Nicola McCartney is playwright, director and expert in the study of plays, musicals and operas. She is a lecturer here at the University of Edinburgh, and recently Sukey Moschini Ridge, a writer here at The Student, was lucky enough to get the opportunity to interview her about her life and career.
Sukey: How did external expectations of what you should do affect your confidence and career?
Nicola: I was the first person in my family to go to university. I knew that I didn’t want to do law like my mother wanted and decided that I was going to Glasgow to do English and Theatre Studies. And I didn’t tell her until the last minute, until I’d got my A-level results, and we were driving me back, and she just stopped the car and said, “Get out.” So, she took it quite badly. I think that it wasn’t till I came to work here (lecturing at Edinburgh) that she finally saw this as a proper job, even though I’ve been working in television, film, and theatre for a long time, they [my family] still think it’s a lovely hobby I have. I don’t think it necessarily affected my confidence. I think that coming from a working-class background where it’s not the thing that people do, you always feel like a little bit of an imposter.
Sukey: How did you end up training Charabanc Theatre Company, which was founded to create more opportunities for women in theatre?
Nicola: Yeah, it was set up by a bunch of female theatre artists in Belfast in the 1980s and it became a real force in Irish theatre. I was studying contemporary Irish theatre as one of my modules, and they were in it, so I became really enchanted by what they were doing and then wrote to them and said, “Can I come and do a placement with you?” And they said yes. Then I got a grant from Arts Council of Northern Ireland and sort of self-funded.
Sukey: Was their feminism important to you?
Nicola: Their whole kind of politics really appealed to me. Writing is all about speaking to the universal play. So, you’re talking about what makes us human, but the universal point of view is even still considered to be the straight, white male point of view. Men back in the 1990s dominated as playwrights, and still to this day. I think our greatest living playwright in Britain is Carol Churchill by miles, by absolute miles. But she is not half as celebrated as someone like Tom Stoppard – she hasn’t had as many plays on at the National Theatre, and I think that’s purely because of her gender. So, when I was starting, my focus was to write female heroes, where a woman was at the centre of the dramatic action.
Sukey: Do you feel like your gender was a hindrance to you when you started out?
Nicola: I think for me personally; it was probably a real bonus because I started in 1990s alongside playwrights like David Greig and Stephen Greenhorn and David Harrower. So, at that point, I was the only girl, and I think that helped because I was different to them, but it also really bothered me.
Sukey: In 2001 you had a burnout, which led you to homelessness. How did that affect your work going forwards?
Nicola: When I began writing, I became successful really quickly. I wrote one play that was on at the [Fringe] festival in 1994 and from that got commissioned to write a play called Easy for Mayfest in Glasgow in 1995 which was really successful, and from that, everything else flowed. I think I felt like I had to say yes to everything, and I was really, really busy, I spread myself way too thinly. I think what caused that burnout was also being caught up in a pathological sense of what success is, which is to get all those big things, to have your name in lights everywhere. And for me, the best definition of success is about integrity and making good work that aligns with your values and does the things that you want it to do in the world. I stopped working for about a year and a half, and when I came back into it, I think I lost my love for it a little bit. I was definitely a little bit more careful about what I took on, but I also was a bit disillusioned.
Sukey: I was really interested to read about your “splitting” yourself from the writing.
Nicola: It’s about how a playwright differs from being a poet or being a fiction writer. A fiction writer is writing to an ideal reader – it’s like a shared secret. A poet is writing to themselves, from themselves, really. But playwriting, you have to split yourself in multiple directions. You have to be yourself, the author, then the characters in the play, and the actors reading the lines of the characters, and you have to be the director, and you have to be the audience.
Sukey: How do you find approaching a project with people who have suffered and have ongoing traumas?
Nicola: It’s not easy, but I think I have a trauma informed practice that has grown from being a full-time foster carer for Glasgow City Council from 2006 to 2022. So, I left theatre completely for about three years, and got a lot of trauma training, and that has subsequently informed all of the work that I do as an applied theatre maker since. Through fostering I re-realized why I wanted to make theatre; the system is not a good system and doesn’t work well. It politicised me and I got my anger back. There’s a process of active listening that I do. I think for me, it’s a real privilege, because you get to sit with an individual and really see their spirit, their experience and their knowledge, and give them that space to be authentically themselves. People are not as simple as just being their pain.
Sukey: Tell me about your “Care in Contemporary Scotland” project with the Scottish National Theatre.
Nicola: We create a space for care-experienced people where they’re invited to just talk about whatever they want to talk about, as authentically themselves. And the reason why we’re doing that is because their stories, like lots of other marginalised voices in society, are often pathologised, and reports are written about them and their lives and who they are over which they have no control. We’re trying to create this archive of 100 diverse stories, which we’re not trying to curate. In any sense, these stories will live in the National Archives. A different take on care experience, which isn’t all the pain, the trauma, or isn’t all the information or data set stuff. We’re trying to break stigma and break these kinds of preconceived notions of what and who a care experienced person is.
Sukey: You’ve also done work with a lot of other marginalised voices; how do you decide which issues you focus on?
Nicola: I care about marginalized people. I care that those stories are told. So, it’s not that I decide. I’ve worked with people in the criminal justice system as well, and with people who have drug dependencies and addictions. It’s all about making people’s voices heard.
Sukey: I read that you are the only member of your family who was Christian. Do your work and your faith mutually affect each other?
Nicola: My work flows from my faith and my faith flows back into my work. Faith and doubt go hand in hand, and intellectually, I often question it, but I think that the value system of caring about people who are marginalised very much flows from my Christian faith. I feel very angry at the moment about how Christianity is becoming polluted by the far-right wing. And I also am personally offended by the fact it was used for centuries as a tool of oppression when it’s about liberation.
Sukey: You’ve won a fair few awards. What do they mean to you?
Nicola: You don’t really do it for awards – they’re a functional thing. They get you more work because they point people towards you. They’re more like a signpost. I think if you relied on awards for your self-esteem, your self-esteem would be really shaky.
Sukey: Do you have a proudest moment from your career?
Nicola: I’m exceptionally proud of the students who come through the playwriting program. It gives me huge satisfaction – 70 per cent of them go on to write plays and get paid for it. I don’t think pride for me is a source of fuel and it makes me think, well, have I done that enough now? Have we done enough?
Image credit Kirsty Anderson via National Theatre of Scotland.