Ryan Fletcher in the South Bank Award winning Black Watch. Photograph: Murdo Macleod.
Tuesday's win for Black Watch at the South Bank Awards confirmed not only that Gregory Burke's verbatim drama is officially the Best Play In This Or Any Other Universe For All Time Ever, but also that the National Theatre of Scotland has had one blinder of a debut year.
Twelve months ago, the organisation was an unknown quantity. By the end of February, it had made a bold statement of intent with 10 site-specific plays called Home, performed everywhere from a ferry boat in Lerwick to a block of flats in Castlemilk, which preceded a further 27 productions over the year. Its work has ranged from the high-profile Realism in the Edinburgh International Festival to this week's community/professional crossover There's No V in Gaelic, a collaboration between TAG, the Gaelic company An Lòchran and NTS Learn.
Such diversity is a result of the company's unique structure. Black Watch, which is revived this year for a UK tour, gained much of its texture from the army drill hall where it was performed. It seemed the perfect location for a play about a military regiment just as the CalMac ferry was the perfect location for a play about emigration from Shetland. The decision to perform in such apposite places came so naturally because the NTS doesn't have a building of its own.
This is fundamental to the company's conception. It was established not to rival the existing theatres, but to complement them. Without its built-in flexibility, it could actually be quite damaging.
That's not the opinion of Nicholas Hytner. When I spoke recently to the director of that other National Theatre on London's South Bank, he speculated that it wouldn't be long before Vicky Featherstone's company was demanding a theatre of its own.
"What they've got going there is too good to be nomadic for ever," he said."That's not how the theatre's ever been. The NTS is not good because it's peripatetic, it's good because it's a golden age for Scottish writing, there are some brilliant directors and it's being run extraordinarily well. It should remain flexible and it should go around a lot, but they should be given the security of a place they can call their own."
He went on to suggest the reason for the NTS not having a building was financial and that, by having three auditoria at his disposal, he enjoyed much greater control. "The NTS has to construct its programme around the availability of the buildings," he said. "That's why it should have a base: it should be in control of its own destiny. Here in London, when it's bad it's because the shows are bad, not because the building's bad and vice versa. Nobody should be taking credit apart from the people who are writing, directing and running the company and they're fantastic."
I put these opinions to Featherstone, formerly artistic director of Paines Plough, and she was quick to disagree. "The flexibility of being able to produce different kinds of work is much easier if you're a touring company," she said. "You're not having to fill a certain amount of seats in a theatre every single night. Therefore you can choose how you put the work on. We can put on a show in Edinburgh Airport or on a ferry in Shetland. That is incredibly flexible.
"Nick Hytner's job is to prove that his building can be a national theatre, that he can fill those auditoria and that he can put brilliant work on those stages. If he only did site-specific projects with Shunt, everyone would criticise him for failing to put a show on the Olivier stage. And that's right. That's what his job has to be. My job has to be to prove that a national theatre doesn't have to have a building. I think we can probably prove both things."
The issue is not one of finance, she argued, because public subsidy is better spent on productions than on buildings. Half her funding goes directly on the programme and a further 25% goes on education and workshops. "I've had one letter from one person in Surrey who asked if there was anyone I would like him to write to to suggest we got our own building. But I haven't heard that from anyone in Scotland. No one in Stornoway or Aberdeen has said, 'Why haven't you got a building?' because they know it wouldn't be there."
