On David Greig's "Lanark"

On Tuesday the 8th of September, Lady Rae sentenced Alexander Pacteau to life for the murder of Karen Buckley. The facts of the case are horrific, the consequences desolate. "I find it extremely difficult to find words appropriate to describe the dreadful crime to which you have pleaded guilty," the judge said. The 21 year old belatedly expressed remorse for his actions through his counsel, but Pacteau’s motivations for killing a young woman who he did not know, within minutes of meeting her, remain in darkness, obscure and unexplained.

We can only guess. What has been reported of Pacteau’s life offers hints from which a highly-speculative pen portrait might be drawn. A life lived at odds with the wealth and privilege of his upbringing. One characterised by transgressive dishonesty. Sexual and emotional frustration. Problematic attitudes towards women. Rage. You might begin to piece together an image of a consciousness, capable of doing what he did.

But as the judge pronounced the penalty in the High Court, my mind turned reluctantly towards my appointment with Lanark at the Citizens Theatre that evening. Adapted by David Greig from Alasdair Gray’s celebrated novel, I was already feeling ambivalent about the production. I first read Lanark as a teenager, and returned to it recently. It is a book which I both admire, and find profoundly repulsive. For a great many people, Lanark is simply a book to be cherished, some people's favourite.

It was a mine which blasted open Scottish literature, shattering preconceptions about what Scottish novels could and should aspire to express and to explore. A book which composed, in fine detail, a recognisable image of Glasgow, which used this city to paint and to people other worlds. It situated the city at the heart of a cosmic drama of life and death, of love and rebirth. It was recognisable, but showed sweeping ambition. It embodied a central lesson of Greek drama: the war between the great forces of the universe play out -- even in Riddrie. On your own street. In your own school. Tragedy plays out, day and daily, in small places, close to home. 

Of the four books from which the novel is built, the most naturalistic ends with Duncan Thaw – sick, obsessed, failed, ravaged – walking into the sea. But before the waves claim the artist as a young man, drunken, miserable, and unhinged, Thaw throttles the object of his frustrated love in the muck of the Necropolis, its old monuments blackened and watchful. “I think I murdered you,” Lanark later says to Rima, the reincarnation of the spirit killed among Glasgow’s ancient dead. Neither the novel nor the play make it clear whether this episode is merely a conjuration of Thaw’s fragmented mind, or if the character has indeed choked the life from a young art student for declining to satisfy his emotionally inarticulate and increasingly embittered sexual desires. 

But either way, the episode illuminates the often overlooked darkness and ugliness of Gray’s central character. In the Citizens, Lanark and Rima’s reflect lightly on this conclusion to Duncan Thaw’s short, unproductive and emotionally bereft life. But for me at least, the memory of Karen Buckley robbed the moment of any levity. The idea of writing the Bildungsroman of Alexander Pacteau would seem more than tasteless – it would seem gruesome and perverse. But in some respects, this is precisely what Lanark is. 

It is a thing of wonder to me how Alasdair Gray can be regarded as a mild and genial eccentric. Some folk would draw a distinction between Lanark and Gray’s more explicitly kinky later work - 1982 Janine, for example – but such a distinction seems to be mistaken. For me, Lanark is a remarkable, unstinting depiction of a kind of profoundly unattractive male consciousness. It is the precision of Gray’s depiction of a sexually and emotionally underdeveloped beta-male which is the novel’s chief achievement. The book is a finely-detailed monument to the subjective experience of Scottish misogyny. It is disturbingly recognisable. If they were prepared to be honest, I imagine most men could find part of themselves – however guilty and reluctantly – in Duncan Thaw’s faltering relationship with the world and in his masturbatory fantasies of frustrated desire. 

I’m yet to meet the post-pubescent man who has not had entertained Thaw’s erotic dream of rescuing their beloved from some calamity, suddenly transforming her cool indifference towards you into obligation and love. The car careening out of control down the slope. The fatal projectile coolly deflected by your quick thinking. But for Thaw, the world of fantasy extends far beyond the gendered trope of rescuer and rescued, into grandiose rape fantasies, and sadomasochistic visions of torture and control. Gray’s literary (and to some extent, personal) candour here is unsettling, but impressively unyielding. Psychologically, the depiction is remorseless and confessional. 

