Paper Title: ‘It was pishin’ doon, man’, how improvisation and chorus work de-centred the linguistic codes towards Scottish English in the narration of Pericles in Pericles on the Seas (2022).

Originally delivered at the British Shakespeare Association Annual Conference, ‘Practising Shakespeare: new collaborations, expanding horizons’. University of York, 2025.

Paper Abstract

Depending on the chosen date of formation, English has been the official language of Scotland for a minority of its existence as a country. Despite this, the majority of Shakespeare’s works are taught and created in Scotland in English.

In the coastal town of Ayr, as part of a group of early career theatre-makers based at University of the West of Scotland, I worked with in partnership with the theatre practitioners in Ghana, India and Brazil and the theatre practitioner Ben Crystal to de-centre the Gower narrator role in Pericles into our use of English here in the West of Scotland as part of the multi-country, digital production of Pericles on the Seas (2022). This paper will explore how the development of practice in three different countries outside of the Anglo-American tradition, coupled with Crystal’s approach to ensemble, spoke to our own life-experience and specific socio-lect of our use of Scottish English. I will argue that this matrix of process served to resist and challenge the colonial legacy of the English language in this part of the world.

I will explore the historical cultural and linguistic tensions that led to an intentionally distanced relationship to the text of Pericles and how we found our approach was emboldened and augmented from theatre practice guided by Crystal, but also the de-centred approach to adaptation from companies part of the project in Ghana, India and Brazil.