The Future of the Past: Revisionism, Theatricality, and National Identity in Three Scottish Plays from the 1970s to 2010

“Go from the grave. The shrill flutes/ are silent, the march dispersed./ Deplore what is to be deplored,/ and then find out the rest”, writes Scottish poet Edwin Morgan in the poem “King Billy”, suggesting that we must know, revisit and review our history, but, at the same time, go beyond it and recognize what is deplorable in it, in order then to move on into the present as well as the future. The aim of this paper is to look mainly at four plays in contemporary Scottish theatre which paradigmatically, albeit by means of different, at times experimental, dramatic strategies, view the past through the eyes of the present, thus stimulating a continuous interaction between past and present that turns out to be also illuminating for the future. Each of these plays touches on the question of historical memory and revisits milestones or mythologized historical episodes in the Scottish past whose resonances and aftermaths stretch up until the present, and, for that matter, towards the future of Scotland, too. By dramatizing through parody and pantomime the relationship between Elisabeth I and her cousin, Ian Brown’s Mary (1977) and Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987) show how the past can become a source of mythmaking with an impact on the nation’s post-Union historical and cultural identity. Finally, Greig’s Dunsinane (2010) re-shapes the history that Shakespeare dramatized in his “Scottish play” in order to trigger reflections on the transhistorical meaning of (neo)imperialist conquest and military invasion. Ultimately, the paper will use these four examples to delineate a picture of Scottish historical theatre from the Seventies to today, in which, as Ian Brown notes, the playwrights’ “concern with history […] is absolutely rooted in their concern with the present and developing state of their nation”.