In short, the drama is in ours, and in most civilized countries, an engine possessing the most powerful effect on the manners of society.

Thus the idea of theatre is political … it must make possible the enactment of an actual political world in the midst of painful and complex transformations within and between politics.

The National Drama was a nineteenth-century dramatic genre unique to Scotland, dealing with Scottish characters in Scottish settings. It has been neglected this century by scholars of theatre and of Scottish history in general. This is a curious oversight given the importance of the National Drama in the development of the Scottish theatre and to the image of Scotland as a nation at home and abroad. The omission may have been the result of a too close association with Sir Walter Scott in the minds of many for whom the phrase ‘High Tory Romanticism’ summed up Scott's career and influence. But, the National Drama is worthy of fresh consideration because, although it is true that dramatizations of some of Scott's Scottish works formed the core of the national repertoire, the National Drama comprised a wide variety of pieces from a range of sources and its influence over the Scottish theatre was considerable.

The Scottish National Players were the most interesting and important group in Scottish theatre in the 1920s, and the ‘national drama’ which they produced defined Scottish theatre for almost two decades. The SNP, as they were known, became the focus for the aspirations of young people wanting to progress to a professional career within theatre and were responsible for training a whole generation of Scottish actors. Later theatre groups, such as the Curtain and the Gateway, were greatly influenced by the Scottish National Players, who also made a major contribution to the early years of broadcasting in Scotland. Though mainly an amateur group, the SNP recognized the necessity for a national theatre company to tour as widely as possible, and in doing so helped to fire the enthusiasm for amateur drama which swept Scotland in the thirties. Many of the problems and debates which confronted them in their attempt to provide Scotland with a national theatre, such as the vexed question of whether production should be restricted to Scottish plays, irrespective of quality in the hope of better things to come, are still relevant issues.

Histories of broadcasting in Britain tend to have a distinct London bias–in other words they all but completely ignore developments in Scotland –and yet the early broadcasting infrastructure ensured that each regional centre could advance the boundaries of radio in more exciting and challenging ways (certainly in different ways) than the production centre in London. This critical bias, however, is perhaps only symptomatic of a more general social tendency to displace diversity within British culture and to focus on a metropolitan vision, a core-legitimized version of culture which discounts the regional and the local as parochial. This tendency is thrown into relief at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century when social and cultural requirements, technological and political contexts reset the role of the state and its institutions (and the BBC is one of the most powerful in the system) as fundamental to the dissemination of culture. In this indigenous and local cultural activities may fall outwith the legitimized cultural capital of the state, and yet be fundamental to the identity used and referred to by the region. This is the perceived lack for ‘Scottish culture’ within the context of British arts. Increased centralization and bureaucratization of the arts community and cultural institutions towards the metropolitan core can produce an intractable gap between the respectable culture of the centre and the barbaric, parochial, dangerous arts of the periphery: a periphery which may then be recast as ‘other’. Within that context, however, the same technological, political and social advances are imposed and experienced but they will be interpreted and used with reference to the local and the indigenous as well as to the national and the international. To discount the distinctiveness of much of Scottish culture is, within a centralist model, justified.

7:84 (Scotland) Theatre Company was launched in 1973 through an epoch-making tour of The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil, pioneering small-scale touring theatre in Scotland. The arrival of the company coincided with a more general resurgence in indigenous theatre and its success heralded the rise of touring companies as an integral part of the theatrical scene. During the 1970s, its reputation was established as a campaigning left-wing company which combined music and documentary in shows touring to popular audiences throughout Scotland. Although 7:84 had been a revenue-funded client of the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) since 1976, in January 1988 SAC announced that it was to withdraw the company from the list of revenue-funded clients from April 1989. On 22 July 1988 John McGrath, writer, director and co-founder of the company resigned as Artistic Director, levelling allegations of political interference at SAC because of this proposal. The company was taken over by David Hayman, Gerard Kelly, and Jo Beddoe. By the beginning of 1992, Jo Beddoe had left the company and the intention of Kelly and Hayman to resign had been made public.

Odd though it may seem, the most popular contemporary playwright in Scotland over the past few years—judged in terms of frequency of productions—has not been a Scot but a Quebecer. In the four years from 1989 to 1992 there will have been four Scottish productions of Scots translations of plays by Michel Tremblay, as well as a revival of one of these shows. Glasgow's Tron Theatre staged The Guid Sisters (Les Belles-Sœurs) in 1989, revived it in 1990, and mounted a double bill of The Real Wurld? (Le vrai monde!) and Hosanna (Hosanna) in 1991; and Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre is staging The House Among the Stars (La Maison suspendue) in the autumn of 1992.

When dawn broke on 1 January 1991, Glasgow's year as European City of Culture was over. It was time to count the cost, £32 million it emerged, to pick up the pieces and to begin the inquest. As Glasgow is a city self-conscious to a fault, with an infinite capacity for self-analysis and self-flagellation, the inquest began long before 1990 had even dawned. The predictable round of ‘Whose City?’ and ‘What Culture?’ articles poured out as soon as Glasow had been awarded the title in 1986. Predictably, many of those early doubters ended up getting involved in the City of Culture events and profiting from them. Indeed, even those most virulently opposed to the whole notion, a group called ‘Workers City’, which rallied around the Glasgow novelist James Kellman, provided what was possibly the year's most entertaining and certainly longest running event. The furious and intensely public debate centred on the ramifications of the £4 million lost by an exhibition called Glasgow's Glasgow.