Drew Milne

Cheerful History: the Political Theatre of John McGrath

In this essay, Drew Milne suggests affinities between the dramatization of history in the work of John McGrath and Karl Marx. He shows how both Marx and McGrath refused to mourn the histories of Germany and Scotland as tragedies, but that differences emerge in the politics of McGraths radical populism differences apparent in McGraths use of music, historical quotation, and direct address. McGraths layered theatricality engages audience sympathies in ways that emphasize awkward parallels between modern and pre-modern Scotland, and this can lead to unreconciled tensions between nationalism and socialism which are constitutive of McGraths plays. Drew Milne is the Judith E. Wilson Lecturer in Drama and Poetry, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. He has published various articles on drama and performance, including essays on the work of August Boal, Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter, and is currently completing a book entitled Performance Criticism.

In memory of John McGrath, 19352002. IN AN OFT-QUOTED remark at the beginning of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Karl Marx claimed that the great events and characters of world history occur twice: the rst time as tragedy, the second as farce.1 Marx was not offering a general theory of history, but making a political point designed to satirize the strange sense of repetition in French history in the period 184851, not least the farcical return of Napoleon I as Louis Bonaparte. His jest is in the spirit of John McGraths combination of historical reconstruction, in particular of Scottish history, and a knockabout theatrical style. McGraths strategies are similar to those suggested by Marxs 1869 preface to the second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire, which talks of how French literature has knocked the Napoleonic legend on the head with the weapons of historical research, criticism, satire, and wit. 2 McGraths work responds to the weight of history not with tragic lamentation, but with comic historical sketches and direct political address. The political context may be farcical, but his theatrical forms mix entertainment with didactic content so as to encourage audience condence

and solidarity. Cynicism and apathy are important features of the popular perception of contemporary politics as farce. Political theatre needs, then, to overcome the farcical representation of politics by other media and the political indifference and quietism generated by media circuses. McGrath nds resources for this conict of media in what might be called radical populism, raiding forms of theatrical entertainment more broadly based in performance culture than the term farce suggests.3 McGraths work can be situated, accordingly, as a negotiation between historical tragedy and the politics of contemporary farce. This develops as negotiations between historical sentimentality and radical memorialization, and between pantomimic burlesque and morally driven satire. Joseph Farrell described The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil as a series of such combinations: The play mingled fact with invention, pathos with humour, satire with tragedy, the grotesque and the straightforward, the entertaining and the didactic, music with acting, politics with farce. 4 Sometimes this medley integrates entertainment and political seriousness, sometimes the juxtaposition is more dissonant. For Farrell: 313

The Cheviot offered a synthesis of present and past, showing not just the roots of contemporary reality but presenting the continuity of experience, of oppression and injustice. That sounds high minded, but there was a festive note in the music and verse and laughter in the satire.5

How does The Cheviot synthesize historicist continuity, political seriousness, and festivity? Why do McGraths other plays seem to have been less successful? Farrell comments that: The Games a Bogey used similar techniques in an urban setting, using the variety show framework instead of the ceilidh, and switching between the life of John MacLean and present-day Scotland. But it never carried the same level of conviction.6 While MacLean is a presiding spirit for many of McGraths plays, such as Border Warfare, there nevertheless seems to be insufficient critical distance between MacLean and contemporary events to sustain a whole play without becoming too didactic. While the ceilidh format in The Cheviot may have an organic relation to contemporary popular culture, the combination of urban contexts and variety theatricality carries less credibility with audiences familiar with commercial exploitation of such forms. Despite attempts to radicalize pantomime, the genre generates its own ideological effects and containments. Something similar undermines attempts to radicalize music hall and variety formats. For syntheses of entertainment and political analysis there seems to be more purchase in material from before the formation of modern, industrial Scotland. If the tendency towards historical pastiche and parody in McGraths work suggests affinities with postmodernism, McGrath himself resisted any such association. In the preface to Six-Pack, McGrath quips that he has always claimed more affinity with the Pre-modern than the Post.7 In an interview, he even suggested that postmodernism creates a pre-fascist mentality thats growing here and in the United States,8 and went on to comment that: I never believed in the Trotskyist General Staff theory of Revolution, nor were we avant-garde. 9 His preference was rather for Gramscis conception of organic intellectuals. 314

Anxieties about indigenous or organic qualities also inform the way many of the most contemporary forms of political theatre synthesize pre-modern theatrical forms and pre-modern political parables, notably in the work of Brecht. Nevertheless, the use of premodern perspectives to illuminate contemporary Scottish politics is not without its perils. One of the main functions of nationalism within Scottish ideology is to obscure the profound differences between pre-modern Scotland and the role of industrialization and capital in modern Scotland. 7:84 can hardly be faulted for highlighting the struggle against capitalism, preguring contemporary struggles against globalization, perhaps most notably in Blood Red Roses. The popular theatricality of their work nevertheless owes much to avowedly pre-modern modes of entertainment. The apparently amicable split between 7:84 Scotland and Wildcat is often put down to musical differences a divergence between folk and contemporary pop music. According to Farrell:
Dave Anderson and I were developing a strain of work which was very musical and rooted in current popular tradition, in rock, rhythm and blues, in jazz and other forms of that type. John McGrath had different requirements. He was tending to use folk music, especially for the Highland tours.10

