“Dreaming of a Scottish renaissance? Wake up!” – Angus Linklater, writing in The Times of 18th August 2025, discusses the Scotland issue of our journal.
Cultural debate has been drained of passion and interest in artistic matters has sadly now fallen to a small group of enthusiasts.
‘That,” said my friend as we stepped out of the Festival Theatre last Friday, “was the best thing on stage I have ever seen in my life.”
“I absolutely hated it,” said my other friend (yes, I have more than one.)
The hater was in a minority. As the curtain came down on Scottish Ballet’s Mary, Queen of Scots, the audience stood as one to applaud a mesmerising performance. This was a world premiere of note, and a fairly cosmopolitan one: original score by Australian and Swedish composers; choreographer Franco-British; director English; company Scottish. You do not get many original ballets that stand the test of time. This one, I suggest, is here to stay. Anything that arouses such extreme reactions is worth watching.
At least as memorable at the Edinburgh Festival was the Dundee Rep/National Theatre of Scotland production Make it Happen, about the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland — a rollercoaster ride through the decline and fall of financial Scotland. I would add, on a different scale, The Invisible Spirit, a sprightly and nostalgic look back at our postwar history from the pen of the late Kenneth Roy, an acerbic critic of the nation’s strengths and weaknesses.
As a measure of the varied strengths of the Scottish arts scene, that, I would say, is a fair result, and I would add in some thunderous performances by the Scottish orchestras in the course of the London Proms. But not much of this is debated any more. Do the arts matter? If so, why and to whom? They surface from time to time when funding is granted by government, or withdrawn by government — both of which happen fairly frequently — but whether they have much impact beyond the auditorium is not much discussed.
“Culture is central to who we are as a nation,” proclaims the SNP government’s website. If so, why don’t we talk about it? None of these performances would have taken place without government funding, so are ministers pleased with their return? It would be good to hear whether our culture secretary, Angus Robertson, thought Mary, Queen of Scots was asking for trouble from the beginning, or Fred Goodwin was a bit hard done by. Any discussion would be better than none.
Even the rows seem to have evaporated. Time was when the arts were marked by furious altercations: Jim Kelman, railing against the English establishment; William McIlvanney, railing against the dead hand of unionism; Alasdair Gray, just railing. There was a literary flurry from younger Scottish writers during the independence referendum, but where are those voices now? Even Irvine Welsh, whom we rely on to pick a quarrel in an empty room, told the BBC in a recent interview: “Maybe we should focus on love as an antidote.” For heaven’s sake…
Scotland takes its cultural pulse only intermittently. The so-called literary renaissance of the 1930s, when Hugh MacDiarmid and Lewis Grassic Gibbon challenged the whole basis of what constituted Scottish writing, is now regarded as seismic, but then aroused interest only among the very few.
Parodying MacDiarmid in his novel Magnus Merriman, my father, Eric Linklater wrote: “The critics were, as usual, divided into two factions, one party calling [his poetry] a work of superlative genius, the other declaring it, quite simply, to be gibberish. The general public, being unaware of its very existence, reserved their opinion.”
By the end of that decade, even that argument had faded, and so far had interest in the arts fallen that a small group of art lovers felt the need to establish the Saltire Society to inject new energy into what was termed “a cultural desert”.
With Scotland’s literary magazines now mostly extinct, it has fallen to the lot of a small Irish publication, Irish Pages, to foster a debate about the Scottish cultural landscape, and whether it thrives today or not. Essays from the likes of the poets Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson, the writers Neal Ascherson, Stuart Kelly and James Robertson and the playwright David Greig, lift up Scottish culture like a heavily embedded stone, to see what lies beneath.
In a world where the arts are viewed through the prism of social media, and literature knows no borders, even defining what constitutes Scottish writing proves problematical. As Kelly notes: “Is JK Rowling evidence of the strength of contemporary Scottish literature? Is she Scottish? (What counts? Birth? Electoral register? Feeling that way that day?) … Do we judge it by column inches, sales, Goodreads stars?”
He names a string of young writers whose work he admires, but accepts there is a risk of judging books from a purely Scottish perspective, particularly when, as in 2014, independence was on the agenda, and “if you disliked a Scottish book, you disliked the idea of Scotland itself”.
James Robertson, by contrast, believes independence is a way for Scotland to “recover” from its current stasis: “Recovery of Scotland’s independence will not make a great difference to me in the years I have left, once the celebrations are over. But for the generations that follow, faced with the overriding issue of climate change and how to build a sustainable human relationship with the planet, I think it will.”
In their introduction to the essay collection, Jamie and Paterson draw a distinction between the views of those they term the “elders” of the cultural scene, among whom “none is happy, none particularly optimistic”, and the younger generation, who have yet to make up their minds. They asked one of Scotland’s younger poets, Niall Campbell, to edit a section of new and emerging poets, because they are “the future dreamers” of the culture “and one ignores their voices at one’s peril”.
The problem seems to be that these young writers have yet to awaken from the dream, and, while resting is a good way of gathering strength, “it may be time to wake up and face the reality of Scotland’s present situation before we dare dream again”.
In other words, we need to start a proper debate about the arts, because unless we talk about them, by the time we wake up we will have forgotten the dream entirely.