The NTS Moves On
The announcement of the National Theatre of Scotland’s autumn season, almost eighteen months after it was launched, provides a good opportunity to look back on a brave experiment. To have a national theatre which is not building-based but is essentially a commissioning body was a daring thing to attempt. Has it worked?
The answer has to be an emphatic “yes”. When we look back to the work it has funded, from that first (also brave) experiment of having ten separate launch events throughout Scotland, through tours to tiny venues which rarely, if ever, saw theatre before, to major productions such as the critically acclaimed (and it is not often that epithet can be so appropriately applied) Black Watch, NTS has made a major impact on the Scottish theatre scene.
And not just on the Scottish scene either: tours outside of Scotland of productions as diverse as children’s show The Wolves in the Walls and the amazingly powerful Aalst have shown audiences elsewhere in the UK just what Scottish theatre is capable of producing.
There has been considerable criticism of the Scottish Parliament and MSPs (much of it justified - the Parliament building at Holyrood, for example) but the NTS is certainly something they got right!
July 21st, 2007 at 02:05 pm
The NTS has had some great successes and I’ve been lucky enough to see several of them including “Roam”, “Mary Stuart”, “Black Watch”, “Dissocia” and “Aalst” (although I was less taken by it than you were), but it hasn’t been all good news. I enjoyed their production of “Futurology:A Global Revue” but the marketing for it was very poor and didn’t remotely suffice in overcoming the reluctance of theatregoers to see a show in conference venues such as Glasgow’s SECC. As a result I understand tickets were hard to shift and matinees were cancelled, but it certainly wasn’t due to the quality of the show.
Similar poor marketing of “Dissocia” meant that I didn’t bother to see it in Glasgow and it was only after the ‘fuss’ it created in London that I made the effort to see what it was all about when the production came to Edinburgh.
In similar fashion I have concerns about the upcoming “Half Life” which appears to require me to traipse around the hillside around Oban for hours to see a number of short performances in the day and a longer evening show. I hope there will be a concerted effort to explain how this effort will be rewarded as at the moment I’m thoroughly unconvinced (especially given the possible need for an overnight stay locally.)
I have also been disappointed to see that the NTS Young Company does not yet appear to have been reconstituted for it’s second year and although I have been told it will return in a different form there is little sign of it at the moment. I saw two of last year’s Young Co productions and “The Recovery Position” is one of the strongest shows I have seen this year. Hopefully the NTS will find a way to continue to mentor future talent.
But yes, overall the NTS has been a resounding success, but it has also greatly raised expectations for future productions and I only hope it can live up to them.
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