The politics of taste and strategy in such musical differences are symptomatic of different conceptions of popular theatre and of the future of culture. The revival of folk music in the fties and sixties, in conjunction with the protest singing associated with such gures as Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, generated a radical populism around folk music. There is nevertheless a hint of romantic nostalgia about folk culture as an antidote to industrial culture. The roots of political song, from political ballads to love laments, run deep in Irish and Scottish culture. The politics of song runs throughout McGraths work, but for all those who see political potential in the songs of folk and popular culture, there are others who see such cultures of song as part of the nightmare of history from which they are trying to escape.

The history of popular music generates conictual recognitions within audiences, not least across the generational conicts and aspirations associated with different musical forms. One key source for The Cheviot was Billy Connollys Great Northern Welly Boot Show, among whose performers were Bill Paterson, Alex Norton, and John Bett, key members of the 7:84 company that put on The Cheviot. Elizabeth MacLennan is critical of the triumphal machismo of Billy Connolly and the male chauvinism laced in with the comedy and class awareness of the Great Northern Welly Boot Show.11 This points to gender politics constitutive of the culture of popular music which can only be re-politicized with difficulty and at the risk of undermining those features of the music which account for its popularity. Part of the difficulty of developing popular theatre through the cultural sensitivity of contemporary music is the way that music symbolizes divergent tendencies in cultural differentiation. Musical taste articulates cultural and class differences, and in unpredictable ways, especially within an audience of mixed backgrounds and ages.12 One of McGraths more explicit engagements with capitalist pop music can be gleaned from Christopher Harvie:
His Little Red Hen (1977), a strip-cartoon history of the Scottish labour movement since the brave days of John MacLean, continued the American dance metaphor of The Cheviot, satirizing the SNP and its oil politics as the fabulously talentless Scottish rock group, the Bay City Rollers, capering cluelessly in their tartans while being ripped off by their managers.13

Glasgow, the idea of a variety show with MacLean as MC comes too close, perhaps, to self-parody. The spectre of Harry Lauder and tartan kitsch haunts even those, such as Billy Connolly, who speak out against such spectres. More generally, the evocation of longer sweeps of Scottish history appears to mobilize nationalist sentiments capable of overcoming more immediate class conicts within contemporary audiences. An important section of The Games a Bogey reads as follows:
Bill P. stops playing MacLean, and comes forward to speak as himself.

bill p: John MacLeans demand for a Scottish

Workers Republic wasnt based on tartan jingoism or mindless nationalism. It was based upon a basic socialist belief that every nation has a right to self-determination. . . . MacLean demanded a socialist Scotland, not to divide the people from the rest of the world, but to let them play their part to the full in the international struggle against capital and its evils.14

This satirical engagement with popular culture exploits the taste of those for whom the Bay City Rollers were already comic rather than analyzing their popularity. There are evident advantages in mobilizing the folk memory of pre-modern cultures of song to generate audience solidarity. But the historicity of such music can nevertheless be heard as a romantic resistance to modern industrial soundscapes. If John MacLeans political theatres were the city and the workplace, above all in

This position is reiterated throughout McGraths work, but modern Scottish audiences seem to be more comfortable with the awkward combination of socialism and nationalism characteristic of contemporary Scottish ideology. There is bathos in the movement of language to the moralism of capitalist evils. Even if international socialism is asserted at key moments in McGraths work, such assertions come out of the way The Cheviot and Border Warfare call on the ideology and folk memory of Scottish nationalism. McGraths work appears to have been most popular when the dialogue between past tragedies and contemporary struggles memorializes pre-modern and pre-industrial Scotland. A mark of this tendency is the way McGrath dramatizes gures such as Fletcher of Saltoun and Thomas Muir. Fletcher sits more easily within the ideology of nationalism, while Muirs radicalism reects the unnished business of the bourgeois reform of Scotland and the British constitution. These gures fall somewhere between good and bad guys, between the avowedly unsubtle caricature of political enemies and 315

more deantly serious or straight representations of political heroes and heroines. It is hard to see such gures as prototypes of John MacLean and the perspectives of twentieth-century socialism. As with the negotiation of different tones that make up the balance between entertainment and political analysis, the critical fulcrum is the transition from satirical negation into political assertion. One of the most sensitive of such transitions occurs in The Cheviot:
Enter snp employer .

