On Wednesday, in the company of an enthusiastic and very large audience at Edinburgh's Festival Theatre, I caught up with Scottish Ballet's rebooting of Matthew Bourne's Highland Fling, an exceedingly contemporary take on La Sylphide which those who had seen it at Glasgow's Theatre Royal insisted I must not miss.
It was good advice, and not simply because it is a beautifully staged and performed ensemble piece and a thoroughly entertaining "good night out" that John McGrath and his associates who helped define a set of parameters of contemporary Scottish stagecraft would have recognised and approved.
Highland Fling is also a very timely exploration – with the lightest of touches, but profound just the same – of our ideas of cultural identity. As it happens, this train of thought has been encouraged this past week. The hour-long film about Oban in Nicholas Crane's Town series on BBC Two on Tuesday, which began promisingly by acknowledging the prejudice I share with many people that the port is CalMac's equivalent of Crewe and not a place to hang about, succeeded in demonstrating that there is rather more to Oban than that, but then descended into TV tropes of Apprentice-like entrepreneurism and lingering Coast-style landscape videography.
Thanks to Crane, it had rather more narrative drive than the Ewan McGregor-narrated Hebrides series on BBC One, but for all its impressive timespan, it was still guilty of the sort of repetition that bedevils much contemporary programme-making, seemingly convinced the audience has the attention span of a fairground-prize carp.
Nonetheless, here was another persuasive advertisement for Scotland that makes you wonder about the Beeb's agenda in the run up to the referendum next year. A case might be made for such journalistically sanctioned PR for VisitScotland bolstering either side of the argument, but that it is not immediately apparent strikes me as rather more interesting.
McGregor's famous speech in the film of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, in which Mark Renton defines the onanistic nature of the colonisers of his native land, is rather better known than Alasdair Gray's rather lengthier essay on "settlers and colonists" which has sparked much debate. And Scottish people enjoy, and chuckle knowingly, at its sentiment.
There is a distinctly post-Trainspotting look to Highland Fling too, set in a world of working-class promiscuity and hedonism, fuelled by drink and drug-taking, but also dressed in tartan and soundtracked by some of the most kitsch bastardisation of traditional music. We howl with laughter at that too, which most of us probably agree shows a very healthy attitude and ability to "see oorsels as ithers see us" but would have dismayed Hugh MacDiarmid.
Grumpy old man that he was, he railed against "Lauderism" as a music-hall conspiracy to promote the "extreme form of those qualities of canniness, pawkiness and religiosity, which have been foisted upon the Scottish people by English propaganda, as a means of destoying Scottish national pride, and robbing Scots of their true attributes, which are the opposite of those mentioned".
If Scottish Ballet are guilty as charged, here then was a real contribution to a debate we should surely be having about our cultural identity in the run-up to the 2014 vote, being articulated by dancers, choreographer and set designer, many of whom, it is hopefully tangential to point out, are not in the least bit Scottish.
The audience certainly didn't seem to care. While the political argument is currently almost entirely concerned with the uncertain economic and diplomatic future in the event of a yes vote, there has been very little discussion about what it means to be Scottish, how much of that is tied up in our relationship with the rest of the UK, and what we can learn about the effect of independence from the small nations across the Irish and North Seas about that. I think these are very interesting areas of inquiry and I applaud one of our national companies for putting them so clearly, and insidiously, on the agenda.
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