(DE)FALSIFICATION OF SCOTTISH HISTORY IN JOHN MCGRATH’S THE CHEVIOT, THE STAG AND THE BLACK, BLACK OIL

Text topic: Lie in Art and Culture

Text author: Милена Каличанин

McGrath’s purpose in staging the political play based on Scottish history was primarily to expose and de-falsify the destructive clearance pattern that had remorselessly been repeated in the last three centuries, but was officially depicted as progressive and developmental for the Scottish region. Although the “brutal” methods of the Highland clearances from the eighteenth and nineteenth century had definitely remained in the past, McGrath posed an important question of whether the phenomenon of clearances had actually been dispensed with in the twentieth century. The theoretical framework of the paper relies on the acutely relevant critical insights of Rich, Dawson, Farber, Brown, Innes, as well as McGrath himself.