Scottish hair designer Scott Cooper on styling for the stage

Alongside regular sponsors (ranging from actors’ union Equity to corporate sponsor STV), Glasgow business BB Hair Collective will be giving the awards its backing. The Hope Street company will, appropriately enough, be sponsoring the Best Design award (which covers every aspect of theatre design, from sets, lighting and costumes to hair and make-up design).

The company’s founder, leading hair designer Scott Cooper, has strong theatre connections. His wife is the award-winning actor Nicole Cooper, who, just yesterday, ended the New York run of Scottish playwright Zinnie Harris’s play Macbeth (an undoing).

As if that wasn’t enough, Scott’s brother is the acclaimed Scottish stage and screen actor Gordon Cooper.

I catch up with the hair designer in a popular bar on the southside of Glasgow. He explains why he decided to throw his company’s money behind the CATS awards.

READ MORE: The rich connections between Scotland, Norway and independence

“I was sitting at last year’s CATS awards [at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh], and what I really liked, when I looked at the images of the nominees up on the screen, was that they were so diverse, in every way you could imagine”, Cooper says. “I loved that”, he enthuses.

The hair designer was clearly impressed by the CATS awards’ celebration of the talents of diverse theatre artists from across Scotland’s communities. However, seeing the increasing diversity of Scottish theatre reflected on the Traverse screen also reminded him that there is considerable progress still to be made.

The inclusivity suggested by the breadth of artists nominated in last year’s CATS awards “wasn’t everyone’s experience”, he explains. Cooper has always been particularly interested in hair design and care for people with curly hair, not least for people of African descent, such as himself.

Consequently, he looks after the hair of many of Scotland’s actors of colour. “Without naming any names”, he says, he knows people in Scottish theatre “who haven’t been having such a positive experience.”

In particular, he explains, many performers of colour in Scottish theatre (and this goes for the screen arts, too) aren’t being offered the hair design and care they require in their work environments. Actors of African descent, for example, are often told that the hair designers the company has don’t know how to deal with their hair.

Consequently, these actors are often left to deal with the hair design for their stage roles themselves, while their white colleagues are looked after on set. Needless to say, this bothers Cooper, not least because it is such a hidden problem.

“The assumption is, ‘they’re not complaining, so everybody must be happy’”, he comments. However, he argues, this assumption completely overlooks “how difficult it is to get a job as an actor, or in any other part of the industry.”

It is, Cooper continues, “very difficult” for Black actors and other actors of colour to speak up. Which is why he, as someone who is at one remove from the theatre business, has decided to go public about an issue that is on-going in the stage and screen arts in Scotland.

The hair designer is at pains to make it clear that his comments are not intended as a condemnation of the Scottish theatre industry. On the contrary, he is an enthusiastic supporter (having supported Glasgow’s Tron Theatre prior to his new sponsorship of the CATS awards).

He is pleased by the strides forward in diversity and representation that the Scottish stage arts have made in recent years and decades. However, he believes that more can and should be done in the interests of racial equality within the business.

READ MORE: Meet the team maintaining Scotland's most iconic landmarks

“I’ve been around the theatre my whole life”, Cooper says. “My young daughters want to go into theatre.

“I would love it if they could come into a theatre [where they were acting] and sit in a chair and not have to think about their hair and their make-up.”

Cooper is speaking out, not only because of the experiences of some of his clients in the theatre business or the hoped for careers of his own daughters. He was also inspired by the speech given at last year’s CATS awards by Scots-Zambian playwright May Sumbwanyambe.

The dramatist picked up the Best New Play and Best Production awards for Enough of Him, his powerful play about Scotland and slavery. He gave a passionate oration that included his thoughts on inclusivity and representation in Scottish theatre.

“It marked my card a little bit”, Cooper says of Sumbwanyambe’s speech. After the playwright’s oration, the hair designer felt that he, too, needed to go public with his thoughts.

What do his thoughts mean, in practical terms, for Scotland’s theatre companies? “When you say you want to be ‘inclusive’, when you use the term as widely and loosely as that, you have to be able to stand up to it”, he comments.

In his own business, he aims to be inclusive in the sense of being able to look after all manner of clients, regardless of their hair type or their ethnicity. “Nobody can achieve absolute inclusivity ever, I would say”, Cooper opines. “What you can do is always be working towards it.”

In practical terms, that means, he believes, that Scotland’s theatre companies need to be looking to bring in more hair and make-up designers who know how to cater to a wider variety of clients. This has to include, of course, actors of African descent.

That should be done in tandem, Cooper continues, with training the theatres’ existing hair and make-up designers so that they can look after the full variety of actors on the Scottish stage.

If his sponsorship of the CATS awards, and his subsequent comments in this interview, help Scottish theatre to make advances in this important area, Cooper will be a happy man.