Self-loathing gnaws at Thaw, but the combination of desire, entitlement, frustration and profound resentment towards women is a witch’s brew. It is rape culture, playing out in a single dowdy, conventional, not particularly attractive human heart. I’ve rarely seen this imaginative task performed more acutely than in Lanark. The misogynist of most drama is flash: an alpha male, confident, smooth. A user, yes, but caddish. Duncan Thaw, with his tight chest and his crusted scrotum, is anything but. The autobiographical dimensions of the prose also make this acuity disquieting. But fundamentally, I despise the central character. 

I had wondered, feared really, that the Citizens' Lanark might become a couthy index of Glaswegianisms. “Glasgow is a magnificent city”, said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here”, said Thaw.” “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” Unexpectly, however, Greig’s staging had precisely the opposite effect. By compressing the heroic sweep of the novel into just under four hours of drama, and stripping the tale away to its essentials, the misogyny of Thaw’s consciousness and choices was, if anything, amplified. 

Audience members anticipating a cosy exegesis of a national treasure’s untroubling Scottish classic could only have been disappointed. I was delighted. This may well be projection, but you could detect a slight unease as times from the Citizens audience as Graham Eatough’s technically impressive play rolled on through its sparkling second Act, and into the final third. The writer, Karen Campbell, put it well on social media shortly afterwards. While ‘technically superb’, the production left her unsure of her reaction, ‘like I was observing with awe rather than experiencing’ the show. I can understand precisely why, for the same reason why I am always bemused when women say Lanark is their favourite book, and disturbed when men reach the same conclusion. 

This is no slight on Greig’s adaptation or the talented ensemble of actors who have brought it to life. Despite the tender humanity Sandy Grierson’s sensitive and understated performance brought to the role – Lanark/Thaw remains essentially unsympathetic. If we strip away the beguiling novelty of the Glaswegian setting, the creative imagination and ambition of Gray’s parallel universes, Lanark is essentially a feeble, self-pitying beta-male's sticky wet dream. Lanark is a book of blistering misogyny. Lanark is a book in which women are cyphers. It is a teenaged book, emotionally. A book shot through with those all too familiar sinister twins of men’s desire for and hatred of women. 

Greig’s adaptation exposes this magnificently. It is precisely the Lanark I remember, but it is not the Lanark of popular memory, embodied in the tun-bellied, peering, (and safely sexless) figure of Alasdair Gray. I sometimes wonder if the qualities of Gray’s art displaces - or at least obscures - understandings of his prose. Perhaps more people claim to have read Lanark than have ever completed it. But there is a friendliness to Gray's drawing and painting, his murals and friezes. While his work can be voluptuous and sensual, in its gentleness, I find it captures none of that fizzing resentment, the spiritual smallness and inarticulacy, the toxic combination of desire and hatred, without which Lanark cannot be understood. Gray may look like a genial eccentric. He doesn’t write like one.

The light on the hill

While Andrew Wilson has been away on his summer holidays, the folk at the Scotland on Sunday asked me to fill in a couple of columns. Last week I wrote about feeling a bit frazzled by Scottish politics, and the unremitting pace of stuff since the referendum.

The aftermath. The Nationalist retrenchment. The Smith Commission. The general election campaign. The victory. The aftermath. The Scotland Bill.  I am a summer hermit crab - an introvert by any other name - who is feeling a little frayed, with no time left to stand, and stare, and reflect on all that has changed in the last twelve months. It has been, as one of Alan Bennett's history boys had it, "just one fuckin' thing after another."

The theme also came up at the Traverse in Edinburgh, at playwright David Greig's Two Minute Manifestos.  The primary guests were Olympian Susan Egelstaff and Edinburgh poet, Ron Butlin. I joined the Guardian's Libby Brooks on the cynical pundit's sofa. The Two Minute Manifesto team have recorded the aftermath in podcast form, available here.

