Towards the end of May, a BBC Scotland afternoon news bulletin surprisingly turned its attention to a forthcoming production of “one of William Shakespeare’s best loved plays” – A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
However, this particular production wasn’t considered newsworthy because it came from an amateur group based in Dumfries and Galloway; not even that the Crossmichael Drama Club were one of just seven amateur Scottish groups taking part in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Open Stages project, which aims to help amateur companies extend their repertoires.
No, the “hook” was how this new production was Shakespeare, “but no as you micht ken it” – because it had been reimagined, in Scots, as A Midsimmer Nicht’s Dreme.
As it happens, writer John Burns’s says that his principle reason for translating A Midsimmer Nicht’s Dreme was simply the intuition that it being in Scots would “work” to the benefit of the production. “It’s not so much that 16th century English can’t do certain things, more that using Scots brings it closer to a Scottish audience, and to audiences who might think Shakespeare too fancy,” he says. “I feel too that Scots can catch the sheer physical power of Shakespeare’s language. He writes lines you really feel physically when you say them out loud. My intention was to use Scots to produce a text that was actable, and which would be accessible and enjoyable for the audience, and the Scots was a major part of that.”
Arguably, translating Shakespeare into Scots – viewed by many as a distinct language from English – is just one way of finding the continued relevancies of Shakespeare’s writing with the here and now. Certainly, John Burns was keen to see if Scots “could match the way Shakespeare switches tone … from broad, at times bawdy, humour to moments that are more serious or even sinister.”
Yet there is a wider perspective, whether we’re discussing translation into Scots or saying Shakespeare’s words with a Scottish accent. Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy, in their introduction to Shakespeare and Scotland (published by Manchester University Press in 2004), go as far as describing the translation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth into Scots as “a patriotic act”, not least because of “the political commitment implicit in translating from English to Scots, reversing the dominant dubbing practice in films.”
Glasgow-based novelist and playwright Alan Bissett – who actively campaigned for a Yes vote during last year’s Independence Referendum – has since written about how, since the 1970s, Scottish theatre had “a deep engagement with the shifting beast of Scottish politics”. Although Bissett was focusing primarily on original works by Scottish playwrights and directors, it’s worth pointing out that Shakespeare – despite there being absolutely no evidence to prove he ever travelled north of Carlisle – has played his own part in this.
As Maley and Murphy point out: “Scotland … never had precisely the same relationship with the Bard as England has, but has experienced a fraught process of appropriation, incorporation, and resistance.” In part, this is because Shakespeare – at least in his latter career – was among the first “British” writers around: many of his later plays – Cymbeline, King Lear, even Hamlet – were produced under the patronage of the Scottish monarch James VI (aka James I), and can be said to touch on “the matter of Britain”, the complex relationship between the constituent element of James’ new “united” kingdom, which the Stuart monarch was determined to see joined into one.
That never happened, of course; Scotland retained its own legal, educational and religious systems along with an accompanying sense of Scottish identity which survived even the height of the British empire. Yet from the 1970s on, there have been notable changes in how Shakespeare is treated by Scotland’s producing theatre companies; several years ago, Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre delivered a powerful Romeo and Juliet in part because of their decision to set the action in a present-day, sectarian West of Scotland – with accents to match.
“English-accented Shakespeare carries a specific resonance in Scotland, one that directors usually choose to avoid,” points out Mark Fisher, a freelance journalist, critic and author of the forthcoming book, How to Write About Theatre. “I’m not sure exactly when attitudes started to change, but I’d say the argument in favour of Scottish-accented productions had been pretty much won by the 1990s. By that time, companies such as Raindog and directors such as Hamish Glen had been making a point of casting very Scottish productions of Shakespeare.”
One example of how things had progressed, even by 1992, was the late Kenny Ireland’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his first as Artistic Director at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum. “He cast the mechanicals with Scottish accents and everyone else with English accents,” Mark Fisher explains. “This, I said in my review, was a fundamental error – or some such phrase. The message it sent out was that people with Scottish accents were foolish figures of fun, whereas people with English accents were serious figures of respect.
“Ireland reacted furiously to my review and made the case that he had based the casting of the mechanicals around (the actor) Andy Gray who has a Scottish accent. In other words, the meaning I inferred had not been deliberate. I think it’s true to say, however, that Ireland never cast a Shakespeare like that again.”
Gordon Barr is Artistic Director of Glasgow-based Bard in the Botanics, Scotland’s only professional Shakespeare company. “We’ve never gone out of our way to make Scottish versions of these texts, nor have we gone out of our way to have classical traditional voices,” he says. “Most of our core actors have made their careers up here, so we think of them as Scottish actors. That is important to us, to not overly look outwards for the acting company; as much as possible, we work with people who are based in Scotland. We’re regularly producing Shakespeare here, and we want to be a part of the training to ensure that there is a range of strong classical actors here.”
First published in Shakespeare Magazine, #8.
