David Greig was born in Edinburgh in 1969, and was brought up in Jos, Nigeria, during 1970’s where his father worked for an oil company, and then he returned to Scotland in 1990 after his father took a job in the construction industry. He began to study English drama in Bristol University in 1987. Greig’s first involvement with theatre was with Edinburgh Young Theatre where he acted in a number of shows. After graduating the university his playwriting career began in the early 1990s with the Suspect Culture. For more than two decades, he wrote award-winning plays which put on stages all over the world including Europe, USA, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Korea. He has popular plays that he has written for Traverse Theatre, the Edinburgh International Festival, the Royal Shakespeare Company and national theatres in England and Scotland include: Europe (1994), The Architect (1996), Caledonia Dreaming (1997), The Speculator (1999), The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman Once He Loved in the Former Soviet Union (1999), Victoria (1999) and Outlying Islands (2002). Besides, The American Pilot (2005), about America’s involvement in the Middle East and Eastern Europe; Pyrenees (2005) about a man who is found in the foothills of the Pyrenees, having lost his memory; and San Diego (2003), a journey through the American dream. These were followed by Gobbo, a modern- day fairytale; Herges Adventures of Tintin, an adaptation; Yellow Moon: The Ballad of Leila and Lee (2006); and Damascus (2007). In 1990’s he founded The Suspect Culture with Graham Eatough and put on stage masterpieces such as Mainstream (1999), Casanova (2001), and 8000 m (2001).
However, Scottish literature is included in the superior British tradition, it isn’t subordinate. Scottish writers’ plays in 20th century were dealing with Scotland and Scottish matters, therefore Scottish playwriting is considered to be literary unimportant. Whereas, it has considerably significant place in British literature, as it improved bravely within English domination and captivity. Within the rich diversity of settings in his plays, Greig underscores the truth that Scotland is a part of continental Europe. Considering that each country is a nation itself and is engaged with other nations, it can be detected that Scotland is also connected to England, England is connected to Europe, Europe to the West like a chain. Greig plays a crucial role in unifying Scottish theatre with the global World. Nevertheless Greig isolates himself from English playwriting way, by defining it ‘impoverished, televisual and dull’, he has an undeniable place in British playwriting. David Greig’s plays are currently being performed in Scotland, Britain as well as in the World. He won awards such as Critics Award for Theatre in Scotland Best New Play (2003), Laurence Olivier Award for Best Revival (2004), Creative Scotland Award (2004), and TMA Theatre Award Best New Play (2005). Most of his plays are either about or set in Scotland. Therefore, he is Scotland’s most provocative, productive and famous playwright. David Greig is a part of a generation of talented writers, who have made the Scottish playwriting scene one of the most exciting in the world, accounts Dickson in his The Guardian article (2015).
Although the playwright is the author of over thirty full-scale plays, nowadays he continues his profession as an artistic director in Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum which is Scotland’s biggest repertory theatre that is known for its effective live drama. After his attendance to the capital’s most important producing theatre it is expected that Lyceum audiences ‘will raise more than a few eyebrows’ in 2016-2017 season, argues Mark Brown (2016). Moreover, Greig is pleased his new job: ‘I love directing. It is a pleasure. I find writing very very hard. Writing a script is mostly like chiseling ice off a rock with a wet stick. Frustrating and hard and uncomfortable. But then there is a great pleasure when one’s script comes into rehearsal’ (James, 2016). In the same interview David Greig also mentions that although coordinating and dramaturging Lyceum take time, he is still a writer and he would make time to write new plays too.
David Greig and Suspect Culture
In the early 1990s two students of Bristol University David Greig and Graham Eatough founded Suspect Culture, in Glasgow. Suspect Culture collective includes some students of Bristol University; actor and artistic director Graham Eatough, musician Nick Powell, and writer David Greig. Also Ian Scott joined the company as a designer of the plays over the next five years. Among their early projects were A Savage Reminiscence (1991), The Garden (1992), And the Opera House Remained Unbuilt (1992), Stalinland (1992), Europe (1993), One Way Street (1995), and Airport (1996). The last two, toured internationally and established a new form of theatre on the Scottish scene. As noted in the website of Suspect Culture, the aim of the new founded company was to form new style of theatre that ‘combined the best of British and European traditions, working with high quality but giving equal weight to visual and musical elements’. The innovation they did was an attempt to create an alternative theatre in British context. Besides that the company has undeniable contributions to Scottish theatre and playwriting. Formally, Suspect Culture had been active since 2008 and had a great influence on David Greig’s works. As Clare Wallace (2013) argues: ‘it would be neglectful to ignore the obvious fact that this work is intrinsic to his growth as theatre-maker’. Suspect Culture is a type of theatre that working with actors form the writing process, as David Greig explains in his interview with Billingham (2007): ‘What I found was that I liked to work with the actors in the rehearsal room and then I would go away and write at night – I didn’t want their words, I wanted them to help me to try to find the right situation’. The company of Suspect Culture were dealing with identity and spatial issues. Insomuch as the matters were not only identity and place but also loss of identity and loss of place.