Having looked backwards last week, today, in my final fill-in column in the Scotland on Sunday, I look forwards - towards the next Holyrood election and the tone and manifesto on which Nicola Sturgeon's government will fight for re-election. An excerpt:

"ONLY a major calamity or unforeseen scandal can now prevent Nicola Sturgeon from seizing a second term. Only a significant revival in Scottish Labour’s fortunes can deprive her government of its majority in Holyrood, and Labour stands a snowball’s chance in hell of securing that revival. Sitting pretty on an overwhelming lead, under a popular leader, eight years since Jack McConnell lost power by a single seat, the nationalists have never looked stronger, or their opponents weaker. 

I’ve yet to meet the Labour activist who has any stomach for this fight. The Tories are chipper but resigned to modest achievements. The Greens are buoyant but aware of their limitations. The capitulation is general. Yet while the politics seem all sewn up, awkward policy questions are beginning to mount up for Sturgeon’s administration in health, education, and policing. Now more than ever, the triumphant SNP needs to cultivate its critical friends."

Read the full piece here.

Jenny Hjul's demonic toys

Discourse analysts are going to have a whale of a time unpicking the referendum campaign, when it is all over.  Both campaigns have exhibited an acute awareness of the power, and perils, of language. It is no accident, for example, that all the Better Together bods alighted on the term "separation" for independence, and have employed it relentlessly.

After all, in ordinary usage, the concept of independence has an unforgettably positive ring to it. Your children flee the nest, live independently, find freedom in the big wide world. Independence summons up sturdiness, self-reliance, freedom from the interfering lets and hindrances of others. The concept of separation, by contrast, recalls the bitterness of the end of a relationship; the lovelorn soldier, casting longing eyes back to Blighty having been conscripted overseas; the involuntary loss of your favourite toe on a rusty spike.

The phenomenon of the cybernat has been summoned and taken on substance from a puff of imagination, transforming your online, off-colour pub style conversation and inevitable internet zoomers into a homogeneous, integrated and organised campaign of hate, allegedly unique to the independence movement. The Yes campaign has gone, hook line and sinker, for the sunshine language of affirmation: hope, opportunity, change -- though increasingly, you're struck but the emergence of tougher lines on the implications of continuing union (presumably the "must" dimension, of the Nationalists' tripartite mantra that we can, should and must be independence).

But one of the weirder discursive constructions in the campaign - usually exhibited by your ultramontane, black-hearted Unionist - is the refusal to countenance the idea that anybody could possibly be in favour independence without being a member of the Scottish National Party. In the latest of her string of fevered diatribes, La Passionara of the Better Together campaign (and La Cochrane), Jenny Hjul, knocks up a classic of the genre. 

Having overcome her irrational aversion to proximity to the mild, pro-independence David Hayman, Hjul wonders "have the Scottish Nationalists taken over the Edinburgh Fringe?" No, this isn't a tale of the organised, malevolent ranks of Salmond's army descending on the capital to force Britain's artists to perform endless renditions of Flowers of the Forest, and Freedom Come A' Ye, late into the night - though as ever with Hjul, you suspect the anxiety simmers just under the surface.

Today's missive from the house that reaction built ponders the ghastly poseurs and talentless, insufferable pro-independence artistes deluging Edinburgh during August (I paraphrase), and throughout, uses capital N "Nationalism" to characterise anything and everything associated with support for independence. (Sacrificing felicity of expression to the overriding desire to be on-message, Hjul suggests that Alan Bissett is "a leading light in the artists for separatism movement" - an unhappily cumbersome sentence if ever one was hammered out).

So we are told, for example, "Scottish Nationalists have long claimed to have a monopoly on passion," though helpfully, no evidence is adduced to substantiate this claim, nor is it clear who these mysterious Scottish Nationalists - and Hjul uses the term indiscriminately to cover anyone from Nicola Sturgeon to the most dyed in the wool pro-independence Labour voter - might be. 

From my perch, plenty of those intending to vote No seem pretty enthusiastic about their cause, but who am I to interfere with Hjul's sweat-beaded parallel reality? She also tells us that the man behind All Back to Bowie's - David Greig - is a "Nationalist playwright." This is, I fancy, information which will be news to David. What luck that there are helpful strangers like Hjul on hand, to diagnose what one really is.

