The quiet cultural engineer

National Theatre co-founder Donald Smith on how the battles of the 1980s reshaped the Capital’s artistic life

EDINBURGH INQUIRER

MAR 03, 2026

“Both those things – the oral storytelling thing and the development of the National Theatre – came out of that key period of struggle in the 1980s. It’s lovely to me that at this point I’m moving on from being involved. 

“I won’t have a formal role in any of them, but I feel they’re all in a good place. There is so much possibility for the future. I’d love to be a small part of that in some way, but that’s not the thing. It’s interesting to reflect on where it came from.”

It is a rare thing in the Scottish arts scene to find a set of fingerprints as pervasive, yet discreet, as those of Dr Donald Smith, writes Will Quinn. 

To the casual observer, or perhaps the regular attendee of the Scottish International Storytelling Festival (SISF), Smith is the genial, knowledgeable figurehead who has steered the event for 36 years. He is the man who helped take a handful of events in pubs and transformed them into a flagship festival with audiences topping 40,000.

But as he steps down as director following the 2025 festival – themed, fittingly, Lights of the North – it is worth looking at the machinery beneath the surface. 

Smith’s career has not merely been about booking acts; it has been an exercise in cultural engineering. From the establishment of the Scottish Storytelling Centre to his less-publicised but pivotal role in the creation of the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS), Smith has spent four decades building the structures that allow Scottish voices to be heard.

The National Theatre of Scotland’s award-winning production of Kidnapped, based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel. Pic: NTS

The School of Scottish Studies

To understand the trajectory of Smith’s career, you have to look at the choices he made at its very beginning. In 1979 – a year defined politically by the disappointment of the failed devolution referendum – Smith made a choice that would define his future.

“I went in 1979 to the School of Scottish Studies, which was a definite big decision to step away from other areas of academics,” Smith recalls. “That was to have a huge ongoing influence.”

At a time when Scottish culture was often marginalised or treated as kitsch, Smith chose to immerse himself in the serious study of its traditions. It was an intellectual pivot that placed him in the orbit of Hamish Henderson and the great collectors, grounding his future practice not in nostalgia, but scholarship and a deep respect for the source material.

The Storm and Drag

Armed with a PhD but facing a bleak economic landscape, Smith’s entry into the professional arts world was less than glamorous. In 1982, he arrived at the Netherbow Arts Centre on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. The non-descript venue itself had only recently replaced the Moray-Knox Church, a Victorian neo-Gothic structure demolished in the 1960s, leaving something of a scar on the High Street.

“The 80s were a storm and a drag,” Smith reflects. “Looking back, things have been difficult since in many ways, but I think the sheer desperation of working on just nothing was… I’ve never experienced anything like it again. Yet there was that determination to make something out of nothing.”

His role? Not director, not yet.

“First, as a stage manager here at The Netherbow, which was in a fairly difficult state,” he laughs. “Nae cash, nae staff, nae whatever! And yet, this fantastic little theatre.”

He was, in his own words, “the swiftly rising captain of a sinking ship.” But for a man with big ideas, it was a laboratory. “Whatever my ideas – and I certainly felt there were distinctive energies in Scottish culture that I wanted to tap into – the practical thing was that there was no money in the arts. There were precious few opportunities for talented people to get a break.”

Necessity proved the mother of invention. The Netherbow became a sanctuary for the neglected. Smith recalls being particularly “horrified” by the standard of children’s theatre available at the time – ”it was just so low grade” – and opening the space to better work. It became a hub for new writing, for actors, and for directors.

The master storyteller in full flight. Pic: Andrew Perry

The Three Hits: 1979, 1986, 1989

For Smith, the journey from that listing ship to the establishment of a national institution is defined by what he calls “three hits on the storytelling centre journey” – three specific moments in time where the potential of the art form revealed itself.

The first hit had occurred just before he joined the School of Scottish Studies. In April 1979, amidst the post-referendum gloom, the revived Edinburgh International Folk Festival was taking place. Smith, determined to absorb everything, found himself at a low-key session in the University Staff Club featuring the legendary Traveller singer Belle Stewart and her daughter, Sheila.

“In the middle of this, Sheila stood up and just delivered a folk tale,” Smith says, his eyes lighting up at the memory. “It was the story she called Orangie and Applie. It’s a version, as I found out later, of The Little White Doo, which was probably the most popular folk tale in Scotland in the 19th century. But it’s about cannibalism and child abuse! It’s an absolute cracker.”

