What a light the National Theatre of Scotland has thrown on the country and its drama. In the year of its founding, 2006, the company ignited the Edinburgh festival with John Tiffany’s freewheeling production of Gregory Burke’s ferocious exploration of white male tribalism, Black Watch. This year, Nat McCleary’s Thrown shows very different Scottish faces. Look, no men!
Johnny McKnight’s snappy production begins with women hurtling across the stage in satin fighting gear, but though the play is full of jousting for position, its focus is on cooperation. Uniformity is the opposite of the point as a group of females gather to learn how to do backhold wrestling in preparation for the Highland Games. Imogen is rich and black and mourning her twin sister; Chantelle is poor and white, struggling with memories of her alcoholic mother, avid for leopard-skin leggings and a small dog that won’t go out of fashion. Jo’s Jamaican mother is dead; she has a white father, knows Gaelic and is aiming for a job in London; Chantelle, her oldest girlfriend, calls her Coco Pop. Helen is white and elderly (when she turns up for practice she is told “the knittin group is in the next room”) and always wanted to be a wife. The white coach (Lesley Hart is particularly strong) roars about clearing energy channels and is not sure whether she feels more male or female. All of them are Scottish.