In point of fact, I have it on good authority that David Greig is actually an elaborate SNP front. Conceived of by Alex Salmond's inner circle in the early 1980s, with the assistance of a Mrs Doubtfire style latex mask, wig and body suit, Alex Neil has been moonlighting as the playwright for the last three decades, squeezing in his ghostwriting between his parliamentary duties.

Oh. And National Collective. All of those sprightly young things and separatist hipsters are also an SNP front. That Alex Neil is a talented mimic. Oh, and I'm an SNP front too. And if you're reading this while supporting independence, chances are that you're one too, you silly sausage Scottish Nationalist you. Your unsolicited membership chit is in the post.

Unlike Greig, I am a member of the SNP, but this determination - in the teeth of all the evidence - to find Scottish Nationalists everywhere in the independence campaign is profoundly odd. Why is it so difficult to conceive of the idea that those who find nationalistic sensibilities do little for them politically might sympathise with a Yes vote in September? Or that the case for independence finds support from across folk of different political proclivities? Salmond has better things to be doing, that plucking on the strings of thousands of guileless marionettes.

It is remarkable, even down to the level of language, how far folk like Hjul are prepared to go, to hang onto the idea that self-government is a pathological enthusiasm, limited to a tiny band of vaguely disreputable Scottish eccentrics. If you can't find your preferred opponent in the real world? Use your imagination. Project them into existence. Conjure them, in language, from the ether. Like demon toys.

In the Goblin King's Yurt

The sun leaches in through the haar. You blink awake, a gluey aftermath of hops parching your mouth. Your napper throbs. Your eyes look like tormented lychees, your clothes are a rumpled mess. Congratulations! You have passed the first test of the Edinburgh Fringe. But having lurched into the street, and stowed a doughy slab of square sausage in your shifting bilgewater, what's to be done with the tail end of the morning? Gentle mental stimulation seems indicated. Nothing too ferocious, but just enough to get your sluggish synapses crackling with a bit of life.

Ailing lushes of Edinburgh, despair not. Your benevolent compère, David Greig, has anticipated your needs with All Back to Bowie's, which kicks off today and runs until the 24th of August. Of the show's conception, the organisers write:

In response to David Bowie’s famous declaration at the Brit Awards, a group of Scottish artists are setting up camp in Bowie’s (metaphorical) living room for an irreverent lunchtime show exploring the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, and what it might mean for the country to stay with – or leave – the UK. Billed as ‘an hour of gentle thinking and hard daydreaming’, the show – which is in St Andrew’s Square, Edinburgh, from 1-24 August, as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – is a non profit making shot in the dark made by people hungry to bring the ideas, internationalism and insight of the referendum debate to a wider public.

David has assembled a stellar line up of witterers between now and the end of August, in conversations which will cover everything from the gender politics of the referendum (Wham! Bam! Thank you Ma’am!) to the Braveheart myth, Tory Scotland, the future of Scottish foreign policy, England, Ireland, Wales, London - and aptly enough in this Commonwealth Games season, sport.  

They've even pencilled me a few times over the run, beginning tomorrow afternoon (2nd August) on the theme Tactful Cactus – Is There a Scottish Establishment? As attentive readers will have suspected, I was trying to gather my wits on this theme earlier in the week. Cailean Gallagher of the Mair Nor a Roch Wind blog offered this engaging response.

I'll also be back over in the capital next Tuesday (5th) for Bevan Tried To Change The Nation – What Happened To The Idea of Britain? - along with David Torrance, Neal Ascherson, James Robertson and other, intimidatingly talented souls, finishing up in the Goblin King's yurt with Dancing With The Big Boys – Negotiations After Yes on the 8th. If you spot me, do halloo. 

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All Back To Bowie’s runs from the first to the twenty-fourth of August, at 12.20pm, at Stand in the Square in St Andrew’s Square, Edinburgh. You can book advance tickets here. Bella also have a good deal going for the canny, who like a bargain.