During their career, David Greig and Graham Eatough they displayed an interest in a mind-boggling array of theatre (Brown, 2016). ‘European aesthetic in Scottish theatre’ as Brown calls, proceeded almost 16 years.
In present Scotland playwriting David Greig has an incontestable place for his contributions, innovations and progress. He is Scotland’s most prolific, efficient and successful playwright. His works developed through the plays he has written for Suspect Culture and his collaboration with Graham Eatough. , Dilek Inan points out in her recent book (2016). Greig’s Suspect Culture characters are desperate to determine their identity and in a challenge with place notion. The characters are often traveling from place to place either in reality or in imagination, and are often situated uncertain places such as train or bus stations, motorway, shopping centers, hotel foyers, airports and etc. The playwright considers he has a kind of geographical imagination as the way of understanding the world: ‘I’m quite interested in finding my way through worlds, and maps are good for that. I think that if we say that the process of making a play a bit like making a journey into an unknown world, then a big part of that process is a making the map, of finding the map’ (Rodriguez, 2016). Therefore we can deduce that places have a central motif in Greig’s work. As it is obvious from the play names: Europe, San Diego, and The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman Once He Loved in the Former Soviet Union Damascus, American Pilot, and Pyrenees. In his interview with Veronica Rodriguez (2016) the playwright clarifies an utterance of ‘a world dramatist’ for him is true. Because in his opinion ‘the world is my world, my experience. The defining experiences of my life took place in Africa, where I was brought up; in hotels in New York, where I worked for months in hotel rooms; on the streets of Cairo and Tunis, where I had extraordinary experiences with young Arab writers’. His plays are signs of his individual life experiences, the scenes that he’ seen all over the world. One Way Street takes place in Berlin, Mini Skirts in Kabul in Afghanistan, The Events in Norway, The Outlying Islands, Glasgow Girls, The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, Dunsinane, Victoria and some other plays take place in Scotland. In David Greig’s opinion a place doesn’t exist until it’s written about in fiction. Through his works he messages that geography has crucial effect on people’s lives. Further, the work of playwright is interested in questions of globalization and internationalization and their influences to modern people’s life. The themes of the plays refer to sense of dislocation and belonging, alienation and proximity in process of globalization in 20th century. For example his ‘breakthrough play’ Europe as mentions Andrew Dickson (2015), is set against the backstage of neo-European movement in late 20th century. The protagonist of the play Katia is a victim of civil wars in the Balkans with her father and desperate to find a place to shelter and blowing around from place to place. They find themselves in a deserted small European border town where the locals are also desperate to leave the town because of the shortage of jobs after heavy industry collapse.
Other works associated with Suspect Culture such as The Architect (1996), One Way Street (1994), Airport and The Cosmonaut (1999) touch on the similar themes. In One Way Street (1994) the protagonist Benjamin is supposed to prepare a tourist guide book about Berlin so he sees it as a chance to escape from his motherland. This peripatetic protagonist walks about post-wall Berlin in order to find his lost lover. Although David Greig tries to refrain traveling by plane himself, his work adheres to international traveling. In The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (1999) playwright depicts two lost and forgotten Soviet cosmonauts in a capsule floating outer space. The displacement and alienation are particular in these two astronaut characters who are trapped in space. The Architect (1994) is a play of crumbling walls and relationships. The characters are away from home and the family members are falling apart. Once successful architect Leo in the seventies built a housing estate, which won awards with. But because of the residents rejection the housing estate has to be knocked down and rebuilt. As his work his family is also collapses. As Europe, The Architect also portrays a sense of hopelessness and loss of moral values in post-war Europe. Moreover, in The Architect David Greig depicts wrong house designing system of British authority.
Although Greig doesn’t categorize himself as a nationalist, he wrote most of his works regarding Scotland. For example, in his award winning play Outlying Islands’ setting is an isolated Scottish island in 1930s – the islands which are famous for their nesting grounds for a variety of seabirds. Two ornithologists from Cambridge catalogue the local bird colonies. The play shows forthcoming World War danger and its probable consequences for the island and its birds. Victoria is also set in Scotland and depicts Scottish rural life from 1936 through 1976 to 1996 over three seasons, autumn, spring and summer. Victoria is the most Scotland-specific play, argues Dilek Inan (2016). Clare Wallace (2013) also accounts Victoria as Greig’s ‘most Scottish of works to date, a play that delves deep into cultural and national identity’. Inasmuch as, Greig focuses on the theme of nation and home through Scottish territory and shows the need of moving forward Britain and integrating with developed Europe. Playwright juxtaposes three stories of three generations to depict 20th century’s Scotland and describes the effect of the past on the present of Scottish context. Also the protagonist of the play is Victoria, the name of the play might be perceived symbolically as Queen Victoria for her special interest in Scotland.
