4 days ago
What would this play's cast say about the Scotland we live in today?
What if a group of 2025 creatives set out, like John McGrath and his 7:84 company once did, to dramatise power, land, resources and belonging in Scotland? What would they say now? And how would they say it?
It might be worth jumping back and forth between the eras, to see what persists of the Cheviot's original themes to this day.
Start with the very title. The structure of the play – dramatised as a wild ceilidh night – maps to three historical periods of dispossession in Scottish history. The Cheviot is the sheep that replaced those human Highlanders cleared from their lands in the 18th century.
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The stag populates the hunting grounds that many of those clearances became, at the hands of aristocratic landowners in the 19th century. And the black, black oil is obviously the 1960s and 70s discovery of fossil fuels in Scotland's coastal waters.
The Cheviot today? Still nibbling away. They take up 55% of land dedicated to agriculture in Scotland – around 3.6 million hectares. But the sheep farming sector makes up only 7% of our overall national income from farming.
In terms of their destructive impact on the environment, George Monbiot once described rural Scotland as being 'sheep-wrecked'. Vegans, rewilders and methane watchers have sheep-farming on notice, never might the weight of history from the Clearances.
The stag's symbolism has hardly diminished as a misuse of the Scottish landscape, the extraction represented by hunting grounds still continuing.
The campaign group Revive tell us that 12-18% of Scottish land is currently being used for grouse-shooting – about the size of Wales – while contributing a tiny amount to GDP.
Wildlife tourism – which protects the diversity of species in landscapes, rather than blast away at them to keep game numbers up – brings in five times as much revenue as hunting. The case against is as strong now as in the 70s.
The black, black oil was in its early potent surge when McGrath did the play's first performance in Aberdeen, April 1973. The following year, the SNP eventually elected 11 MPs on a proprietary slogan, 'It's Scotland's Oil'.
But could the legacy of the black stuff be more complex? In the play, with amazing foresight, the American oilman Texas Jim thanks God that the UK Government 'didn't believe in all these pesky godless government controls like they do in Norway'.
This anticipates the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund from oil and gas established in 1990, its trillions now invested in 1.5% of the globe's company stocks. Feel the pain. Which can be trebled.
Firstly, the loss of such anchoring capital, because a tax-frittering Westminster had full sovereignty over the North Sea fields.
Second, we have to admit the contribution that the exploitation of oil and gas has made towards what now looks like irreversible climate worsening.
And thirdly, the pressure to leave remaining reserves where they are. Climate scientists urge that every ounce of carbon saved is worth it, if only to prevent an even more calamitous outcome. What a troubling, ethics-bending, dark-and-sticky mess this turned out to be.
In 2025, the great theme of McGrath's play – extraction without consent – rolls back round again, with the stampede to develop renewable energy in Scotland. After the black, black oil comes the endless saving wind.
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But are the enemies as clear as the Cheviot identified them, with all the brutal clarity of seventies Marxists? Lesley Riddoch reported this week on the miasma of political and economic snarl-ups involved in wind-farm applications across the Highlands and Islands.
It is, shall we say, a dramatic scene. Ed Miliband rejects zonal pricing, which would lower electricity costs in Scotland. MSPs raise their hands, saying they're legally bound by Westminster climate targets to allow rampant corporate and commercial developers to dominate bids – over that of community owners.
Rural communities themselves are divided – between their commitments to the planet (which you'd expect, given their proximity to wildness). And then the despoiling of these conditions under breakneck imperatives – the 'industrialisation of the Highlands', as Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis puts it).
They're suffering all the environmental chaos and disruption of next-stage renewable engineering, but on the poorest of terms.
Turbines and pylons are on the march, sending clean energy to England. Meanwhile localities endure high domestic energy prices, as well as a structural prejudice against them benefitting directly from wind developments.
Great and stormy meetings take place among and between communities. Rural electoral parties are mooted for next May. They look like they're urging a plague on all existing party-political houses.
What theatrical drama could encompass such live political and social drama? The 2025 forms that might comprise a follow-up to the Cheviot are a really intriguing question.
So many of the reports around its 50th anniversary in 2023 emphasised how much the play answered its audiences' thirst – for themselves and for their history to be represented on stage.
The energy of the play seems to parallel Billy Connolly's explosion into the TV and concert mainstream. Both 7:84 and the Big Yin were relentless giggers, adapting themselves to whatever church hall or community centre could house them.
However, we are also social media people in 2025, wherever we are strewn across Scotland. The young are on TikTok, but even the oldies are on Facebook and WhatsApp. And Zoom or Teams are the default organisational tools for many.
What kind of single dramatic 'representation' could take purchase, when we have so many ways and means to represent ourselves? Creatives worth their salt should rise to such a challenge.
Another major difference between these eras may be the acute need to foment less an anti-capitalist critique, more a pro-planet tendency.
What's the bigger vision we can land, that makes Nigel Farage and his anti-green populism seem small and petty, in a Scottish context? Between makars and folk, can we co-compose 'cli-fi' – climate fiction – that puts emotional and dramatic flesh on the lives of Scots in this future?
We can also be eclectic about the forms this cultural intervention takes. What's the 2025 equivalent – EDM club night, immersive event, game platform, social cosplay: let's explore – of the ceilidh which originally frames the Cheviot? And which often continued onwards, for real, after the final call?
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Many stories from the Cheviot's past cherish the interaction between performer and audience. Again, assuming the presence of digital networks, how could culture and performance click directly into other democratic and self-determining behaviours? Both face-to-face and virtually?
Powerful, co-created arts should be one motivating element to help you persist with the planning and deliberation of projects like community energy, civic assemblies, collective envisioning.
To defeat the Faragists, we need a dollop of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's advice about projects: 'If you want to build a ship, don't drum up folks to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.'
And reflecting on the Cheviot, it may not be that we need a 'theatre of the oppressed', as the Brazilian Augusto Boal once asked for. But what Simon Starkey, one of the founders of the National Theatre of Scotland, calls a 'theatre of opportunity'.
Let's push back against yet more 'extraction without consent'. But as many of Scotland's greatest artists would agree, let's raise visions of a desirably complex and alternative Scotland at the same time.
That's the kind of new Cheviot I'd yearn to see – and maybe even help shape. Something vast and unruly enough to hold our anger, our grief, our planetary hopes, all at once.
So what's your version? Who's your cast? Where's your stage?
