These remarks were prepared for a panel titled “A Career In Theatre” at SPARK: The Highland New Play Festival hosted in Eden Court January 18 - 22nd 2024. I was fortunate to direct two extracts at this event: SEEDS OF EPPIE by George Gunn and HOTEL CALEDONIA by Aine King. The theme of “a career in theatre” is the vague throughline of this meandering set of paragraphs.
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My family didn’t fight my decision to study drama. They wanted to support my decision. I was supported. I feel that support. My mum and dad are usually the first or maybe second people to hear my new ideas, and they aren’t shy about telling me if it has legs.
They give clear notes. Practical notes. They are not theatre people. No one in my family is. When I said the world “dramaturgy” at the dinner table one night my dad laughed very loudly and took the piss pretty relentlessly. They don’t see much theatre. They were part of the 67% of Scotland’s population who don’t watch it. But I’ve kept encouraging them to go more often, and they see most of my stuff. So they’ve now joined the 33% who do see theatre. They supported my decision to study drama.
But they did worry. Because they wanted me to have an easier life than they had. And that’s not what being ‘in theatre’ is. The work itself is mostly brilliant, it’s a privilege, and I would take working on a bad play any day over a shift in any of the many retail jobs I’ve had to do. But it isn’t an easy life, and it isn’t always a laugh.
I’ll talk about what it’s like to do this, but there’s so many people who could also be up here, my story is my own, but it isn’t particularly remarkable, or cinematic.
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It’s 2023, I’m standing in Edinburgh Castle for a launch event for the Fringe. I’ve never been in the castle. A guy there finds out I am from the Highlands, that I studied there, and he asks: “Are you a Gordonstoun chap?”
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In the play The Seeds of Eppie by George Gunn, which I directed during this festival, there’s a line that cuts close to the bone, James Christie - who thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room - declares: “There are two constant companions in the life of an artist - loneliness and poverty.”
I would add a third one, rejection. You learn to live with that. It waits for you in the inbox, almost every day, certainly each week, and slowly you harden your heart to that word. No. You develop a sort of apathy to the idea of failure or success. Two possible coexistent worlds: where I get the job or I don’t, where I get enough money or don’t. You can’t let that determine your quality, your work is more than what other people say it is. It is for someone, out there, but it is also for you. And that’s all it needs to be.
But I have let my day be ruined by No a lot of the time.
The power brokers of the industry; institutions (which are businesses), gatekeepers who control these organisations, they want artists like you and me to hate eachother, and to develop rivalries, and to pursue them over years, to fight one another for a shrinking pool of work
These things are non-productive, they are not artistic, they don’t empower, or help, and while we can absolutely get together to have a moan about things, and there’s so much to moan about, the real reason we’re all here is because we love this industry more than we hate it. I hate that word “industry”. As if we’re all in an assembly line. No control or power or agency. That’s not true.
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It’s June last year and I get three rejections in a single afternoon, one of them really hurt because it was after a lengthy set of discussions about producing a script. I’m dropped in a one line email by an @-info address. I spend weeks feeling like total shit. I am so miserable I consider giving it all up. I am still depressed weeks later when I start rehearsals on a brand new show called ‘Everything Under the Sun’.
It’s so hard not to turn it all around on yourself. Someone makes a decision and without clear feedback all you have is yourself, your work, and your sense failure to contemplate the basis for that decision.
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During the lockdown, I had two scenarios in my head: one - that it was the end of society as we knew it, forever, and this was the start of the future. That we would never be together again, like this. And it would never be as it was. Sometimes I feel like we haven’t processed that feeling.
The other vision of the future was that the rebuilding would cement glitches in the system into permanent fixtures, that the ladders would be pulled up, the circle tightened, and a form of plague austerity would seep into all aspects of our society, like a country at war with itself, complete with supply chain crunches, economic contraction, and greater distrust of one another in search of ‘the enemy’. I sometimes think, when I am not feeling optimistic, that this is what has actually happened. The effects of the pandemic on our society, and our sector, will take years to fully process and measure. We are in that moment of transition.
The idea of a career itself is now a thing that slips from view for me, most of the time, trying to even imagine what that looks like is pretty much impossible, the idea of going from project to project like hopping from one train to another and never falling off, or stopping, that seems impossible in a landscape as starved of opportunity as ours in Scotland, where every callout will be impossibly competitive. The only solution seems to be emigration to richer markets in London, or America, or mainland Europe, where there is money placed into the arts, where work is given time and resources to develop. It’s easy to say that things will be better there when times are hard here.
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It feels as though the sector is in a multitiered system of patronage. As a writer, surrounded by other writers, we are expected to endure the slush-pile submissions thunderdome of full-length plays (written on-spec), for judgement, and maybe (in 8 months time), some feedback. When do you have to stop doing so much for no money? I don’t know. How long is the piece of string I’ve tied around my future?
Most importantly, early-career artists need spaces to mount work inexpensively, and have a chance to fail without being fatal. The Arches was a place for that. I read about it all the time, folk who cut their teeth there are now doing plenty bits today. Present day, if you are able to beat the odds and get something made professionally it has to be really good, because the stakes feel very high, the expectation is that all the work must be slick - so if you fuck up, and show your inexperience, then that will be something you have to carry and it’ll put the institutions off. I feel as though we have no room to fail. Institutions give me this feeling. They are, after all, businesses run on subsidy. They have many heads pulling them in different directions, between a genuine love of exciting art and the need to engage work that’s popular and profitable and a safer bet.
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I’ll admit something.
I feel jealous sometimes, when I see work that’s amazing, that is really good. It’s a huge compliment, in my mind, when I feel that way about someone’s work because they nailed it. They killed it.
And I burn with jealousy when I talk to writers and directors working with anything approaching normal stable regularity. When they make it look easy. Because it really isn’t and it can sometimes feel very lonely.
I think it’s okay to be jealous and to admit jealously. I think that’s something we’ve all felt before. But at a certain point you need to remember how far you’ve come and where you’re going, and you have to narrow your vision onto what’s next. And keep working on that until the next thing happens.
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There was once a brilliant, curious, and empathetic man called Mark Fisher-- not the theatre critic-- he’s grand, but I mean the philosopher and academic who sadly died in 2017 but left behind a wealth of insights.
One of them hits very close to me. It’s from a short piece called ‘Good for Nothing’ - about the politics of depression, both individual and collective. It posits that this widespread disaffection and disengagement from power, politics, culture, etc. is an engineered project… and that, crucially, it can be reversed.
I think we can break this collective cultural depression by going back to the promise of theatre, its egalitarian principles, its ability to build a community out of a room full of strangers. Theatre is an invitation to empathy, to feel the same things as the characters, who live lives vastly different from you.
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When we enter a creative space, we have a chance to build that better thing. We are told we live in a democracy, but we live our working lives in undemocratic spaces, in petty dictatorships, like working in a shop. I wasn’t heard. No one was respected. This is the business ontology in action.
When we have power over how we make our spaces, in theatre, we can make our own rules. So I would encourage you not to run to what you may be comfortable with, a hierarchy is efficient but unhappy. And I want people who work with me to be happy. I want them to look forward to coming into work
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I would also add one more to James Christie’s list of lifelong companions for artists: and that’s hope.
And it’s not a powerless hope either. It is a proactive one. A career in theatre is possible, but you have to make it yourself, and you have to lean into each success and each failure and learn to live with both.
Thanks.
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