His play Dunsinane is a sequel to Shakespeare’s Macbeth was commissioned by the National Theatre of Scotland and Royal Shakespeare Company. Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth is named as Gruach in Dunsinane play. In Greig’s version, after her husband’s death Lady Macbeth outlives and continues to struggle for the throne over her son from her first husband. The playwright clarifies in one of his interviews that the most famous play about Scotland is written by Shakespeare who hadn’t been to Scotland and wasn’t Scottish but he reduced great King Macbeth, but ‘now we now a lot more about him and have realized he was a good king, that interested me into writing a response’ (McAlister, 2013). So Wallace calls Dunsinane ‘an act of repossession’ (2013). Therefore the playwright both wrote the Scottish play from a Scottish point of view and touch upon actual problems such as occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Inasmuch as, the play does not simply describes simply historical cases, but also deals with contemporary resonances.
One more play about Scotland is The Yes/No Plays (2013) which seemed first on David Greig’s twitter feed and on the website of National Collective, a community who come together in support of the Yes campaign by using the heading ‘imagine better Scotland’. Inasmuch as, David Greig is a high-profile Yes supporter and interested in the referendum closely, both committed to paper and directed the play himself. In the play, Yes is the symbol for Scottish thoughts from 1980s until today- ‘confident, outward looking, sure of its place in the world’ (Pattie, 2016). And No is the voice of conservative Scotland. Therefore, the couple- Yes and No are opposing sides which symbolize Scottish citizens’ quandary. All these plays mentioned above take their inspirations from Scotland. David Greig is a man who lives in North of Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland with his family – his wife and two children – proud of his motherland’s history and this day. Although he wouldn’t like categorize himself as a nationalist, he mentions in his interview with Veronica Rodriguez that he is ‘somebody who would like Scotland to be an independent country’ (2016). Moreover, Scottishness is a focus point in Greig’s work as a source of discussion, and a space for survey; sometimes historical, sometimes political. Perceiving the fact that Scotland is in secondary position, and marginalized, David Greig tries to highlight it with his work. As mentioned above number of his plays depict the otherness of Scotland in case of its cruel environment, outlying location, different culture and sometimes different language. This is also politically real that, Scotland and England cannot be comparable:
‘Where everything in England was normal – Summer, land, beer, a house, a bed, – for example – In Scotland – that thing would turn out to be made of water – This is what you learn here – nothing is solid’ (Dunsinane, 39).
The way that King Malcolm, in Dunsinane describes his country is full of irony:
‘Sometimes I think you could be born in this country. Live in it at all your life. Study it. Travel the length and breadth of it. And still if someone asked you – to describe it – all you’d be able to say about it without contradiction is – ‘It’s cold’’ (29).
References
Brown, M. (2016). Enter Stage Left: Interview with New Edinburgh Royal Lyceum Director David Greig [online] (30.11.2016) http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/14478191.Enter_stage_left__interview_with_new_Edinburgh_Royal_Lyceum_director_David_Greig/
Botham, P. (2016). Look at the Ground and Imagine its Past: David Greig’s History Plays. Contemporary Theatre Review, 26:1, 49-59.
Dickson, A. (2015). How Playwright David Greig discovered Birnam Wood in Basra [online] (30.11.2016) https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/jan/24/how-david-greig-discovered-birnam-wood-in-basra
Grieg, D. (2016). Biography [online] (26.11.2016) http://www.front-step.co.uk/biography/
Inan, D. (2016). The Sense of Place and Identity in David Greig’s Plays. Altınpost Basın Yayın Dağıtım.
James, T. (2011). Exclusive Interview with Lyceum’s David Greig. [online]. http://young-perspective.net/exclusive-interview-lyceums-david-greig/
McAlister, K. (2013). David Greig on his Play Dunsinane. [online]. (01.12.2016). http://www.oxfordtimes.co.uk/leisure/theatre/10667984.David_Greig_on_his_play_Dunsinane/
Pattie, D. (2016). Dissolving into Scotland: National Identity in Dunsinane and The strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart. Contemporary Theatre Review, 26:1, 19-30,
Procter, J. (2011). British Council Literature – Biography of David Greig [online]. (22.11.2016) https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/david-greig
Rebellato, D. (2014). Contemporary Theatre review – Dan Rebellato in conversation with David Greig [online]. (26.11.2016) http://www.contemporarytheatrereview.org/2016/interview-with-david-greig/
Rodriguez, V. (2016). Zāhir and Bātin: An Interview with David Greig, Contemporary Theatre Review, 26:1,88-96.
Suspect Culture (2009). Suspect Culture had its beginnings at Bristol University where David Greig met Graham Eatough whilst studying English and Drama [online] (25.11.2016) http://www.suspectculture.com/history.html
Wallace, C. (2013). The theatre of David Greig. Bloomsbury.
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