nationalism. Indeed, although The Cheviot dramatizes class struggles within Scotland as well as within international frames, the populist address to a Scottish audience mobilizes Scottish solidarity rather than confronting conicts between Highland and Lowland Scotland, or offering a sustained critique of anti-English sentiment. This perhaps explains the reaction reported by Christopher Harvie:
Jim Lynch in the Scots Independent remarked on its impact, although christening the McGrath troupe the International Young Socialists. How can they put on a play like that and then say they are not nationalists? he asked Billy Wolfe.17

snp employer : Not at all, no no, quit the

Bolshevik haverings. Many of us captains of Scottish industry are joining the Nationalist Party. We have the best interest of the Scottish people at heart. And with interest running at 16 per cent, who can blame us?

mc2: Nationalism is not enough. The enemy of

the Scottish people is Scottish capital, as much as the foreign exploiter. Drum roll.15

The transition from the knockabout pun on interest to the plays central proposition generates dramatic tension. The drum roll comes after the second speech, the central socialist assertion, rather than after the puns punch-line. The performer playing MC2 needs to generate political sincerity to stand above the quick-re play of juxtapositions. McGrath relates how Elizabeth MacLennan squared up to an audience of SNP members and gave the lines of MC2 with shattering power. Some cheered, some booed, the rest were thinking about it.16 The lines stand out as a conictual address to such an audience, but the characterization of the SNP might even be more provocative to an audience of Scottish nationalists who see themselves as left-wing internationalists. There is a politics in the way both speeches are spoken, since the accent of delivery inevitably cuts across markers of region and class so sensitively perceived by Scottish audiences. The critique of SNP nationalism is itself couched in nationalist rhetoric, moreover, since the lines claim to speak on behalf of the Scottish people rather than from the perspective of British socialism or European inter316

The Cheviot requires the performers to combine the plays different voices with the chorus of statements made directly to the audience, especially in the plays ending. The plays festivity and location within popular nationalist sentiment nevertheless means that the plays emotional tone and its political analysis remain dialectically awry. The protean gure holding many of McGraths plays together is a character, often a narrator or series of narrators, who embodies the contradictions involved in transitions of tone. The storytelling function of individual narrators tends to converge on a mode of direct address which is the authorial voice of the plays company. The ambivalence of Joe Smith in Joes Drum and Border Warfare asks audiences to decide whether to trust characters who take on the role of narrators, or to view them more critically. In McGraths earlier play Random Happenings in the Hebrides, by contrast, there is an Ibsenite quality to the broadly realist portrayal of Jimmy Litherland. Litherland is shown to be a dynamic but awed character, a friend of the people who may also be the peoples enemy. Fluid character portrayal allows the central character to embody social contradictions without becoming too obviously didactic. Thus the dramatization of the conict between revolutionary romanticism and Labour Party reformism is set up against Jimmy Litherlands oscillation between his deeper romantic allegiances to Catriona and

his more pragmatic sexual relations with Mary, Pauline, and Rachel. In the work after Random Happenings in the Hebrides, however, McGrath avoids character analysis as a metonym for a wider class analysis, preferring a rhythm driven by narrators, singers, and direct address, emphasizing the difference between the role played and the political address of the actor as the agent playing the role. The actors not only double up to play different parts, but also perform different roles as entertainers, musicians, and storytellers. The effect generalizes a Brechtian technique of acting in the third person. Audiences come to appreciate the sincerity and the versatility of the actors, appreciation enhanced by the recurrence of actors in different 7:84 Scotland productions, not least of John McGraths wife, Elizabeth MacLennan. Within individual plays, however, what emerges is a tension between theatrical parallelism across the range of roles played by one actor and the tendency for satirical caricature to divide characters into good guys and bad guys. Bill Patersons creation of Andy McChuckemup in The Games a Bogey and The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil plays differently with the parts he doubles up. In The Games a Bogey, Paterson also played John MacLean, the spirit of the plays most serious and straight political address, as well as Mungo McBungle, along with moments in which Paterson plays himself. In The Cheviot, Bill Paterson played the role of the narrator/MC, as well as the swindling negotiators, Loch and Texas Jim. The latter parts map on to the role of McChuckemup. The willingness of audiences to trust the MC to act as master of ceremonies does not preclude suspicion. Indeed, there is often something sinister about the authoritarian seduction techniques of the circus master with his whip or the seasoned controller of the microphone, from the quipping bingo caller to the too-slick patter of the game-show host. Allowing for the suspicion audiences often reserve for charismatic narratorial performers, there is a difference in kind with which audiences are likely to respond to the

