On the far side of the field, a girls’ football match is under way. Over to the left there is highland dancing. Immediately in front is a ramp set up by the cycle stunt team, just along from the bouncy castle. Somewhere in between, actor Lesley Hart is queueing for the haggis-hurling competition.
“Are you going to perform?” asks the compere in a silver-spangled jacket when he finds out Hart is here with the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS).
“Not as far as I know,” she says before giving the haggis an impressive lob.
As her fellow actors look on, three boys run up to playwright Nat McCleary. “Are you in Jamie Johnson?” they ask nervously, recognising her from the CBBC footballing drama. She is thrilled to be spotted.
These are the Bearsden and Milngavie Highland Games, and McCleary and I are here not to throw haggises but because of what is going on in the adjacent field. Not far from the hammer throwing and the inflatable slide, Heather Neilson is running an afternoon of backhold wrestling.
This simple, fast and compelling sport involves hugging your opponent then trying to topple them over without releasing your grip. The loser is the first to hit the ground. The folk sport, depicted in stone carvings from as early as the 7th century, is sometimes treated as a poor relation, but Neilson is determined to keep it alive.
And it was Neilson, who works as a camera operator, who gave McCleary the idea for her debut play. Staged by the NTS and heading for the Edinburgh international festival, Thrown uses backhold wrestling as a metaphor. “You have two people who become one thing with diametrically opposed views,” says McCleary as we watch. “Their experience of the fight is not the same. You have unity and tension and, at some point, one will be surprised by the other.”
Written with the same snappy pace as the sport itself (“You don’t get to sit and rest”), her play is about five mismatched women who form a wrestling team. All they have in common is their ambition to win.
McCleary has no history with backhold wrestling. What fascinates her about the highland games is that they present a picture of Scotland she does not recognise. “It’s not a Scottishness that has been part of my experience,” says the actor turned playwright from Coatbridge, just east of Glasgow, who describes herself as working-class, mixed-race and bisexual. “That’s what I wanted to explore in the play: wrestling with self-identity, wrestling with national identity and wrestling physically.”
Sitting with us in the Saturday afternoon sun is director Johnny McKnight, who remembers the highland games of his childhood on the Ayrshire coast. “It’s a big part of the social calendar because not much goes on in Ardrossan,” he laughs. “But there are people who are Scottish who have never been to the highland games. Living in Coatbridge, why would you when you live so close to the city? The play is about whether labels tell us anything about who anybody is.”
“Oral history is constructed,” says McCleary, looking out at the field where two girls in kilts are readying themselves for a backhold bout. “I don’t feel recognised by this kind of Scotland. We’ve bought so much into the rhetoric of Scotland the brave, and tartan, that there isn’t space to build an identity that reflects the current landscape.”
For McCleary, who has a Scottish and Jamaican heritage, the gulf between narrative and reality feels particularly acute. She was once told she should not be speaking Gaelic because of the colour of her skin. “The mixed-race experience is distinct from the black, white or ethnically specific experiences,” she says. “It is to be neither one nor the other. It’s hard to say I’m both because I’m not given permission to identify as either fully. There’s a no man’s land experience which makes it difficult to feel included in a national identity that is presented so traditionally.”
The schism only gets wider in an age of social media bubbles. “We’re all avoiding difficult conversations and retreating into echo chambers,” says McKnight. “That’s why the world is becoming more toxic and rightwing. The play asks: ‘How do you work as a team if you’re all radically different?’”
“This is not a play about race, it’s not even just a play about Scottishness,” McCleary adds, as the Milngavie Pipe Band strike up. “It’s about what unity looks like. We’ve lost the art of tolerating one another. In an increasingly polarised world, we’re losing the art of conversation, discussion and disagreement. No one has curiosity, everyone has opinion. True unity is people with deep-rooted differences being able to find respect, care and empathy for one another. It takes vulnerability and humility to stand next to someone you don’t agree with.”
Thrown is at Queen’s Hall, Dunoon, on 6 July, and touring until 27 August
