theory being propounded by MacLellan and those who share his opinion - is that we don't talk about Scottish elites these days, their incestuous connections, throttled by the suffocating assumption that everyone is basically decent and well-intentioned? How can one develop a political theatre, when we're all pretending to be Jock Tamson's bairns, and our humanitarian banalities serve mostly to obscure from us the extent to which our egalitarianism is a fond, self-serving fantasy? How can one critically engage through drama with questions of who holds power in Scotland, if the producers of the dramatic refuse to see Scotland's bourgeoisie as anything but proletarians in none-too-convincing costumes, a small cast of peripheral characters with background parts, non-speaking roles and little influence? To put the argument at its most provocative, surely, contra MacLellan, the really interesting question is why contemporary Scotland doesn't have political drama (in both the institutional and, arguably the broader senses), and what we might do about it?