Yeah even unto the Middle Ages

I’ve always been interested in confidence, partly by dint of pure narcissism. When it comes to self-assertion, I’ve long felt like two souls in the same body, the one self-possessed, the other possessed by irrational, inadequate self-doubt. I will thoughtlessly take on challenges which would make many folk shiver and choke. I can stand up, noteless and half prepared in thronging rooms full of people, and put in a brisk oratorical turn. Somehow, perhaps sometimes misguidedly, I’m sure that I’ll put in a decent performance and that somewhere in my skull, relevant thoughts clatter about and will dutifully assemble themselves into something coherent at the indicated moment. 

If you and I met, or in company, I can be brisk, cheerful, inquisitive, intimate – but if the spirit of confidence deserts me, I find myself prey to irrational hindrances, unlyrical, stoppered, odd – even, or perhaps particularly, about small, unconscious acts and ordinary things. It is exhausting to be useless, and generally pointless. The source of one's inadequacies are rarely as formidable as they seem, when your mind spins off into gyroscopic anxiety. Over time, with a growing sense of myself, this doubleness has receded, but across my short life, this Jekyll and Hyde attitude to confidence has both tested and tended to confuse those around me: teachers, colleagues, friends. I find it confusing too. 

Folk often seem to assume that confidence is a zero-sum sort of calculation: either you are graced with it, or you are bereft: bumptious or a trembler. That’s not my experience. Teaching undergraduates in tutorials and seminars also opens a window into self-assertion's fickle ways. I've known students who you'd need a crowbar or a picklock to coax into speaking during the session, but who explode into vivacious little creatures as soon as the class breaks and the tutor's not-terrifically baleful eye leaves them.

A little flicker crosses the face of others - the cue that they've got something to say - but an encouraging prod is required if the thought, however cogent, is to be expressed. The heedless confidence of others outstrips their capacity. Being alive to this psychological dimension of the encounter is one of the unexpected, rewarding but challenging, parts of teaching.  This work has persuaded me, more than ever, that confidence isn't just a matter of personal psychology - it is structural. We build it up or leave it to atrophy in families and institutions. 

Yesterday, Alex Massie tacked this post over at the Spectator, asking "Who cares if English commentators like or respect Scotland?" Confidence is at the essence of the piece, but Alex's argument is multi-pronged. Surely being desperately concerned about the good opinion of others isn't really an expression of confidence, but actually craven and a bit needy? Isn't it outsourcing your self-esteem to other folk, making your happiness and equanimity contingent on their good or bad conceits of you? But Alex doesn't stop there, taking a swipe at what he perceives as a tendency amongst Yes advocates to regard:

"... anyone voting No this September lacks confidence in Scotland. A No voter, you see, bears the mark of the Scottish cringe and if that’s not obviously or prominently displayed on his napper it surely scars his conscience."

I wonder though if Alex isn't at risk of conflating a few issues. I agree that seeking externally for approval is no expression of confidence, but the opposite. On the other hand, while I don't think voting No is necessarily an expression of lack of confidence, and some Scots doubtless feel perfectly chipper and self-assertive within the UK, I sit with the folk Massie criticises: for most folk, the decision to vote No won't a vindication of healthy, pith-helmeted British imperiousness, but an expression of lack confidence. As Massie rightly contends, you meet plenty of Scots who would would scratch their head at the idea that Scottishness is a wooden leg within the United Kingdom.

The theme of this Saturday's session of David Greig's All Back to Bowie's #indyref Fringe discussion is Tactful Cactus – Is There a Scottish Establishment? Having passed through private schooling in Glasgow, Edinburgh law school and Oxford, I'm familiar with the mindset of the folk Alex is referring to and to a significant extent participate in it.  These institutions generated and continue to generate folk, unawed and at home in cloistered corridors. You can still imagine many of these unselfconscious bluffers donning rifles and linen suits and setting sail to rule some luckless corner of the British imperial map. Such are the wages of privilege.

Visiting the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, and then wander around the New Town, has a similar effect. I'm always struck by the continuity of feel. The faces of the periwigged worthies of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries easily transposed onto the bustling suits and polished shoes of today. Watching Edinburgh's bourgeois tribes clip confidently through the neo-classical architecture, I'm always reminded of the scene from Chris Mullin's Very British Coup, where the ancient establishment functionary explains to the socialist Prime Minister why the security services have conspired against his government. As Harry Perkins says, these are "people who remain quiet, behind the scenes, generation after generation, yeah even unto the middle ages."