more or less lovable rogues also played by Paterson. Put differently, the loss of the fourth-wall lter puts a different emphasis on the difference between heroes, villains, and actors who step out of character simply to sing, present, or narrate the story. The theatricality of McGraths work is not exactly farcical, then, but its combination of satire, song, and historical narrative often hints at the farcical reprise of early historical forms in modern politics. In Border Warfare, to give just one example, Thatcher appears in the nal part of the play on a Knoxmobile, the mobile pulpit of Knox earlier in the play, a theatrical device modelled on the Pope-mobile pioneered by Pope John Paul II for his own form of pageantry. The layering of theatricality might be compared with the politics of farce developed by Dario Fo, but in a Scottish context the more obvious analogies are with pantomime and with David Lyndsays Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. McGrath adapted the latter into Ane Satyre of the Fourth Estate (1996), satirizing the media and the power of Rupert Murdoch. In The Bone Wont Break, McGrath conrms the implicit theorization of the early modern morality play and comic inversion, indicating his enthusiasm for Bakhtins conception of Rabelaisian carnival. Unlike many of those who have been too quick to apply Bakhtins account of culture in earlymodern culture to a modern context, McGrath comments that:
Of course we would certainly be courting disaster to assume a medieval sensibility lurking within a modern audience. I would prefer to read Bakhtins visions of carnival, laughter, and wholeness as inspirational rather than either historical accounts or as a model to imitate.18

McGrath, like Bakhtin, nevertheless shares a concern to rework the spirit of carnival as an antidote to socialist puritanism. This comparison motivates a return to the extent to which Marx and McGrath share a politics of farce. The alert theatrical historian might question the accuracy of farce as the English translation of Marxs juxtaposition. Marx had a fondness for mixing terms from different European languages rather than 317

respecting the etymological purity of German. The rst German edition contrasts groe Tragdie and lumpige Farce and in the second edition Marx removed the adjectives. Even if there is a particular French affinity with the dramatic genre of farce, the generic relations between farce and alternative German terms such as die Schwank and die Posse, in conjunction with the shabbiness of lumpige, indicate that Marx was not casually translating an opposition between tragedy and comedy. The contrast is between earlier heroic struggles and the shabbiness of modern political farce. Marxs use of farce can be illuminated by passages elsewhere in his work:
The struggle against the German political present is the struggle against the past of the modern nations, and they are still troubled by reminders of that past. It is instructive for them to see the ancien rgime, which has been through its tragedy, with them, playing its comedy as a German ghost. . . . The modern ancien rgime is only the comedian of a world order whose true heroes are dead. History is thorough and goes through many phases when carrying an old form to the grave. The last phase of a world-historical form is its comedy. The gods of Greece, already tragically wounded to death in Aeschylus Prometheus Bound, had to re-die a comic death in Lucians Dialogues. Why this course of history? So that humanity should part with its past cheerfully. This cheerful historical destiny is what we vindicate for the political authorities of Germany.19

The Hegelian motif of the comic transcendence of historical tragedy works in Marxs thinking to highlight a satirical view of the struggle to be free of ancient and feudal history as well as a description of the need for a clear, happy, and cheerful [heiter] sense of historical purpose. Marxs account plays on a sense of the backwardness of German political arrangements as compared with those of France and England, suggesting ways in which the theatre of Germanys modernization can be seen as a comic spectacle from the perspective of more modern bourgeois societies. Marx is concerned to puncture the ideological gravity of German ideology and to suggest instead a politics of comedy and wit. The parallel with the modernization of Scottish society is not exact, but there are 318

some similarities with regard to the politics of dramatic tone. The rapid modernization of the Scottish economy after the Union of 1707 is famously anomalous, and helps to explain some of the peculiarities of Scottish nationalism as compared with the European phenomena of nationalism as a response to capitalist modernization. The dramatization of gures such as Fletcher of Saltoun and Thomas Muir is, accordingly, difficult to read in relation to twentieth-century class conicts. As representatives of constitutional nationalism and enlightenment radicalism such gures cut across any conventional account of Scotlands bourgeois revolution and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Indeed, at the end of Border Warfare it is Fletcher rather than Muir who is staged so as to recall pre-modern conceptions of the Scottish nation, whereas the more radical reformism of Muir is subsumed. As Neil Davidson has argued, For Scottish socialists the Scottish Revolution cannot occupy the same place that comparable events do for socialists in England and France. . . . 20 Commenting on the absence of nationalism in Scotland in the period from 1800 to 1870, Tom Nairn argues that older conicts gave Scotland a cast of national heroes and martyrs, popular tales and legends of oppression and resistance, as good as anything in Mitteleuropa.21 More decisively, he suggests that:
Only one society was in fact able to advance . . . from feudal and theological squalor to the stage of bourgeois civil society, polite culture, and so on. Only one land crossed the great divide before the whole condition of European politics and culture was decisively and permanently altered by the great awakening of nationalist consciousness. It was Scotland which enjoyed (or suffered) this solitary fate.22

