‘Sexy kilts with attitude’: Scottish theatre in the twenty-first century

Abstract

This chapter considers the significance of the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS), which since 2006 has created work in diverse settings, in collaboration with a wide range of partners. It argues that the NTS’s buildingless model productively disturbs the ‘wholeness’ of existing models for national theatres, and has proved well equipped to produce engaged and often experimental local theatre in an era in which suspicion of traditional elites and centralized power is widespread. It also argues, somewhat paradoxically, that the very existence of the NTS is predicated on a longer-term evolution of autonomy and distinctiveness in Scottish culture, which although it pre-dated it, was energized by the opening of the devolved Scottish parliament in 1999 and shows no signs of slowing down.