THE annual ceremony of the Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland was held at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh last Sunday. In addition to celebrating the best work on Scotland’s stages in the 2022-23 theatre season, the event also commemorated two important milestones in Scottish theatre.
As 2023 marks the 60th year of the Traverse Theatre – which began as a theatre club, before morphing into Scotland’s new writing theatre – it is also the 50th anniversary of the path-breaking play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, by the late, great dramatist John McGrath and his 7:84 Scotland theatre company.
In addition to awarding the regular 10 prizes for Outstanding Performance, Best Design, Best New Play and the like, we (the 12 professional critics who judge the awards) sometimes present a CATS Whiskers award for a particularly noteworthy contribution to Scottish theatre.
This year it was obvious that the Whiskers award had to go to The Cheviot, 7:84’s great work of politics, song and ceilidh, which explored the history of the Highlands and Island of Scotland, from the appalling brutality of the Clearances to the private profiteering that followed the discovery of North Sea oil.
This famous show transformed Scottish culture, not only with its special brand of political theatre, but also its pioneering touring to small Highland and Island communities.
We were delighted to have the screen producer Danny McGrath (son of John) and actor and singer Dolina Maclennan (a member of the original cast of The Cheviot) in attendance to accept the award. Other surviving members of that great company (John Bett, Alex Norton and Bill Paterson), who were unable to attend, sent video messages.
In his message, Paterson reflected on the fact that McGrath’s avowedly socialist theatre company had been named, in the early 1970s, after a statistic in The Economist magazine which stated that seven per cent of the UK population owned 84% of the wealth. “I’m delighted to say we’ve improved on that”, he added, sardonically.
“Now, one per cent owns 99% of the wealth. So, didn’t we do well on that front?”
Norton told the members of the Scottish theatre community assembled at the Traverse that he was delighted that the CATS were recognising the significance of “the play that really, really changed” the lives of himself and his fellow cast members. Indeed, the Two Doors Down actor added, The Cheviot “changed Scottish theatre”. It was, he said, “something extraordinary, and something I’m delighted that I was part of.”
In the awards’ regular categories, Enough of Him, written by May Sumbwanyambe, and staged by the National Theatre of Scotland and Pitlochry Festival Theatre, took the lion’s share of the prizes. Sumbwanyambe himself received the gong for Best New Play, while Orla O’Loughlin was awarded Best Director. The show was also given the CATS’ greatest accolade, the Best Production prize for 2022-23.
Sumbwanyambe’s drama imagines events within the walls of Ballindean, the 18th-century mansion of the Scottish slave owner Sir John Wedderburn, at the time when Joseph Knight (an African slave brought to Scotland via Jamaica) begins his successful fight for his freedom through the Scottish courts. “In the so-called ‘Culture Wars’, people are obsessing about statues and who’s going to put a 50-word plaque at the bottom of one”, the playwright told the Sunday National.
“Statues are only vanity made solid. In my history plays I’m more interested in creating statues of the mind, living statues that will not be easily torn down.”
Speaking of the CATS awards ceremony itself, Sumbwanyambe said: “We often say that ‘Scotland is a village’, and the ceremony felt like that. It felt like a big family celebrating the impressive amount of excellent work that’s created in Scottish theatre.”
Another big winner in the 2022-23 CATS was Love Beyond (Act of Remembrance), by acclaimed performer and theatre-maker Ramesh Meyyappan, which received the Best Technical Presentation prize and the award for Best Music and Sound, for the lovely and emotive compositions by David Paul Jones. The piece, which was directed by Matthew Lenton, was created for producers Raw Material and Vanishing Point theatre company, with support from the British Deaf Association.
The play deals, with great sensitivity and theatrical imagination, with the heartbreaking subject of dementia within the Deaf community. Its central protagonist, Old Harry (played by Meyyappan, who is himself Deaf), is simultaneously losing his short-term memory and his language, BSL (British Sign Language).
However, as so often in people with dementia, Harry is reliving vividly long-term memories of the great romance of his younger life. These memories are represented by way of beautiful, ingeniously-realised dream-like sequences.
The other award winners were: for Outstanding Performance, Sally Reid (for Shirley Valentine at Pitlochry Festival Theatre) and David Hayman (Cyprus Avenue, Tron Theatre, Glasgow); for Best Ensemble, the cast of Castle Lennox (Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh and Lung Ha Theatre); for Best Design, Macbeth (an undoing) (Royal Lyceum); and, for Best Show for Children and Young People, The Gift, (Capital Theatres and Barrowland Ballet).
Due to the knock-on effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, there were only nine months between the 2022 CATS ceremony, at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow last September, and last weekend’s jamboree at the Traverse. It speaks volumes about the talent and commitment of everyone working in Scottish theatre that – despite the often swingeing cuts in funding the sector is facing and the ongoing impacts of the pandemic – Scottish theatre managed to offer audiences and critics such a brilliant and diverse array of high quality work in just three quarters of a year.
It seems appropriate, in this anniversary year of The Cheviot, which is a totemic work of Scottish political theatre, that Enough of Him, a play that speaks with such power and intelligence to the horrors and complexities of Scotland’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, should receive such acclaim, not only from we critics, but also from audiences across Scotland.
For full details of the CATS 2022-23 nominees and winners, visit: criticsawards.theatrescotland.com
