The Declaration of Arbroath and Scotland's 'performance culture'

The Arbroath document was not familiarly known as a “Declaration” until long after 1776, although it’s true that among its signatories were John Witherspoon, formerly a minister of the Laigh Kirk, Paisley, and James Wilson, a Fife lawyer who, in Edward J Cowan’s phrase, was thought to have “contributed the crucial concept of the sovereignty of the people” and who on more than one occasion referred to “essential liberty, which ... we are determined not to lose, but with our lives”.

Cowan, in his essay “Declaring Arbroath” in The Declaration of Arbroath: History, Significance, Setting, edited by GWS Barrow (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 2003), quotes a contemporary writing of Witherspoon and Wilson: “Both strongly national & can’t bear any thing in Congress which reflects [badly] on Scotland. [Witherspoon] says that Scotland has manifested the greatest Spirit for Liberty as a nation, in that their History is full of their calling kings to account & dethroning them when arbitrary and tyrannical.”

READ MORE: Alan Riach: Kilts, tartan, whisky: is Scotland a performance culture?

Cowan then asks the question: “In this assertion may there lurk the shade of ‘Arbroath’?” The answer is yes it may, but in the judgment is “not proven”. What is true is that the Arbroath document was not so much a Declaration as a letter, or specifically, a petition, to Pope John XXII in Avignon, to request, or rather, to ask emphatically or politely demand that Robert Bruce be recognised as the King of Scots and that therefore Scots must not be ruled in perpetuity by the English monarchy. The letter, and its purpose, its ideals and political meaning, had the approval not only of the signatories, the Scots nobles, but also of the church leaders.

And this is the point. To quote the historian Alexander Grant, in Independence and Nationhood: Scotland 1306-1466 (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), as well as the conviction of the Scots nobles, “The attitude of the Scottish Church was also significant at this time. Most of the bishops were staunch nationalists, who had stocked their dioceses with like-minded relatives and dependants. Not all of them actively supported Robert I, but few were directly hostile.

“On the whole the Scottish Church, unlike the nobility, attached more importance to the national cause than to the way Robert had seized the throne; it did not condemn, let alone excommunicate, him for his sacrilegious murder of John Comyn in a church.”

So the church, as well as the nobility, was embroiled in what remains one of the most dramatic political statements in history.

David Annand’s arresting sculpture on the edge of Arbroath shows the figures of both bishop and king raising the document into the air above and in front of them, one hand on each side, as if it were a shield guarding not the individuals holding it but the realm beyond and behind them, not only Scotland (not as property but as a place in which to live) but also the Scots, a people to live among and be part of.

Factions of support raged around both John Balliol and Robert Bruce as potential kings but the cause of independence in this era was profoundly endorsed by the church, beyond individual leaders.

And today?

The assertion of self-determination embodied in the Declaration of Arbroath is and remains a theatrical statement, performance culture at its most dramatic. Yet the question of whether Scotland might be described as a “performance” culture in this way is counterbalanced by a more familiar sense of Scotland as a culture of repression, tight-lipped silence and self-suppression.

Both are exaggerations, of course, and both have some truth, but the balance, or oscillation, or bagatelle, between these ideas of how the pre-eminent characteristics of a culture might be presented – or represented – are suggestive. A contentious interpretation of the prevailing feeling among the people of Scotland in 2021 might be that half of us are scared, the other half frustrated, and we need to solve that conundrum somehow.

Religious and moral conviction is everywhere in the political imperatives dramatised in David Lyndsay’s Satyre of the Thrie Estaits, where comedy and political address come together in social satire and critical engagement. The play is an immediately entertaining performance of ideas about religion, social morality and statecraft. The context of complex religious conflict is crucial to its political purpose, its display of human motivation, and its vision of a just society.

BUT in the years since, screen media have come to dominate visual experience in the western world; live theatre has had to renegotiate its presence and value. David Hutchison, in his essay on “The Experience and Contexts of Drama in Scotland” in The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Drama (2011), sums up an essential quality of all play performances like this: “Liveness is of the essence of the theatrical experience.”

The problem, he points out, is that since the days of the music hall, screen media has contested the attractiveness of “liveness”. The music hall’s “largely working-class audience abandoned liveness for the spectacle and exoticism of recorded images”. The boom in cinema-going between the wars, the establishment of radio, the infiltration of television and now online technology, all these mechanisations of spectacle are in competition with liveness, especially when the ground rules for engagement are commercial priorities. And then there’s lockdown.

Hutchison reminds us there are many opportunities made possible through screen and sound media for representing (in both senses), plays and literary works of various kinds, and for renewing critical engagement with them. Examples abound: John Purser, Stewart Conn and Iain Crichton Smith all wrote memorable plays for radio; Gerda Stevenson’s radio version of Walter Scott’s novel The Heart of Midlothian is the best quick way to get an accurate summary of that huge, complex work because Stevenson deeply understands not only its language, historical moment, characters and lasting significance but also the literary-philosophical and dramatic-theatrical values inherent to its narrative structure.

Meanwhile television “plays” such as John Byrne’s Tutti Frutti (1987), or the television adaptations of literary fiction by George Mackay Brown, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, George Douglas Brown, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson broadcast in the 1970s and 80s, or Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness (1985) and David Kane’s Jute City (1991) remain to be rediscovered and learned from in the 21st century.

Hutchison concludes that “important as radio, television and film are for the understanding and experience of Scottish drama” nevertheless “live theatre remains crucial to its existence and success”.

Performance, live communication, performativity in actual, staged production, demands a particular kind of respect, in Hutchison’s words: “The writer is important, but is one of a team whose efforts combine, sometimes in a workmanlike fashion, sometimes even in a dull fashion, but sometimes to magical and mesmerising effect.”

But the question remains, who writes the scripts for Westminster?