LOCAL HERO: THE PLACES OF DAVID GREIG

The University of Lincoln hold an annual festival and symposium dedicated to a different playwright. They've done Caryl Churchill, Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane. This year it was David Greig's turn and I was asked, by the conference organiser Jackie Bolton, to give a keynote. My paper was on the place of place in Greig's work, particularly thinking about his distinctive contribution to the Scottish Independence debates. As is rather well known, he once declared that you can't be a good writer and a good nationalist. I suggest that he's presenting good nationalism and good writing, but by presenting a non-territorial notion of Scotland's independence, founded in imagination and possibility rather than glen and byre. I suggest we might think of this as localism under erasure and nationalism without nation. The paper gets its title and a starting point for its thinking from Bill Forsyth's lovely 1983 movie, Local Hero.

A revised version of the paper is being published in Contemporary Theatre Review in 2015.