In this sense, nineteenth-century Scotland was no ancien rgime engaged in nationalist struggles comparable with those which saw the unication of Germany. Rather, Scotlands peculiar status as a quasi-nation within the greater British state enabled Scotland to undergo a process of agricultural improve-

ment, economic modernization, and industrialization which was more rapid and brutal than capitalist development in England. The belated twentieth-century development of Scottish nationalism, a phenomenon which Nairn describes as neo-nationalism, begins to turn against the perceived economic benets of the union with England. The absence of a bourgeois revolutionary moment comparable to the revolutions in England and France determines the disjunction between nationalism and the enlightenment radicalism of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Scotland. The arrival of twentiethcentury neo-nationalism also begins to specify the way in which, as compared with Ireland, Scotland began belatedly to mourn the violence of its history of capitalist development. Whereas Marx saw the need in the middle of the nineteenth century to encourage a sense of the comedy of Germanys development, it was perhaps only in the twentieth century that Scotland came to see its modernization as a tragedy. Indeed, the violent deindustrialization of twentieth-century Scotland feeds into popular nationalist mourning for preindustrial Scottish history and the sense that Scotland has come to be haunted by the ghosts of its own history. It is instructive to compare the level of historical amnesia in Scotland with the deadlock of historical mourning constitutive of Irish society. Amid these long waves of historical drama, the cheerful dramatization of Scotlands past as a comedy in The Cheviot intervenes in the tendency to lament and mourn the past that is constitutive of backward-looking nationalist sentiment. Where Marx warns against focusing the struggle for modern Germany on Germanys ancient history, so the festive and knockabout tone of The Cheviot memorializes the violence of Highland history with a cheerful focus on historys relevance for modern struggles. Indeed, in The Year of the Cheviot, McGrath comments on the making of The Cheviot that:
One thing I had insisted on was that we broke out of the lament syndrome. Ever since Culloden, Gaelic culture has been one of lament for exile, for death, for the past, even for the future. Beautiful, haunting lament. And in telling the story of

the Highlands since 1745, there are many defeats, much sadness to relate. But I resolved that in the play, for every defeat we would also celebrate a victory, for each sadness, we would wipe it out with the sheer energy and vitality of the people, for every oppression, a way to ght back.23

The shared concern of Marx and McGrath is to avoid the tragic memoralization of history and the way such memorialization reproduces the problems of the past. Tragic history can be mobilized to inspire contemporary struggles, but the costs can be high, as perhaps is all too evident in Irish politics. While Scottish politics has a more pragmatic relation to contemporary possibilities, nationalism might nevertheless become part of an ideology of past glories blocking the possibilities of the present. The Cheviot negotiates such problems but, as McGrath suggests, the revolutionary traditions of Scottish socialism cannot afford to wallow in the tragic defeats of the past. The classic statement of the need to cast off the tragic costumes of the past is also provided by Marx, again in The Eighteenth Brumaire:
The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. And, just when they appear to be engaged in the revolutionary transformation of themselves and their material surroundings, in the creation of something which does not yet exist, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they timidly conjure up the spirits of the past to help them; they borrow their names, slogans, and costumes so as to stage the new world-historical scene in this venerable disguise and borrowed language. . . . [In the English and French revolutions] the resurrection of the dead served to exalt the new struggles, rather than to parody the old, to exaggerate the given task in the imagination, rather than to ee from solving it in reality, and to recover the spirit of the revolution, rather than to set its ghost walking again. . . . Earlier revolutions have needed world-historical reminiscences to deaden their awareness of their own content. In order to arrive at its own content the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead.24

Marxs rhetoric engages a complicated dialogue between the drama of history and the staging of revolutionary politics, a problem which echoes through the revolutionary his319

toriography developed by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin, perhaps most notably in his reflections on the concept of history, argued that the working class are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren and countered Marxs cheerful sense of historical progress with a more tragic conception of contemporary struggle.25 The signicance of this critique of Marxs condence in historical progress resonates in the ambivalent staging of history in Brechts work. There are limits to the viability of historical caricature, a point Adorno makes against Brechts play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui:
To present processes within large-scale industry as transactions between crooked vegetable dealers suffices for a momentary shock-effect, but not for dialectical theatre. The illustration of late capitalism by images from the agrarian or criminal registers does not permit the monstrosity of modern society to emerge in full clarity from the complex phenomena masking it.26

Some of this critique could also be applied to McGraths work. Aside from suggesting the political dangers in Marxs historical conception of the necessity of letting the dead bury the dead, the perspectives suggested by Benjamin and Adorno problematize progress in the staging of history. The spectres of the past are not so easily exorcized, and the resurrection of the spirits of the dead depends as much on political circumstances. Much has been made of the rhetoric of spectres in Marx, partly provoked by Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx.27 Derrida suggests a theatrical logic in Marxs rhetoric which evokes other theatrical ghosts, such as the ghost of Hamlets father. The theatricality of spectres can also be traced out of the work of Marjorie Garber and the more recent work of Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass.28 The pressure of such arguments in McGraths work is perhaps best understood as the way he develops distinct ways of exorcizing the ghosts of the past, offering a distinct critical pathology of the function of ghosts in modern drama. The critical difference constitutive for McGraths work is the difference between 320

