Highland theatre has a short and impressive past and a bright and beautiful future.
In theatre there is no place or function for the writer as a “vigilant solitary” as James Joyce put it. Rather the quality needed for any writer who chooses the theatre is that of outrage or, again to use another Joycean term, “indignity”. A writer who dares to dream of a better, a new, imagined Scotland – now, such an artist is of great use to the theatre. A playwright who prefers the demeaned standards required by the status quo of the UK state is of absolutely no use to anyone. Poetry may be the language of the theatre but it is a language of political challenge and a muscular language that forever seeks new forms out of the old: forms which insist on active participants and which eschews passive consumerism. What all this translates as is a theatre which can show us what it means to be alive here, now, today.