ARTICLES: 7:84 Threat

February 19, 2006

© MARK FISHER published in Scotland on Sunday

POOR OLD 7:84. The Scottish Arts Council would have loved to put the final nail in the theatre company's coffin many years ago. The time was ripe in the late-80s after founder John McGrath had been forced out and the company looked to be more directionless than ever.

But just as the SAC axe was poised to fall, the company miraculously reinvented itself by instating a dream-team leadership of director David Hayman, actor Gerard Kelly and administrator Jo Beddoe. The SAC could hardly accuse the avowedly left-wing company of failing in its brief to produce popular political theatre when it was fielding the likes of Una McLean and Russell Hunter in Revolting Peasants, a play about the Poll Tax, at the Glasgow King's.

So 7:84 hung on by a whisker and was back in the clear by the time rising young star Iain Reekie took over the artistic directorship in 1992. His political vision was broader - some would say vaguer - than McGrath's, but in his exploration of sexual politics and pre-devolutionary nationhood, he made a good crack at redefining the company's raison d'être.

But there was still an underlying problem and it's one that besets the company to this day. When McGrath took to the village halls and community centres of Scotland with The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil in 1973, he gave an incendiary political voice to a nation.

The achievement of that ceilidh-style play - which analysed 200 years of Scottish history - should never be underestimated. In terms of content and aesthetics, it set the pattern for modern Scottish theatre and was the foundation of McGrath's pioneering work with 7:84 for much of the next 15 years.

Post-McGrath, though, you could see the company as a victim of its own success. Other theatre-makers saw what it was doing and were duly influenced, so that it became hard to tell everyone apart. In 2003, 7:84 staged Dario Fo's Can't Pay? Won't Pay! In 2005, Borderline staged Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Only one of them is an avowedly political company, so what's the difference?

To be fair on current director Lorenzo Mele, he's done a reasonably convincing job of defining what politics might mean to audiences in the new century. His Private Agenda in 2004 was a piece of verbatim theatre about the deleterious effects of the government's Private Finance Initiative on public services. It didn't sound like a riot and, theatrically it was unexceptional, but it made you angry and it engaged with contemporary life in a way that no one else was doing in Scotland.

But when you hear that this week 18 members of the Scottish Parliament signed two motions applauding 7:84's work and questioning the SAC's latest assault on the company, you have to figure out whether we're talking about politics or art.

It is undoubtedly politics that has kept the company going as long as it has. Its name famously refers to an old statistic that 7% of the population owned 84% of the wealth and its unique selling point, as the only up-front political theatre company in Scotland, has done a lot to protect it through leaner artistic times.

Any legitimate artistic attack on the company's work can be reinterpreted as an attack on political freedom, prompting an instant cry of censorship. Are the 18 MSPs standing up for the company because they thought last year's lame adaptation of Christopher Brookmyre's Boiling a Frog was a good night out - to borrow McGrath's phrase - or because they like the idea that someone's still flying the red flag?

Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt, would those same 18 MSPs sign motions in favour of Communicado, Suspect Culture, Highway Diner or any of the many other vibrant companies who could put 7:84's grant of £225,800 to good use? I'd love to think they would.

None of this is to say that 7:84 necessarily deserves to be dropped by the SAC, only that it shouldn't have special protection just because it ticks the right ideological boxes. It strikes me as rather too soon in Mele's reign to cast a final judgement on his achievements - and I'd say the internal SAC report alleging the company was "turning sharp political satire into panto for the working classes" was overly severe.

Rather, the company's work over the past two years has been competent but not startling. Mele has demonstrated an intelligent approach to engaging with the world - whether that be reacting to the G8 Summit in Tipping Point or considering the legacy of council house sales in the forthcoming Free-Fall - even if he has yet to find a consistent artistic voice.

The question the SAC must ask is whether this is good enough when there are so many other organisations brimming with potential and putting demands on a sorely limited budget.

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