On the high and low roads

“Oh you’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low, and I’ll be in Scotland before you.” So opens one of Scotland’s most famous ancient songs about Loch Lomond, perfectly capturing one of the glories of the country: its unforgettable landscape. We have highlands, islands, borders, mountains and forests in addition to towns, cities and villages.

The National Theatre of Scotland started on its radical journey nine years ago, with the declaration that it was a ‘theatre without walls’. This mission perfectly matches the exceptional geography of Scotland and allows us to embrace our aspiration of taking theatre to wherever an audience is to be found, whether that is the village hall in St Margaret’s Hope on Orkney, the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh, the Warehouse in Lossiemouth or the Tait Hall in Kelso. There has long been a tradition of performing arts companies touring the high roads and low roads of Scotland and so we stand on the shoulders of giants in continuing this convention.

Advance booking is virtually unknown in most of our small-scale locations and so a certain nervousness comes into play on the night when hoping for audiences to appear

Since we began performing in 2006, we have mounted 239 productions in 205 locations in dozens of Scotland’s rural communities. Richard Lochhead MSP, the Scottish Government’s Minister for Rural Affairs, noted recently in a speech that one of his policies is “to build a fairer Scotland and tackle inequality” and, in this respect, ensuring the provision of publicly subsidised culture is a vital principle by which we operate. As this article goes live, we will be performing our most fully realised Gaelic language theatre production to date, an adaptation of Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore/Uisge-Beatha Gu Leòr. The tour prioritises the heartlands of the Gaelic-speaking areas, including the islands of Barra, Harris and Skye. Our small-scale tours (usually one-nighters) to rural communities in Scotland have included six to eight week tours of Long Gone Lonesome, Rantin, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, Molly Sweeney and Miss Julie – all pieces created by Scottish or Scottish-based theatre-makers, specifically to connect with smaller communities. In addition to these tours, we have embedded artistic development projects in smaller communities, including writers’ workshops and events for young people and families.

We apply the same philosophy of creating high-quality work with the keenest artistic, creative and technical standards, whether we tour to a 60-seater village hall or the Lincoln Center in New York. The producing, budgetary, management and communications strategies related to small-scale touring require us to devote extra time to getting it right. We need to make sure that we are open to the differences inherent in each community and invest much energy in becoming familiar with a local area, promoter and venue. Our senior producer, Eileen O’Reilly, an expert on small-scale touring, comments: “The best thing about this job is saying yes to promoters or volunteers in rural venues. In planning tours, I prioritise for appearances Scotland-wide and look for as many different places as possible to take our work to as many corners of the country as we can. My ambition is that we are within commuting distance – however that is defined in different locations – of everyone in Scotland, on a regular basis.”

Eileen talks about the challenges that some community members face in either keeping their venues alive or in creating a venue from an under-used village hall. In Dalmellington, South Ayrshire, for example, Christine and Henry Burgoyne are working to breathe life into their community education centre and have been in touch with us to scope out what the venue would need to provide for us to tour there. A similar story exists in Ardfern in Argyll and Bute where the local community hall received some investment in its fabric and the committee of volunteers encouraged us to take advantage of their new provision. Now that they have doors big enough to permit sets to enter, we haven taken Long Gone Lonesome to them.

One of the main planks of our touring strategy is to invest in local economies, not only by booking neighbouring accommodation and spending in village shops, but by working with local promoters (where they exist) to encourage members of communities out of their houses to enjoy a communal experience. In very rural locations, this can be an enormous challenge to our marketing and communications team. They need to make sure they are equipped with the hyper-local knowledge required to understand how to reach potential attenders, be that via a poster in a bus shelter or a paragraph in a parish newsletter. Emma Schad, our press manager, says: “Never miss a deadline in a community newsletter. The local and regional press in rural areas matter more than national titles.”

Advance booking is virtually unknown in most of our small-scale locations and so a certain nervousness comes into play on the night, when hoping for audiences to appear. The normal issues relating to box offices and online booking are of secondary importance when many rural locations don’t have reliable broadband or mobile signals. The latest snazzy app can be irrelevant, requiring us to prioritise more traditional forms of marketing and communications. Gareth Beedie, our Marketing Manager, comments, “With a smaller marketplace than for a main-scale tour – sometimes just a couple of hundred people within a drive time of up to 90 minutes along single-track roads – the essential thing is to find the person on the ground who can help us with insider local knowledge. And when traditional marketing – posters, leaflets, local newspaper ads – is crucially important, we need to know exactly where to devote our spend.”

The infrastructure in Scotland around small-scale venues can be demanding since not every location is able to provide the sort of technical or operational support we might need. This often means touring extra lighting or sound systems, washing machines and a staff member for front-of-house duties. There have been occasions when, having geared up a small-scale venue for one of our shows, we have been able to leave a legacy of equipment or kit, the better for that location to facilitate other companies’ visits in the future. When we wished to take our award-winning production of The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart to the Old Torry Community Hall in Aberdeen, it was clear that the venue would need a permanent theatre licence and the installation of 3-phase power before our visit could be viable. We were able to help with both, so contributing to improving the location for performing arts.

Our overwhelming experience with small-scale touring is that the immediacy of response from attendees, and their pleasure at us being in their communities, validates everything we do. Over the years we have been told of people’s pride that their national theatre visits them on their doorsteps, of the enjoyment of meeting the actors the morning after shows in the post office and their sense that, even though their community might not be in the central belt of Scotland, they are given access to the high-quality drama. Producer Eileen O’Reilly tells of our appearance in Unst, the most northerly part of Shetland. We had just performed Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. Eileen was approached by an 82-year-old woman who said: “If I’d known theatre was this good, I’d have come sooner.”

In all this, it is crucial to highlight one major factor: our small-scale touring is not a one-way street. We learn and grow as much from visiting these small centres of population as they, hopefully, do from us. It is a privilege for us to discover so much about our own country, and experience life in multiple contexts from being welcomed into these communities. Notwithstanding the beauty of sitting in a minibus as some of the world’s most awe-inspiring scenery moves by your window, getting to know the people who live and work in places such as Strontian, Buckie, Galloway, Ullapool, Cromarty, Wick and Strathdon creates life-affirming encounters that not only make us better at our jobs, but make us better citizens.

Whether we are on the high road or the low road round Scotland, presenting theatre in small-scale rural locations is part of the life-blood of our organisation. Long may it continue.

Roberta Doyle is Director of External Affairs at the National Theatre of Scotland.
www.nationaltheatrescotland.com