Exile
is at the heart of Heritage, Nicola McCartney’s tragedy set in 1920s Canada, in
which Ulster emigres in search of some bright new tomorrow discover that the
past isn’t easily left behind. Coming from Northern Ireland, McCartney’s roots as
a writer were steeped in such themes when her play premiered at the Traverse
Theatre, Edinburgh in 1998.
In an
interview during the run-up to the play’s opening, the then twenty-something writer
described herself as a ‘voluntary exile’, who had left Belfast to study English
and Theatre Studies at Glasgow University. Heritage was the play McCartney said
she said she’d never write, yet the love across the barricades story in Heritage
proved irresistible, as the hand-me-down mythologies depicted in the play are
romanticised to the characters’ terminally destructive downfall.
Written
in a spare poetic demotic that was a key form for many of McCartney’s
generation of writers, Heritage arrived in the thick of what now looks like a
golden age for new playwriting. Peers such as David Greig, David Harrower and
Stephen Greenhorn had already been championed by the Traverse under the new
writing powerhouse’s then artistic director Philip Howard. It was the time as
well of so-called in-yer-face theatre, with the likes of Sarah Kane and Mark
Ravenhill sending shockwaves throughout London’s theatre-land.
While
writers in Scotland appeared more lyrical, their questions about identity,
belonging and nationhood were the same. With the UK in the first flush of Tony
Blair’s New Labour government, devolution in Scotland still a year away and the
end of the twentieth century looming along with what some suggested was the end
of history itself, the world was in a serious state of flux. Old political
certainties had seemingly gone, and it was time to dig the new breed.
Heritage
may have been McCartney’s main-stage debut as a playwright, but she was far
from an ingénue. She trained as a director in Northern Ireland with the
Charabanc company, and directed the first commercial tour of Harry Gibson’s
staging of Irvine Welsh’s era-defining novel, Trainspotting. McCartney had also
co-founded and was artistic director of lookOUT, with whom she had written and
directed six plays prior to Heritage.
Twenty-one
years on it first appeared, Heritage is regarded as a modern classic, while
McCartney has gone on to work extensively as a writer, dramaturge and academic.
Her most recent play, Crazy Jane, was produced by Birds of Paradise in 2015,
and she is under commission from several major theatres.
McCartney
is currently Reader in Writing for Performance at the University of Edinburgh,
where she leads the Masters programme in Playwriting. She has also become one
of the driving forces behind Class Act, the Traverse’s flagship outreach
programme, with a particular emphasis on working in Russia and Ukraine.
Here
and elsewhere closer to home, arguments about identity, migration and
nationhood are at a premium, with everyday suspicions of otherness ramped up by
a mixture of misinformation and territorial tribalism that lingers like a
festering sore. It is in the shadow of such a seismic social and political
landscape that this overdue revival of Heritage suggests the play itself has come
out of exile even as it has come of age.
Commissioned by Pitlochry Festival Theatre for the programme of their revival of Heritage in July 2019.
ends
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