A Highland Spaceport Fantasy

A HIGHLAND SPACEPORT FANTASY: From The Province Of The Cat by George Gunn

It was often told to me as I grew up, by those who were my elders and betters and whom I supposed knew what they were on about, that I would amount to nothing. Now, after nine books of poetry, two novels and over fifty plays, I suppose they were right. Angus Robertson and the Scottish Government have just signed the certificate of completion on my nothingness. I won’t be the only writer in Scotland who has heard the sound of shutting doors. Luckily I have never been very good at listening to my elders and betters or in being deterred by politicians who cannot tell the difference between a work of art and a trade conference. Life, thankfully, is nothing if it is not a revelation. And an experience. I have cast off all my supposes of baptismal religion, imperial history and political disappointment and have jumped like a redemptive ould tup into the sheep-dipper of the bog of memory. This warm black envelope of ten thousand years of ice and pine forest is my history. It’s all I’ve got. It feels good. It’s enough. Angus Robertson can’t cancel that. I also don’t need UNESCO to inform me that the peat bogs of Caithness and Sutherland are a special place.

You think things are bad and then sometimes things take a turn.

On August 19^th, on the Unst spaceport in Shetland, their rocket exploded. According to the official blurb what happened was as follows,

“A rocket engine has exploded during a launch test at the UK’s new spaceport in Shetland. The test was being carried out by German company Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) who hope to eventually launch the UK’s first vertical rocket into orbit. The scheduled nine-engine test was part of a number of trials due to be carried out before progressing to launch. RFA said no-one was injured in the explosion and the launch pad had been ‘saved and is secured’.”

In reality, this happened – Rocket Flames.

The metaphor is there for all to see.

Whatever the North of Scotland needs to progress and prosper it certainly is not spaceports. The militarisation of the Highlands has been going on since 1745, through the two world wars and then Dounreay, and now we have this dubious project proposed for the Moine peninsula, in North Sutherland – the scullery sister of the SaxaVord-Unst spaceport’s latest addition to viking fire culture. In every instance this colonial militarisation has been sold to the natives – who are always addressed as though they are slow, dull children – as being good for us, something we have always needed and should be grateful for and without which we would be living in caves, picking wilks or emigrating.

During the booking of Dogstar Theatre’s tour of my play “The Fallen Angels Of The Moine”, which the company advertise as a “Highland Spaceport Fantasy”, the company manager could not find anywhere in Melness – on the Moine peninsula – for the cast and crew to stay. Eventually accommodation was sorted out – in Tongue – but it transpired that we found out that there are 61 holiday homes in Melness. I was surprised there were 61 houses on the peninsula. We are not emigrating; we are being evicted. Southern English disposable capital is sending us on the coffin ships as certainly as the clearance and land enclosures of the 18^th and 19^th centuries populated Cape Breton and Nova Scotia. South and West of Melness, Tongue and the other townships scattered across Sutherland’s North Coast, there are the mountains, lochs, glens and straths of the UNESO designated World Heritage site of the Flow Country. According to the UK Space Agency (i.e. the Westminster Government) all this means is as follows,

“A vertical launch pad, as the name suggests, is one which enables rockets to be fired directly upwards into space. There are key criteria which are necessary for a site to be considered for this. They revolve around the orbits of the rockets – principally known as polar and sun synchronous orbits (SSO). An SSO is where it passes over any given point on the Earth’s surface at the same local solar time. A polar orbit is one that passes over polar regions, especially one whose plane contains the polar axis. Scotland contains sites with the best access to polar and SSO orbits without flying over land inhabited by humans.”

Looking over the Atlantic Ocean from Cape Breton to North Sutherland you will not see the tail trace of these rockets going up, but you might see the irony in “orbits without flying over land inhabited by humans.” coming down. In the Highlands of Scotland, for Westminster governments, for centuries now, it has been the land inhabited by humans that has been the problem. The solution, historically, has been to remove the humans. Once it was by forced clearance – removal, eviction. Now it is by economics. The result is the same. An empty landscape. An emptied landscape. Filled by rockets and the other strange dreams of foreign governments and the dull witted complicity of domestic ones. It was Tom Nairn who coined the fitting title of Ukania for Britain. He was inspired by Kakania, Robert Musil’s alternative name for the Hapsburg Empire in “The Man Without Qualities”.

