OIL is in the news again, so it’s fitting that a new production of John McGrath’s landmark play, The Cheviot, The Stag, And The Black, Black Oil is in the pipeline too, as Dundee Rep launch a major revival.

First produced in 1973, The Cheviot appeared at a unique moment in Scottish history: the build-up to a referendum on Scotland’s future. It was a play that looked to history to shed light on the present. It used the ceilidh form of songs and speeches to explore the period from the Clearances to the discovery of oil, and asked what these events meant for ordinary Scots.

Yet it could have turned out differently. John McGrath, who died in 2002 from leukemia, recalled that he was almost persuaded to write about the so-called “Lowland Clearances” – the slum clearances of Glasgow of the 1960s and 1970s: “The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) yard had been occupied in 1971, and Richard Eyre suggested I might write about Glasgow being cleared in the same way that the Highlands had been cleared,” he said. “I didn’t write that, but it was the beginning of the idea that became The Cheviot, The Stag And The Black, Black Oil.”

“The reception of The Cheviot in the industrial areas indicated many things about our future work. The Cheviot, popular and appreciated as it was, did not touch on the urban misery, the architectural degradation, the raw, alcohol-riddled despair, the petty criminal furtiveness, the bleak violence of living in many parts of industrial Scotland.”


McGrath’s aim was to push beyond sentiment and offer some hope: “One thing I had insisted on was that we broke out of the ‘lament syndrome’. Ever since Culloden, Gaelic culture has been one of lament – for exile, for death, for the past, even for the future. Beautiful, haunting lament. And in telling the story of the Highlands since 1745, there are many defeats, much sadness to relate. But I resolved that in the play, for every defeat, we would also celebrate a victory, for each sadness, we would wipe it out with the sheer energy and vitality of the people, for every oppression, a way to fight back.”

In his letter to the Scottish Arts Council, McGrath recognised that funding depended on the play’s politics not being one-sided or party-minded: “You ask me if the play has any overt political intention. We certainly are not proselytising for any party or group, openly or secretly. So have no fears, we shan’t be canvassing for anybody.”

Yet the play, already political, soon became politicised when 7:84 theatre company were invited to give a reading of The Cheviot at the SNP conference in Oban in 1973. This presented a challenge to those who felt socialism should have nothing to do with nationalism. McGrath felt the play’s radical politics shone through: “The hall was enormous, the stage a thin slit half a mile from the back, and the acoustics dreadful. We had all of half an hour to sort it out, lighting and all, but we did, and it worked. Reactions differed from various parts of the hall. I shall never forget Liz squaring up to all 500 of them and delivering:

‘Nationalism is not enough. The enemy of the Scottish people is Scottish capital as much as the foreign exploiter’ – with shattering power. Some cheered, some booed, the rest were thinking about it.”

Many are still thinking about it, with its themes of landownership and management of resources. Actress Elizabeth MacLennan, who died in June, wrote in her memoir of 7:84, The Moon Belongs To Everyone (1990) that the purpose of The Cheviot was to revisit a dramatic episode in Scottish history, to examine its causes, and make it relevant.


MacLennan, who married McGrath in 1962 (pictured left), argued that the two great catastrophes that shaped modern Scotland, the Clearances and the Famine, were too often viewed as tragedies with no bearing on the present, although they continued to affect people directly: “The connection between these events and land ownership today was not widely made,” she wrote. “Nor did people see these events as relating to, say, their own difficulties in buying a house in Aberdeen.”

“The moon belongs to everyone” is a line from an old song, The Best Things In Life Are Free, from 1928. MacLennan and McGrath’s drama belonged to everyone, a people’s theatre. Other things, like land and oil, remain largely in private hands. When The Cheviot appeared, the ‘black, black oil’ was not the only precious resource in Scotland being eyed by multinational companies.

The Scottish landscape would have changed even more dramatically had the big corporations been able to extract another natural resource.

On July 21, 1971, the Secretary of State for Scotland answered a question in the Commons about a major proposal to extract mineral wealth from the Isle of Harris, known as the Lingerbay Superquarry. The plan was to wipe a mountain off the map because of the discovery of what radical geographer Fiona Mackenzie called the “white, white rock” – anorthosite, the material the moon’s surface is made of. In November 2000, the newly devolved Scottish Government finally announced its decision to deny planning permission. The companies would have to get their anorthosite elsewhere.

ALAS, it now seems that the moon doesn’t belong to everyone. In September 2013, The Telegraph reported that legal experts were working on lunar ownership, which was obviously an area of contention: “Without a sensible legal framework, space law can get bizarre. Last year, a Quebec man named Sylvio Langevin walked into a courthouse in Canada and filed a suit declaring himself owner of the planets in our solar system, four of Jupiter’s moons, and the interplanetary space between. The judge dismissed Langevin’s claim, calling it an abuse of the Canadian legal system.”

Ironically, the birth of the National Theatre of Scotland in 2006 coincided with the demise of 7:84. It’s interesting to compare the National Theatre’s greatest success, the massively funded Black Watch, with McGrath’s Cheviot, which was a real grassroots production. The national theatre McGrath envisaged before his death, one with a roving commission rather than institutional anchorage, came into being, but without the radical, populist, working-class theatre of 7:84 or Wildcat.

7:84 famously took its name from an article in The Economist that said seven per cent of the population owned 84 per cent of the UK’s wealth. In 2013 a briefing paper on land reform in Scotland used a different statistic. 432:50 – Towards A Comprehensive Land Reform Agenda For Scotland (2013), alludes to 432 individuals owning 50 per cent of Scotland, prompting commentator Kevin McKenna to ask why “Scotland has the most inequitable land ownership in the west”.

Asking for fairer wealth distribution than 7:84 or more equitable land ownership than 432:50 is like asking for the moon, only to find it’s already been parcelled out to private investors. There’s no oil on the moon but there is in Scotland – more, apparently, than a year ago. And there is still theatre. In the 40 years since The Cheviot, the political landscape has changed profoundly, but McGrath’s play remains as relevant ever.

Willy Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Glasgow University