Building national identity and cultural confidence in the National Theatre of Scotland’s theatre for young audiences

ABSTRACT Beginning in 1997, with the devolution of Scottish Parliament, the Scottish people had to re-define their shared language in order to establish what it truly meant to be Scottish. The National Theatre of Scotland uses traditional and native performance styles to build on the shared language(s) of its audience during their theatrical productions. This essay examines three NTS theatre for youth productions as case studies which seek to build Scottish cultural confidence in order to explore the effect of interweaving Scottish performance traditions with commonplace cultural traditions, as a form of language, on the cultivation of Scottish national identity in children and young people.