It may seem the act of a mad person to write a play about all of this – landlordism, money, rockets and everything – but as things fall apart ever more alarmingly in Ukania, as Scotland is grounded into the steel toe-capped hush puppy reactionary valueless government of Keir Starmer, we need a theatre that at least addresses the direction in which we are being dragged. We have to see Ukania for what it is.

The “dissociation of sensibility” was the phrase T.S. Eliot coined to refer to the way intellectual thought was separated from the experience of feeling in poetry during the course of the seventeenth century. A similar “dissociation of sensibility”, or even a “dissociation of reality”, is evident in contemporary Scottish theatre, as the theatre managers who live in a gated community, fail to engage with, reflect on or represent on stage the reality of Scottish life, and certainly not with life in the Highlands. Indeed you could be forgiven for thinking that their project essence is to deny it. They wish to forget thoroughly the experiences of the majority who pay for their gates. The  reasonable democratic expectation of the Scottish people to be represented in their theatres has been virulently resisted by the managers. Indeed such an aspiration is belittled with terms such as “worthy”, “inward looking”, “parochial” or even “narrow”. So the unwritten colonial constitution of Scottish theatre is applied – whatever you say, say nothing.

The heretics and rebels of this “dissociation of sensibility” live and work on the edges of the theatre world and their output is regularly traduced as irrelevant nonsense or ignored by the taboo-like censorship of the urban media. So the reality of Scotland is shunted out of the back doors of her theatres by the very interests who have stolen her poetic estate. So far this has been an easy victory for the managers, but it will not always be so. The heretics and rebels are thrawn.

Theatre belongs to the majority because it is a social art. The dialogue and discussion which is necessary to create any meaningful future has to be between and amongst the people of Scotland, and not limited to furthering the interests of the land owners and the ruling elite. This is why the theatre has always been, historically, popular and why the elite have striven to control it. The property owners and the land robbers fear the theatre because theatre is a product of democracy and seeks, by its very creative nature, to undermine and overturn their managed assumptions. It does this best through comedy because anarchic spontaneity undermines the authority that is set above and over us. This offers the audience participation, enlightenment even, in the nondifferential satire which is the beating heart of comedy. Suddenly, through the event of the play, what was thought to be impregnable, unchangeable, is made to be vulnerable and another way of being, another alternative, is glimpsed by the audience, even if for a moment. Change is implicit in the theatre making process.

Tragedy, traditionally, belongs to the cities and towns where the rulers have their keeps, their banks and their fortunes. Comedy is generally set outside this ordered and structure society. Satire thrives beyond the polis, the baile, in the bardic rough bounds at the edges and on the fringes of so-called civilization. Here, in this unmapped landscape, the people can make their own songs and their own laws. Every oligarchy fears sedition and the theatre through its direct, physical contact with an audience offers the people the popular sedition of a play. The story told on the stage is a revolt against the story told by government. Where better, in Scotland, for this seditious storytelling and comedic theatre to flourish than in the Highlands and Islands? Could it be that the only thing that will truly take off in the rough garve regions on the fringes of Europe, which will fly over a land thinly “inhabited by humans”, will not be spaceports, rockets or surveillance satellites, but a theatre that is irreverent and impatient, poetic, passionate and political? Wouldn’t that make you laugh?

©George Gunn 2024

Dogstar Theatre will present the World Premiere of The Fallen Angels Of The Moine – A Highland Spaceport Fantasy by George Gunn at The Macphail Centre, Ullapool, 7.30 pm, 27^th August. https://tickets.highlifehighland.com/ or at door: http://www.dogstartheatre.co.uk/