dressing up in historical costumes merely to set the ghost of revolution walking again, as opposed to more active, lively, and purposeful resurrections of the dead. This critical difference is evident in the contradictory performance parameters of The Cheviot, not least the negotiation between the Highlands tragic history and the possibilities of forwardlooking struggles. As The Communist Manifesto notoriously suggests, the revolutionary spectre is that of communism. As Davey remarks in Out of Our Heads, however, the spectre of Stalin walks the streets, and terrorizes the Western World.29 Davey also speaks out against the way the rearguard of Calvin and Knox walk Scotland with straps, crushing the feeling and the singing and the emotion out of our lives.30 The analysis of the contradictions in socialist politics informs many of McGraths plays, but the history of local struggles is more developed than the broader ideological failures of Stalinism and of state socialism, decisive though these failures are for the prospects for the Scottish Workers Republic. In Joes Drum, McGrath resurrects a ghost from Scottish history to act as the central narrator/character in a play that seeks to awaken audiences from the curious hibernation31 in the aftermath of the 1979 devolution referendum and subsequent general election. Joe introduces himself as a rather lively and idiomatically energetic ghost:
Ive been deid and cauld in the earth two hundred year, and Ive slept in my grave through monys the disaster aye through Napoleons wars and the Kaisers wars and Hitlers wars too.32

The pre-modern eighteenth-century historical context allows McGrath to juxtapose Joes populist conception of natural justice and struggle with gures associated with the Act of Union debates in 1707. The more forward-looking function of Joe, however, is to comment on subsequent historical gures and events, such as Adam Ferguson, Thomas Muir, and Robert Hamilton. Joes dissidence is unreliable and pre-modern but nevertheless more dynamic and idiomatic.

This energy contrasts with the sobriety with which the heroes of the enlightenment are presented. Whereas Adam Ferguson is given a formal and argued rhetoric, Joe can make wisecracks that juxtapose his eighteenth-century sensibility with local references to the Edinburgh of 1979: Id trust the Edinburgh Corporation as far as I could throw one o their buses.33 Thus Joe provides an ambivalent critique of enlightenment radicalism: Ye see, Mr Muir and his friends never quite made contact wi the mob, and the mob werenae quite sure whether they would want the vote or no, anyway so the reformers had no power.34 More controversially, Joe claims that Baird, Hardie, and Wilson died so you could have the vote.35 The radicals have been dramatized by other playwrights, notably in James Kelmans play Hardie and Baird: the Last Days (1990), but in McGraths resurrection the spirit of radicalism is provided by Joes voice. The nal movement of the play calls on the audience to remember Muir and Fletcher, but Joe remains the presiding spirit of the play, the proto-working-class hero, a status conrmed by the texture of Joes language. Joes dramatic function, then, is to resurrect not the spirit of the political radicals but the radicalism of popular, mob protest. The avowed political strategy of the production was to intervene in the dangerous bored fatalism 36 and sense of powerlessness that overcame Scottish politics. The spirit of the resurrection of Joe is, then, a call for direct action whose theatricality depends on the dialectical relation between pre-modern and contemporary forms of popular protest. The politics of theatrical resurrections of the dead is also constitutive for the historical pageantry of Border Warfare. As Olga Taxidou comments, Border Warfare inhabits one of those consensual/conictual spaces that triggers a critical and dialectical relationship with tradition and the new, history and the present.37 Taxidou cites the speech of the resurrected corpse at the beginning of Border Warfare and comments that:
This corpse appears as a kind of historical ghost, as an emblematic inhabitant of a hybrid in-between

space. Indeed, much of the rest of the performance explores the historical circumstances and the contradictions that have helped create this creature, and possible ways of resuscitating it.38

This account neatly holds open the signicance of this corpse as the spirit of Scotland understood as the spirit of the border conicts between Scotland and England. The Corpse itself, as if echoing Marx, asks to be allowed to lie in peace. Put me in the earth with decency and thoughtfulness. 39 Indeed, the potential for theatrical lamentation over the victims of history is juxtaposed by the noisy rebelliousness of Tartan Army. The funeral procession that removes the Corpse from the stage in a pram/coffin is accompanied by hooded gures who stab each other in the back rhythmically.40 These details in the staging seek to check any spirit of religiosity or lamentation. The rest of the play contrasts historical ghosts and contemporary caricatures. Bon Accord epitomizes the rough contrasts with his suggestion that, Then as now, the Scottish ruling class came up from London, on the twelfth-century shuttle, the feudal 125!41 Such contrasts are also worked through at the level of the accents given to characters. The Pictish Queen is given free reign in her pronunciation of Pictish words, but thereafter characters offer a palette of different Scottish accents. Brudie speaks with a thick Inverness accent; Britons speak with a Cumbrian accent and make terrible Melvyn Bragg noises; Eadwin and Eadwina are given stereotyped Danish accents; and so forth.42 In addition to accent-mockery, the play weaves together highlights from the history of Scottish poetry and prose to generate a dramatic idiom that interrupts historical narration with bathetic quips. The play nevertheless builds up parallels that make it hard for the audience not to read the play as a call to resurrect the spirit of past struggles rather than letting the dead bury the dead. A number of gures are resurrected from McGraths earlier plays such as Joes Drum, but the speed of the historical procession prevents any one character becoming a guiding narrator. The conclusion of Border Warfare 321