It wasn’t just the shocked reaction to the content that struck him; it was the delivery.

“It was the style! She came forward, took up a strong stance, almost as if she were going to be a ballad singer, and what came out was this power. I thought: God in Heaven, what is going on there? There was a powerful sense of identity and psychology coming out of that. But there was also this incredible skill; she was delivering the story, but at the same time highly conscious that she was narrating it. I thought, my god, this is quite something.”

The Prototype: A Crone with a Cutty Pipe

That realisation – that storytelling possessed a narrative magnetism distinct from theatre – simmered until the second hit in 1986. It was the year of the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh, and faced with an official cultural programme where the “only Scottish offering was a pipe band,” Smith intervened.

“Now, don’t get me wrong, I love pipe music in all its different forms. But I thought: no. This can’t be. We’ve got more to offer than this.”

He immediately phoned the organisers, politely but firmly, and threw together The Bothy, a show that would prove to be a prototype for everything that followed.

“I put together at a red-hot pace a little show called The Bothy: Tales, Songs, Traditions of Scotland,” Smith explains. “I had one actress – so this was definitely a theatre piece – Annie Lacey, whom I knew through Theatre Alba. She went on to work for the National Theatre, Bondagers, Royal Shakespeare, and all sorts. A wonderful actress.”

The production was a hybrid beast. It moved from intimate hearthside stories told by a young married woman to the grand ballads – specifically Tam Lin, staged with “maximum lighting and Theatre Alba spookiness” – before concluding with Lacey transforming into an “old crone with a cutty pipe” for a female telling of Tam o’ Shanter.

“The audience absolutely smashed it. They loved it,” Smith says. “This was a late addition, not in the official programme, but we ran it for the whole of July, and it was selling from the beginning. I thought: just a minute, there’s something here that we really need to grapple with.”

The Scottish Storytelling Centre being used for what it was created. Pic: Scottish Storytelling Centre

1989: The Birth of a Movement

The third hit came in 1989, when Smith decided it was time to give this “Sheila Stewart style approach” its own platform.

“I got in touch with a couple of storytellers I knew right back from my School of Scottish Studies days. I said: ‘Look, I’m thinking of having a storytelling festival. That’s all that’s going to happen. It’s stories. Would you be willing to come and take part?’”

Cautious of overreaching, he housed this first festival not in the main theatre but in a small gallery room at the top of the building ((now part of the TRACS (Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland) hive)). “On the one hand, it was caution – if not many people come, we can still create a little bit of an event. But also, it took it out of the theatre space, creating a different dynamic. Well, people turned out.”

Crucially, the audience wasn’t just watching; they were engaging. “There were teachers, librarians, and so on. I thought: this is the way to go. Start with a core of people who are committed to taking this creative methodology into contemporary society.”

From that initial festival, the infrastructure grew outward. “We formed the Scottish Storytelling Forum and started the Guid Crack Club. It was all based on participation. Everything else followed on from that.”

As the festival grew, it began to occupy more of the Netherbow – the theatre, the gallery – but it still lacked a permanent home.

“Then the thing was: Okay, if you were curious about this storytelling thing, where would you go?” Smith realised that a festival was not enough; they needed a footprint. “By this time, there was an old attic in the Netherbow building. It had been a video unit that had outgrown it. I said: ‘Look, here’s this space. Why don’t we open this? Call it the Scottish Storytelling Centre. We’ll just see where it goes.’”

This humble attic was the seminal moment in the Centre’s birth. It wasn’t about architecture yet; it was about presence.

“The key thing was that if you were interested in exploring what on earth this thing is about, suddenly there’s an address. There’s a number. There’s someone you can say hello to.”

The Invisible Hand Behind the National Theatre

While the Storytelling Festival began its organic growth from that attic, Smith was fighting a parallel war on a different front. The campaign for a National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) is often remembered as a political inevitability following devolution, but the groundwork was laid in the trenches of the 80s and 90s. Smith was one of the key architects, driven by the practical need to support playwrights rather than a nationalist agenda.

“Creatively, the theatre was on the front edge of the anti-Thatcher movement,” Smith notes. “Of all the art forms to pick, not to have a national expression… why the theatre? The answers [from the powers that were] were not positive. It was actively regarded as troublesome. It foments opinions.”