Doctors, judges, bankers, Faculty men, Scotland Office mandarins, these well-heeled, black-coated gentlemen did and continue to do the British state some service. The pacts struck by the Ghost of Henry Dundas still commands allegiances. The High Court of Justiciary which convicted and transported Thomas Muir for sedition still sits, in some important sense. For most Scots, this is a bewildering world apart, but having encountered it, one cannot but be struck by its robust sense of self, and its unselfconscious confidence in the exercise of power. Quietly, behind the scenes, yeah even unto the middle ages.

The SNP have adopted the mantra that Scotland can, should and must be independent. For my money, the Yes campaign has made good headway with the idea that we should be independent, but we're still struggling to persuade people that we can. In bridging that gap, confidence matters. If we fail, the Yes campaign must bear the weight of blame. But for the overwhelming majority of folk, unsteeped in what can sometimes seem like the uncritical hive mind of the Scottish establishment, I struggle to believe that a No vote would represent a happy, dauntless vindication of Scotland's place in Britain. If this referendum has revealed one thing, it is that Scots allegiance to the British state is - perhaps disturbingly - provisional.

Treacherous weapons

Newsflash: prominent / eminent / official person expresses opinion / prediction somehow relevant to independence referendum shocker, Yes / No campaigners outraged.

It is becoming a familiar format. The media unearth a suitably credentialled worthy or bigwig, ask them a few prickly questions, and invite an indiscretion liable to wind up one side of the constitutional debate. Which is generally fair game. This Sunday it was Barroso's declaration that an independent Scotland's EU accession would be "difficult if not impossible", for which read, bloody hard, tending towards chuffing hard. Cue salivation in Class 2B, as the Bash Street Better Together kids get their tweets formulated and fire off a series of whizzpoppers about pariah Scotland's hilarious exclusion from Europe, like the plooky teen tapping, ignored, at the form room door. 

On one level, this is a perfectly understandable response on their part.  Uncertainty and risk are the No campaign's favoured instruments.  They want us to see the independence referendum as a jury might a criminal trial, with Yes campaigners' being afforded the opportunity to displace the presumption in favour of union.  Has the prosecution proven its case? If not, the defence need not take to its pins and clear its throat to offer a reasoned account of its own. The proposition falls. 

Where, it seems to me, Better Together go wrong is that they've ceased properly to discriminate between credible and incredible lines of attack.  Does a particular intervention, however wrong-headed, ignorant or loopy favour our position? Then attack, attack, attack. This isn't a phenomenon unique to themselves. Pro-independence folk share the bad habit of enthusiastically promoting congenial interventions in the debate, however objectively dodgy their reasoning or provenance.  The First Minister loves to quote an eminent somebody, pouring icy water on an opponent's position. But we have to try to retain our critical faculties, and resist the partisan logic that every scrap of opinion, prophecy or claim which happens to chime with our constitutional preferences must be right.  That way intellectual bankruptcy lies.

Barroso's intervention this week furnishes an admirable case in point. Whatever your view about the desirability of Scottish independence, his remarks over the weekend were cobblers, and all fair-minded folk who want Scots to vote on the facts instead of distortions should have regarded them as cobblers.  Since, a number of constitutionally unaligned or no-tending voices have offered interesting (and quietly incredulous) responses to the Commission President's opinion. Sir David Edward, a No voter who served on the European Court of Justice and on the Calman Commission, described Barroso's reasoning as "absurd". Professor Michael Keating at the Future of the UK and Scotland blog argues that his intervention "confuses the question" of Scottish accession to the EU and the real and unreal challenges facing it, concluding that:

"None of this is in itself an argument for independence. Unionists can argue that Scotland is better off as part of a big EU state than as a small independent one. It is not consistent, however, to agree that Scots can vote to be an independent state but then seek to deprive them of the basic rights of any European democracy."

While this morning, for the Scottish Constitutional Futures Forum, Professor Neil Walker - "inclined to vote 'no' in September's referendum" - responds to Barroso's comments. He writes that these:

"... recent  events  have fuelled my anxiety about  the climate in which the debate is taking place. They have made me wonder whether the case for independence is getting a fair crack of the whip on the international stage, and have caused  me to ponder the implications of lending my vote to a position that remains so reliant upon negative rather than positive arguments."  