provides a memorial tableau in which the contradictory fabric of the play wears thin, including the voices of Robert Burns, Robert the Bruce, John MacLean, and Fletcher of Saltoun, but with no place for radicals such as Thomas Muir. If the spirit of the play suggests the necessity of burying the ghosts of Scottish national pride, the more forceful impression is the evocation of a nationalist history that bridges the pre-modern and the modern but struggles to articulate the texture of twentieth-century Scottish experience. Whereas The Cheviot frames Scottish history in a more international framework than the conict between Scotland and England, the populism of Border Warfare comes close to reproducing bourgeois nationalist sentiment. In short, the energy of Border Warfare falls victim to the spirit of resurrection Marx was concerned to criticize. By way of conclusion, the difference between Border Warfare and The Cheviot can be illustrated by resurrecting the ghostly presence of Marx in The Cheviot. In The Year of The Cheviot McGrath alludes to the inclusion in the play of Direct Marxist analysis of the Clearances (cf. Das Kapital).43 The play does not resurrect Marx in person, but Capital includes passages germane to the play, such as Marxs attack on the Duchess of Sutherland:
This person, who had been well instructed in economics, resolved, when she succeeded to the headship of the clan, to undertake a radical economic cure, and to turn the whole county of Sutherland, the population of which had already been reduced to 15,000 by similar processes, into a sheep-walk. Between 1814 and 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and burnt, all their elds turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced this mass of evictions, and came to blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to death in the ames of the hut she refused to leave. It was in this manner that this ne lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land which had belonged to the clan from time immemorial.44

The way such passages sound like excerpts from The Cheviot itself suggests the skill with which The Cheviot animates a Marxist analy322

sis of Scottish history without labouring the relation to the words of Marx himself. More intriguing still is the ghost of Marx in The Cheviot provided by Marxs reference to Harriet Beecher Stowe, an otherwise surprising presence in McGraths play. In The Cheviot, Stowe describes her book Sunny Memories of a Stay in Scotland, contrasting her perception of negro slaves and your dreamy Highlanders. McGraths Stowe offers a brief but evidently ideological portrait of her host in Scotland, the Duchess of Sutherland: To my view, it is an almost sublime instance of the benevolent employment of superior wealth and power in shortening the struggles of advancing civilization.45 In Capital, Marx remarks on the hypocrisy of the Duchess of Sutherlands attitude to slavery, showing sympathy for Negro slaves by entertaining Mrs Stowe, a sympathy subsequently forgotten during the Civil War, when, as Marx comments: every noble English heart beat for the slave-owners.46 Indeed, Marx notes that he penned a critique of the Duchess of Sutherland and her attitude to slavery which was published in the New York Daily Tribune and subsequently called forth a polemic from the sycophants of the Sutherlands when the article was reprinted in a Scottish newspaper.47 Marx himself, then, sought to articulate the international dimension of the class struggles of the clearances, linking the proto-capitalist expropriation of land to the struggle for the abolition of slavery. Elsewhere in Capital, Marx also provides information that punctures the claims of Fletcher of Saltoun to a place among the memorialized voices of Scottish history. In a discussion of the way serfdom was abolished later in Scotland than in England, Marx quotes the following passage from Fletcher: The number of beggars in Scotland is reckoned at not less than 200,000. The only remedy that I, a republican on principle, can suggest, is to restore the old state of serfdom, to make slaves of all of those who are unable to provide for their own subsistence.48 Fletchers modest proposal deserves the satirical wrath of Swift rather than memorialization among the informing voices of

modern Scottish nationalism. Indeed, his republicanism can be understood as a motivating factor in his defence of the integrity of the old Scottish parliament, an institution decidedly pre-modern and, by modern democratic or socialist standards, indefensible. The defence of the old Scottish parliament, like many of the paradoxically classicist tendencies which saw Edinburgh styled as the Athens of the North, harks back to Republican Rome rather than forwards to the Workers Republic. As such, Fletchers historical position needs to be understood, but perhaps should be buried rather than gured so prominently in plays such as Joes Drum and Border Warfare. Marxs injunction to let the dead bury the dead is too harsh, all the more so as we mourn the passing of John McGrath. Perhaps an appropriately cheerful sense of his enormous contribution to political theatre would not linger in the tragic glories of recent Scottish theatre history, but look again to move from sadness to the vitality and festive energy of his plays.

