The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, 6 June, 1974

Zoë: 

The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil is, according to the information accompanying the film on YouTube,a play written in the 1970s by Merseyside-born playwright John McGrath. From April 1973, beginning at Aberdeen Arts Centre, it was performed in a touring production in community centres in Scotland by 7:84 and other community theatre groups. The television version, directed by John Mackenzie was broadcast on 6 June 1974 by the BBC as part of the Play for Today series.

The play seems to me to be the nearest you can get on telly to "promenade theatre". The one and only thing I like about promenade theatre is that you get a bit of exercise as you have to move about a building, rather than sitting in a seat in the stalls. Of course, when watching such a thing on television this is no longer the case. Instead of you wandering about, the production does the wandering for you, jumping between the interior of Dornie village hall - complete with rather bemused, mostly elderly audience who I faintly suspect were bussed in compulsorily from their retirement home - and the great outdoors, where the Highland Clearances are reenacted, the opposition conducted by women with sticks, many of whom reminded me of a frenzied Terry Jones got up in a dress and mob cap. This is all intercut with newsreel footage of the coming of oil rigs to the North Sea.

I lost count of the number of times the words "capitalist" and "capitalism" were flung at us. In case you are wondering, capitalism is not viewed by the show's creators as a good thing in any way. From time to time the action, such as it is, is interrupted so that the main actors can line up across the stage and subject the audience to a blizzard of statistics, each delivered solemnly, as if part of a funeral eulogy: 

"Until economic power is in the hands of the people their culture will be destroyed" is a typical example of what they have to say. 

So modern, so riveting, as my aunt used to say when she couldn't think of a genuinely positive response to a work of art. The poor audience at Dornie. The cameraman edits his shots of them well, but being ranted at can't really have been a jolly way to spend an evening, even if no other live theatre had come through the place in decades.

The play's opposition to North Sea oil exploitation seems especially silly now. Bill Paterson - looking as smug and certain of his leftist views as a youth as he, to my mind, always looks now - plays the part of a rapacious Yankee oilman and declares with the menacing twinkle of the pantomime villain: 

"The highlands will be my lands in four or five years".

Am I wrong in thinking this prediction/threat has been proved totally wrong? Is Scotland now owned by American corporations? I know there is D Trump's infuriating golf course, but one could hardly call that a wholesale takeover of the nation - and, so far as I know, its purchase had nothing to do with North Sea Oil. 

But time is never wasted. Thanks to this play I learnt that it was the development of the breed of sheep called the Cheviot that precipitated the Highland Clearances. Interestingly, in addition, although, as the play shows, the Clearances were achieved with quite unnecessary brutality - (question: is brutality always unnecessary and therefore the adjective is redundant here?) - even the script slips in the admission that the crofters could not have sustained their way of life forever - or even for much longer

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Essentially, this play was made by people who believed themselves radicals but were in fact ingrained conservatives who had never seen a single change they liked. They were so in love with their ideas that it didn't occur to them to make something with a plot or entertainment value. The whole thing is devoid of subtlety. Of course, so is pantomime, However, pantomime, unlike The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, is usually funny.  In place of humour, an intense loathing of the English threads through the entire production, which includes the heresy of portraying stag as being hunted down by Englishmen with machine-guns. The only shred of amusement I got from the play was noticing that one of the main actors, a person who seems to loathe all forms of hierarchy and authority, (and one of the flaws of this kind of drama is that the performers are not playing characters but themselves, not telling a story or creating characters but lecturing us via the medium of song and dance), looks enormously like a young Stuart royal. He may be against all manifestations of hereditary power and in favour of the common man but he looks just like a King:

 

Yes, I hated this, mainly because I hate lack of humour.

 

 Phil - At last, we disagree! I enjoyed this strange blend of leftwing agitprop theatre, documentary and filmed reenactments. Watching a play within a play would probably have some earnest, modern day hipster nodding his head sagely and saying that it was all very "meta." Perhaps the rather fragmented nature of this drama appealed to my short attention span, but I liked the broad sweep approach, taking the viewer on a tour through 200 years of Scottish Highland history. 

Were the audience there at gunpoint? They seemed to be enjoying it to me, as I imagine that the play had more reasonances for them than it does for the casual viewer. I'm not an expert on this period in history, but the Highland Clearances were a brutal episode that reduced the Gaelic-speaking population of Scotland to the margins of the country. Of course, similar things were happening in England, where the enclosures created a rural poverty that forced huge numbers of people to move to the towns and cities, where they were all too often destined to live short, brutish lives - something that was brought home to me when I researched my own family history (if this was an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, I suppose I would now be obliged to look a bit teary).

So in general, I agree with the play's main thrust: successive generations of people in the Highlands have been exploited and while Scotland may not have become the American playground that the drama gloomily predicted, the oil industry has not been the unqualified success that it was in Norway, where the surplus revenues were invested in a social fund. However, while I may largely agree with the play's diagnosis, I don't agree with its recommended treatment: old fashioned, unreconstructed socialism, with its labyrinthine bureaucracy and aversion to innovation. 

But that's by the by. How does The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil work as a piece of drama? I found it enjoyable, but that's because I had an interest in the subject matter and felt a fondness for the dated naivety of its style. However, I can imagine that it might be very dull for a viewer who wasn't sympathetic, as at times it felt more like a BBC Schools production for A Level History students than a proper drama. 

Would I watch it again? Yes. Artistically it may have been a messy, uneven piece that at times felt more like a polemic than a work of drama, but it was also passionate, earnest, engaging and even, occasionally, beautiful, with its inclusion of Gaelic songs. In a cynical world, this play was refreshingly raw and although I sometimes felt as if I'd been stuck with Howard Kirk at a party, I was never bored.