Noting, of Barroso's comments, and asking:

"These remarks have been well publicised. Predictably, they have been seized upon by Better Together as vindicating their long-standing scepticism about an independent Scotland's EU future, and as further evidence of the emptiness of nationalist promises. But why should anyone listen to Barroso on this topic?  Does he have a legitimate political voice in the debate? Does he speak from a position of legal authority?  Or, regardless of his political or legal standing, does he simply have a good insider argument, and one that we should heed? The answer, on all three counts, would seem to be 'no'. Why is this so, and why is it important to the integrity of the debate that the kind of intervention Barroso has sought fit to make should be challenged?"

It is an interesting piece, exploring the complex and contested principles undergirding the European Union, and how these relate to the particular case of an independent Scotland's chance of negotiated EU accession, and the terms of that accession.  

For what it is worth, my own view is that the Nats bungled the early argument on Scotland's EU status, the rhetoric of "automatic" membership offering Better Together an easy and predictable free shot at our vitals on the reasonable basis that (a) there are legal protocols governing EU accession and (b) EU treaty amendment requires unanimity among Member States.  However smooth or rough Scotland's accession to the EU might be, and whatever might be lost or gained in terms in that negotiation, "automatic" seamless and unruptured the process ain't. We have to make informed, prudential and principled judgements about its outcomes.

As Lord Glennie observed in a recent Court of Session decision, "the decision on continued membership will not ultimately be decided solely as a legal question but will, to a greater or lesser extent, involve questions of hard politics." To my mind, taking into account the principles undergirding the EU, and past practice, these hard politics favour some sort of EU accommodation with an independent Scotland. For that reason alone, the demand for certainty emanating from some quarters of the pro-Union debate is absurd. It is like one of David Greig's Yes/No plays.

Yes: Should we go out for dinner, darling?

No: Can you guarantee that the restaurant won't have been booked out, exploded, or become infested with weasels?

Yes: Um. No.  

No: We'll stay in. Microwave mac-and-cheese it is.

Much - too much - of the uncritical response to Barroso's intervention continued to foster this kind of ridiculous shadow-boxing. The temptation to squeeze short term tactical advantage from an intervention damaging to the other side may seem irresistable for the cynical hack.  It is certainly understandable, and a measure of skulduggery and position-taking is to be expected in a political campaign.  But a treacherous weapon is ever a danger to the hand.

Stands Scotland where it did?

Well, the damn thing's difficult to shift.  Earlier this week, I went to Glasgow's Theatre Royal to see David Greig's Dunsinane. The play saw its first production in 2010, is much-coloured by the Iraq War, and represents a counterfactual take on what happened after the end of Shakespeare's Macbeth.  

The revival stars many of the members of the original cast, including Siobhan Redmond as the surviving Lady Macbeth, and Jonny Phillips as Siward, Earl of Northumberland. Greig brings us a drama of occupation, told primarily from the perspective of Siward's callow English soldiers, trying to keep, and enforce, his kind of a peace in a Scotland rent by civil war. In its essence, it is a tale about the failure of a worthy Englishman to understand the perfidious, thrawn, contrary folk of Scotland and our Esher politics. Greig's Scotland is bleak, poetic -- and above all, cold. 

If you get the chance, the show really is worth seeing, pitching for big national themes. The production is on its way down south, with a tour taking in Birmingham, Bath and my old haunt Oxford, before bending back up to Edinburgh. Glasgow audiences - even for the theatre - are notoriously boisterous. It'd be fascinating to see the production amid a primarily English audience, on an English stage, when Greig's gags are pitched at the Other rather than the Self. 

While the Theatre Royal audience twinkled with self-recognition at the droll Malcolm's cynical take on his countrymen, and at the English infrantrymen's bitching about Scotland, the whole thing takes on a different cast, seen from the other side of Tweed, in a political context where our independence referendum continues to prompt bemusement and perplexity among our southern neighbours. Seems a pity to miss it.

You can read my ★★★ review of the production here.