Notes and References

1. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Ben Fowkes, in Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, Vol. 2, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin/New Left Review, 1973), p. 143249 (p. 146); see also Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 11: 185153 (Moscow: Progress, 1979), p. 99197 (p. 103). Cf. Harold Rosenberg, The Act and the Actor (New York: New American Library, 1970), which discusses the theatrical metaphor in Marxs conception of the proletariat as the hero of Marxs drama of history. Further suggestive reections are offered by Jeffrey Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977). 2. Marx, Surveys from Exile, p. 144. 3. For a brief critical discussion of Farce, see Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis, trans. Christine Shantz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 1478. Pavis suggests that: The etymology of the word farce spicy food used to stuff meat indicates the foreign-body aspect of this spiritual nourishment within dramatic art. . . . Farce was at least successful in never permitting itself to be diminished or co-opted by order, society, or the noble genres such as tragedy and high comedy (p. 147). 4. Joseph Farrell, Recent Political Theatre, Chapman, special issue on Scottish theatre, VIII, No. 6 IX, No. 1 (Spring 1986), p. 4854 (p. 51). Cf. Maria DiCenzo, The Politics of Alternative Theatre in Britain, 19681990: the Case of 7:84 Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

5. Farrell, Recent Political Theatre, p. 51. 6. Ibid. 7. John McGrath, Preface, Six-Pack: Plays for Scotland (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996), p. viix (p. vi). 8. From Cheviots to Silver Darlings: John McGrath interviewed by Olga Taxidou, Scottish Theatre since the Seventies, ed. Randall Stevenson and Gavin Wallace (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 14963 (p. 162). 9. From Cheviots to Silver Darlings: John McGrath interviewed by Olga Taxidou, p. 153. 10. Quoted in Farrell, Recent Political Theatre, p. 53. 11. Elizabeth MacLennan, The Moon Belongs to Everyone: Making Theatre with 7:84 (London: Methuen, 1990), p. 43. 12. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984). 13. Christopher Harvie, Fools Gold: the Story of North Sea Oil (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 245. 14. John McGrath, The Games a Bogey: 7:84s John MacLean Show (Edinburgh: EUSPB, 1975), p. 423. 15. John McGrath, The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil, in Six-Pack: Plays for Scotland (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996), p. 13999 (p. 192); John McGrath, The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 667. 16. John McGrath, The Year of the Cheviot, The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (London: Methuen, 1981), p. vxxviii (p. xxvi 17. Harvie, Fools Gold, p. 2734.). 18. John McGrath, The Bone Wont Break: on Theatre and Hope in Hard Times (London: Methuen, 1990), Chapter 6: Celebration, Spectacle, Carnival, p. 14466, esp. p. 1514 (p. 154). 19. Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Law, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3: 184344 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), p. 17587 (p. 1789). For an alternative translation, see Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right. Introduction (184344), trans. Gregor Benton, in Karl Marx, Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin/New Left Review, 1975), p. 24357 (p. 2478). Benton translates heiter as happy and happily. 20. Neil Davidson, Scotlands Bourgeois Revolution, Scotland, Class and Nation, ed. Chris Bambery (London: Bookmarks, 1999), p. 51133 (p. 12930). 21. Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain (London: Verso, 2nd ed., 1981), p. 106. 22. Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, p. 108. 23. McGrath, The Year of the Cheviot, p. xxviixviii. 24. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Surveys from Exile, p. 1469. 25. See Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, trans. Harry Zohn, Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 24555 (p. 252). Benjamin offers a more prosaic account of his historical materialist conception of historiography in Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian, One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), p. 34986. 26. T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), p. 144. 27. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994). For criticism of Derrida, see Ghostly Demarcations: a Symposium on Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker

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(London: Verso, 1999), and my own essay, Marxist Literary Theory after Derrida, Common Sense, No. 19 (1996), p. 519. 28. See Marjorie Garber, Shakespeares Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York; London: Routledge, 1987); and Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Of Ghosts and Garments: the Materiality of Memory on the Renaissance Stage, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 29. McGrath, Out of Our Heads, Six-Pack, p. 365. 30. Ibid., p. 369. 31. McGrath, Original Programme Note for Joes Drum, Six-Pack, p. 278. 32. McGrath, Joes Drum, p. 282. 33. Ibid., p. 301. 34. Ibid., p. 313. 35. Ibid., p. 316. The point about voter apathy continues to resonate, but the political history is more awkward, as can be gleaned from Henry W. Meikles study Scotland and the French Revolution (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1912).

36. McGrath, Original Programme Note for Joes Drum, Six-Pack, p. 278. 37. Olga Taxidou, Epic Theatre in Scotland, Scottish Theatre since the Seventies, ed. Randall Stevenson and Gavin Wallace (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 16475. 38. Taxidou, Epic Theatre in Scotland, p. 170. 39. McGrath, Border Warfare, Six-Pack, p. 7. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., p. 13. 42. Ibid., p. 9, 10. 43. McGrath, The Year of the Cheviot, p. xviii. 44. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin/New Left Review, 1976). 45. McGrath, The Cheviot, Six-Pack, p. 159. 46. Marx, Capital, footnote, p. 892. 47. Ibid. Marx reuses the highlights of his essay in Capital, but the full text can be read as Elections. Financial Clouds: the Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 11: 185153 (Moscow: Progress, 1979), p. 48694. 48. Marx, Capital, footnote, p. 882.

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