Performing Scottish identity: From the rise of the Stage Scot to the National Theatre of Scotland

This dissertation focuses on Scottish drama and performance to argue that embodied acts play a crucial role in the construction of national identity. Utilizing methods of theatre history, performance studies, and postcolonial theory, it identifies the origins of a dominant Scottish identity based in the image of the warlike Highlander and examines the role that drama and performance have played in creating and disseminating this image. While a militarized Scottish identity persists today, the project concludes that contemporary Scottish performances have also begun to question this entrenched historical identity. The study begins by establishing a "Stage Scot" figure. It starts with Shakespeare and emphasizes the Charles Macklin's Scottish characters in the eighteenth century and stage adaptations of Walter Scott's novels in the nineteenth century and argues that the characteristics attributed to Stage Scots came to represent what Britons expected from Scots and thus what Scots began to perform for themselves.;The project continues by offering a sustained analysis of a performance event that helped move the performance of the Stage Scot character into real life. I argue that the royal visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822 served as a ritual of surrogation for the Scottish people, one in which the King and Highland culture combined to fill spaces left by successive traumas in Scottish history. The third chapter pairs a play, Gregory Burke's Black Watch, and an annual performance spectacle, the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, to examine present-day responses to Highlandized Scottish identity. I suggest that the play, produced by the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS), inaugurates a new era of Scottish theatre, one that grapples with the cliches of Scottish identity. The project concludes by examining possibilities for Scottish identities that diverge from the dominant, masculine, martial identity. I argue that plays such as Liz Lochhead's Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off and the NTS's production of Macbeth signal the possibilities for both feminist and queer futures for Scottish identity.