On Gl★sgow...

One of the great pleasures about being back in Glasgow is how much stuff is on the go. Oxford can be a curious town. So much of the population pass through in transit, tarrying at most for a year or two, the place itself sometimes feels ... hollow, almost.  Not a place in which folk really live, day to day.

This is an exaggeration, of course, and I have friends who still stay there quite contentedly, but I'd struggle ever to envision returning myself on any more permanent basis.  

One frustrating aspect of my time there was the thinness of the local theatre scene. True, Oxford boasts a pretty, expansive Playhouse, but its repertory company long withered away, and it is only now starting to produce its own drama, instead playing host to touring shows from across the country. The National Theatre of Scotland are taking their revival of David Greig's Dunsinane (2010) down there later this month.

This is all well and good, but the lack of localness, and the absence of an abiding relationship between the theatre company and the wider the community, only underlines Oxford's nagging civic gap. 

In fairness, Oxford students are a rapacious dramatic lot. One of the most (unintentionally) funny things I saw was a gaggle of English public schoolboys, trying their gangled pins and reedy voices on West Side Story. The idea of shimmying knife-gangs, and crooning hard-nuts, was already troubling.  Needless to say, for all of their enthusiasm, the stilted, callow academic types didn't quite realise the Sharks or the Jets.

What's more, a few committed independent companies (including my friends and comrades, Troika) bring some splendid productions to life, including the summer staple of open-air Shakespeare, requiring only brass lungs, a voice that carries, and the good luck to situate your run during a blue-skied week.

Now that I'm back in Glasgow, I'll be doing the odd theatre view for the good folk of Exeunt magazine. Last week, I hied me down to the Citizens Theatre to see their new production of Crime and Punishment, on in Glasgow until the 28th, before transferring to Liverpool, and back up to Edinburgh at the end of October. It is a really interesting, theatrical, thought-provoking production, which I'd commend to you all.

If you need further enticing, you can read my whole review here.

Are you a Scots Shakespeare hidden in the wings?

Just in case anyone among my readership are bashful but budding writers, I wanted to draw your collective attention to the Open.Stage Playwriting Competition being run by Glasgow’s Tron Theatre.

Open to all folk living in Scotland or of Scots stock loitering in the rest of the British Isles over the age of 18, the competition invites a synopsis of the proposed theatrical yarn and 20-odd pages of your writing to give the judges a sense of your capacity to realise the proposed material. After the closing date at 5pm on Friday 18^th of December, the three submissions determined to be the nattiest by a panel of Scottish theatre’s high heid yins will go forward as finalists. The three playwrights will be given £2,000 and mentored as they coax the little shoots of their plays into full flower. Bringing the competition into the digital age – and encouraging public participation – the three finalists will then have to film a trailer of their would-be bit of art, which the common footsoldiers of the stalls will vote on, with an eye to its theatrical interest to them. The winner of this vote will then be professionally staged by the Tron Theatre Company as the flagship production of their Autumn 2010 season. The disappointed pair will also get a rehearsed read-through of their material at the Tron – and I imagine, if they’re worth the effort, the plays will have a good chance of catching the eye of one of big fishes that slap about in Scotland’s small arty pond. The small print also reveals that the winner will receive the not-unreasonable sum of £6,560 for his or her labours.

Sitting in judgement over the synopses are Andy Arnold, Artistic Director of the Tron, Jay Smith, well-known actor Peter Mullan, Vicky Featherstone who is Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the National Theatre of Scotland, Janice Forsyth from off the tranny, Davids Greig & Harrower, successful playwrights, Keith Bruce arts hack for the Herald and Julie Ellen of the Playwrights’ Studio Scotland, based in the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. It is a competition of amazing potential and significant possibility. Any among you with a dramatic and literary bent who get an itch and consider giving it a go – I’d strongly encourage you to enter. As a lethargic, slothsome sort of person myself, it is all too easy to see these little possibilities pass one by, without even dignifying them with a stab. The excuses are pretty thin since for this competition, you don’t have to mint a perfectly pitched 90 minute performance – only a inspirational précis and a series of brisk vignettes.

For any whose interest is piqued, all the relevant information can be found on the Tron website here.