Islay McLeod's Scotland

 

George Square, Glasgow

 

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Poor Caledonia

Thom Cross

The National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) decided to follow the lead offered by the new Edinburgh International Festival director (the Australian) Jonathan Mills  and 'follow the sun' but like Columbus they lost their way. The NTS, funded substantially by the Scottish Government, commissioned a new play on Scotland’s 17th century attempt at creating a Caribbean colony in Darien, Panama.
     Any discussion/debate on Scotland's early imperial ambitions is a troubled and challenging conversation that we need to have. On the one hand there is a sense of chauvinistic pride when we read of great Caribbean-Scots, like Maxwell, speaker of the House in Barbados, John Dunlop of Glasgow with business interests from New York to Jamaica achieving success, even before the Act of Union and as alien Scots in English colonies. Colonel John Campbell of Argyll (head of the military in the Darien expedition) reached Jamaica where he became patriarch of a substantial Argyll community of Campbells in western Jamaica. (Indeed, Jamaica has been described as an Afro-Celtic society).
     However this success was achieved in circumstances that required Scots to operate within an enslaved economy. Robert Burns, 'oor-ain' iconic 18th century humanist and democrat, chose to work in the grossly inhumane environment of a Jamaican sugar plantation (but never went). Scottish folk of all classes made a significant contribution to plantation Caribbean society – even before 1707, with figures of 4,500-7,000 Scots in the Caribbean at the time of the Darien expedition. Yet, for all that, the quite substantial Scottish capital produced in the Caribbean (that built so much of Glasgow) was an inglorious episode of crude capital accumulation with even cruder human cruelties. 
     Scottish management of the Caribbean sugar industry and indeed the political and military control of several of the islands, demonstrated a ruthless aggressiveness that TM Devine points out in his 'Scotland’s Empire 1600-1815' as well as Douglas Hamilton in his excellent 'Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World 1750-1820'. So we have a certain ambivalence towards our exploits in that tropical and troubled region.
     Darien was a legitimate attempt (in the fate of  a hostile England and an angry Catholic Church) to create a (protestant) Scottish colony in the strategic isthmus of Panama that today links globally the Far East and Atlantic West.
'Caledonia', commissioned by the National Theatre of Scotland, written by Alistair Beaton and directed by Anthony Neilson, was a very poor theatrical attempt to interpret that historical tragedy within a contemporary context.
     The production had three major strikes against it.
     First, as a play in performance it was dull, dreich and dour with a sub-Brechtian lecturing/hectoring didactic format that from the outset antagonised the audience into responding at best unsympathetically. The core theme of unremitting national failure was a parody of inept Scots 'losers' who enjoy self-flagellation. 'Caledonia' was hostile to any semblance of a legitimate affirmative national identity. Even while the list of the dead (paradoxically) fell from the heavens, the music played was the inappropriately cheesy Ally’s Tartan Army anthem from the Argentine World Cup.
     It was this repugnant tone of desultory satirical self-harming with a Gilbert & Sullivan satirical silliness that poisoned the entire production. 'Caledonia' was clearly a production, conceptually and artistically, in deep trouble. Within two plus hours the actors tried with increasing anxiety to bring some sense of light into the unremitting darkness made visible and risible by the tedious repetition of jokes on dodgy bankers.
     This was Scotland’s major contribution to the Edinburgh International Festival and what a mauling it received. Yet the Scottish Government through its Expo fund spent a fortune on it. How long can the National Theatre of Scotland sustain any credibility (or budgets) on the basis of one brilliant production and an abattoir of lame-ducks?

 

Kirkcaldy-born Thom Cross is a former head of the Jamaica School of Drama at the Edna Manley Centre in Kingston and has worked in the Caribbean for over 30 years. His recently completed novel ‘The Kirkcaldy Swimmer (of Colombia)’ urgently requires
a publisher.