On a glorious summer’s day in rural Perthshire in 2014, an extended family sit down to eat dinner and talk politics. It is just weeks before Scotland will vote no to independence, by 55% to 45%, in a referendum that may be era-defining or a historical footnote – just one of the puzzles of perspective posed by award-winning playwright Peter Arnott in his latest work Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape.
The friends and relatives of eminent professor of history George Rennie – a prominent Labour supporter who is leaning towards voting yes – are ultra-liberal, well-educated and well-fed. But as the characters reach their dramatic, wine-accelerated reckoning, the play is as much about that political moment, what it meant then and how it resonates today.
“We’re getting on for 10 years since 2014,” says Arnott, who has has been writer in residence at both the Tron in Glasgow and Edinburgh’s Traverse theatre. “So it’s really about looking at it as history: that particular moment when the analogue universe was forced into a binary vote”.
With half the dinner table voting no and the other half voting yes to independence, today’s audience views the characters’ tribalism with the benefit of experience, explains director David Greig, himself a multi-award-winning playwright who became the artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in 2015. “These characters think this is the big decision, and they don’t know what we know about Brexit, Trump, Covid, inflation …”
What is striking about the subject matter, this moment that pivots around 18 September 2014, is how seldom it has been tackled directly in Scottish theatre since then. Of course there is a powerful argument that all theatre is political but, as Greig says: “I don’t think there’s been anything direct in the main theatres. I don’t think there’s been much art set in 2014. I’m struggling to name a television series or a novel or even a sequence of paintings – so it might be the first time there’s been a major treatment of that year.”
So this is, as Greig puts it, “a big new Scottish play that thinks about our time”. It’s one that has only been able to complete its journey to the stage because the Lyceum is working together with Pitlochry Festival theatre – a necessary response to arts funding cuts. “It’s important to recognise that,” says Greig. “There was a world 20 years ago where any one of these theatres could have done it. This is not that world.”
“There have been plenty of theatrical events that have addressed an audience who took part in a referendum,” admits Arnott, who says he has lived with the characters in the play since the end of the 1980s. But any earlier, “would have felt wrong. To write a play directly about something, and to do proper poetic justice to both sides of the argument, you need a bit of distance.”
While the staging has been five years in the planning, this summer – amid significant upheaval for the governing SNP and the independence movement, following the resignation of former first minister Nicola Sturgeon and the ongoing police investigation into the party’s finances – feels timely to Arnott.
“Although I am a great admirer of Nicola Sturgeon, I would say that one effect of her continuation was that we were in a kind of deep freeze. Now it feels like we’ve definitely moved somewhere. And with a Labour government potentially around the corner – and what difference does that make?”
Group Portrait is a Chekovian comedy, says Greig, “in the sense that these characters who are pompous, vulnerable, cowardly, vain, in love, all get pricked and poked in ways that make us laugh. And I hope, by the end of the play, we see ourselves in them.”
Particularly apparent is the generational divide, he adds: “There is the postwar generation, which is able to believe in progress, and the younger generation, which is dealing with the idea that progress is a much more ambivalent concept.” But for both Arnott and Greig, the theatrical snapshot offers the audience a chance to examine 2014 without rancour. After all, says Greig, “it’s a football match where you already know the score”.
“It allows you to see the referendum as one moment among all the other moments,” adds Arnott. “One character says, ‘I was your age in 1979’, which is when there was a referendum on devolution, and now that’s a footnote to 1997, when there was another successful vote to create a Scottish parliament. So will 2014 be a footnote to 2032, or whenever another independence referendum takes place?”
