The Basement Flat (NHB Modern Plays)

By Rona Munro

Fiona and Stephen's tenant has become their landlord and their daughter has taken to living in the overgrown garden, which is creeping into the house as temperatures rise...
From the author of The James Plays, The Basement Flat was first staged at the Traverse Theatre, in 2009.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Apr 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781780015804

Rona Munro

Rona Munro is a writer who has written extensively for stage, radio, film and television. Her plays include: Mary (Hampstead Theatre, 2022); James IV: Queen of the Fight (National Theatre of Scotland, 2022); a stage adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (UK tour, 2019); a stage adaptation of Louis de Bernières' novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin (UK tour and West End, 2019); Scuttlers (Royal Exchange, Manchester, 2015); The James Plays trilogy (National Theatre of Scotland, the Edinburgh International Festival and the National Theatre of Great Britain, 2014); Donny's Brain (Hampstead Theatre, 2012); Pandas (Traverse, 2011); Little Eagles (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2011); The Last Witch (Traverse Theatre and Edinburgh International Festival, 2009); Long Time Dead (Paines Plough and Drum Theatre Plymouth, 2006); The Indian Boy (RSC, 2006); Iron (Traverse Theatre, 2002; Royal Court, London, 2003); The Maiden Stone (Hampstead Theatre, 1995); and Bold Girls (7:84 and Hampstead Theatre, 1990). She is the co-founder, with actress Fiona Knowles, of Scotland’s oldest continuously performing, small-scale touring theatre company, The Msfits. Their one-woman shows have toured every year since 1986. Film and television work includes the Ken Loach film Ladybird Ladybird, Aimee and Jaguar and television dramas Rehab (directed by Antonia Bird) and BAFTA-nominated Bumping the Odds for the BBC. She has also written many other single plays for television and contributed to series including Casualty and Dr Who. Most recently, she wrote the screenplay for Oranges and Sunshine, directed by Jim Loach and starring Emily Watson and Hugo Weaving. She has contributed several radio plays to the Stanley Baxter Playhouse series on BBC Radio 4.

Book preview

Introduction

Philip Howard

Of the nine plays in this collection, seven date from the decade 2000–09, a decade that saw two distinct developments in the evolution of Scottish theatre. One is a big cultural statement and represents a millennial shift in thinking – the founding of the National Theatre of Scotland; the other is a bubbling undercurrent – the emergence of a thriving, idiosyncratic subculture of one-act plays, centring on the lunchtime series at the Òran Mór venue in Glasgow. Of course it is foolhardy to attempt to analyse such modern history, but there is a perception, albeit anecdotal, that the latter half of the decade witnessed a wane in the celebrated boom in Scottish playwriting that had started in the 1990s. The truth is rather that the talent is there – you just have to start looking for it in different places.

The long-running campaign for the establishment of a national theatre for Scotland now feels, in retrospect, like a miniature version within the cultural sector of the twentieth-century struggle for the re-establishment of a Scottish Parliament. Within the first year of that Parliament, the publication of a National Cultural Strategy in 2000 committed the new Scottish Executive to developing a National Theatre organisation, and by the autumn of 2003 the finance was confirmed for it to proceed. The new National Theatre of Scotland is both a symbolic and actual demonstration of the confidence of the theatre culture here. Under its founding Artistic Director, Vicky Featherstone, its repertoire is firmly forward-looking in the mould of a new-writing theatre, as displayed triumphantly in its greatest (and global) success thus far, Gregory Burke and John Tiffany’s Black Watch (2006): a delicious rebuff both to the dying generation that believed a Scottish national theatre must devote itself to a parade of the hundred loftiest revivals, but also to those of us naysayers who obstinately believed there needn’t be a national theatre institution in Scotland at all.

Meanwhile, far below the radar of public funding, in a model of disestablishment, there is the A Play, a Pie and a Pint programme of short plays at Òran Mór, Glasgow, founded in 2004 by producer/director David MacLennan, graduate of 7:84 Theatre Company