However, he is keen to clarify his motivation. “For me, it wasn’t an argument about identity. Identity is important, but I didn’t have a view that ‘We need to have this big lab of Scottish identity.’ I thought that would emerge naturally.”

Smith recalls the campaign’s winning moment: the publication of a list of Scottish plays to refute the naysayers who claimed no such tradition existed.

“To begin with, it was a campaign idea to publish a hundred plays because people said, ‘Oh, there’s no theatre tradition in Scotland.’ So I thought: right, f*** you. There’s a hundred! Within another week, there were 200. At that moment, the press switched onto our side.”

Soon after, a new Labour government ushered in devolution, and an inquiry into, “national companies, including a Scottish National Theatre – which didn’t exist, but which people now accepted should exist.”

The shaping of the NTS – a “theatre without walls” – was to be a chaotic affair. The Federation of Scottish Theatre, representing existing venues, was initially sceptical. They set up a Steering Group that was so disorganised it drove the theatrical establishment to despair.

“Kenny Ireland, bless him, was passionately for a National Theatre but became emotional,” Smith recalls of the tense atmosphere. “He would have a big row with Philip Howard from the Traverse.”

It eventually proved too much for Giles Havergal, the celebrated director of the Citizens Theatre.

“Oh god, they were the most disorganised rubbish meetings I’ve ever had… Giles Havergal was on this – I am a huge admirer of Giles Havergal. After the second of these disastrous meetings, he came up to me and said, ‘Donald, this is getting nowhere. You will have to chair this.’ The Son of the Manse coming out! ‘You will have to chair this!’”

Smith demurred, suggesting a co-chair arrangement. “I said: ‘Well, Giles, I’m really here just for the campaign. How about we co-chair it?’ He said: ‘Right. Done.’ But because I chaired all the meetings, he went along with it! It was so funny. We just got the thing onto a workable footing.”

Smith’s pragmatic vision helped cement the unique NTS model: no building, no standing company, but a commissioning body that could act anywhere. This was a radical departure from the norm.

“We started with nothing, and deliberately did not identify with any one company,” Smith says, contrasting it with Tyrone Guthrie’s English National Theatre. “One of the big struggles was the Federation of Scottish Theatre representing the existing theatres. They were keen on: ‘You’ll just take our hit production and put a logo on it.’ I said no. That was a big argy-bargy.”

He sees the validation of that hard-won model in its continuing success, particularly Gregory Burke’s Olivier Award-winning Black Watch in 2006. Smith was present at the opening night at the Drill Hall, a moment where the lines between performance and reality blurred.

“It was funny coming out, and the Tattoo fireworks were going off. I thought: ‘This is 7:84 for today,’” Smith says, invoking the spirit of John McGrath’s radical theatre company. “Sending a playwright to be embedded in the regiment was a bold decision.”

It was a history he was careful to preserve. “I had religiously kept my silence about the whole thing,” Smith admits. But in 2004, realising history was being rewritten in real-time, he used a speech at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin to put the true timeline on record. Fortunately, his words were recorded for posterity in the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies – the curious can seek further enlightenment here: https://jiss.aberdeenunipress.org/article/204/galley/204/download/

Smith as he prepared to step down from the Scottish International Storytelling Festival. Pic: Neil Hanna

Designing the Campfire

If the NTS were to be a spirit, the Scottish Storytelling Centre needed a body. By the late 90s, the Netherbow was crumbling, and Smith saw the opportunity to replace the old attic with something unique: the world’s first purpose-built home for the oral tradition. Under Smith, The Scottish Storytelling Forum rustled up £2.6 million, a sum underpinned by funding from the Scottish Arts Council National Lottery.

The commission was awarded to Malcolm Fraser Architects to create a contemporary structure that metaphorically “re-presented” the medieval gateway of the Netherbow Port. “We asked: What would a Storytelling Centre be like? Is it not a campfire that we need?” Smith explains. “We need a relationship to the outdoors. That is in the storytelling heart.”

Smith was rigorous in his research, visiting other venues to learn what not to do. A trip to the Mitchell Library in Glasgow ended with the revelation that “no kids allowed” was their policy. A visit to The Ark in Dublin revealed a foyer with “two shut doors and a big notice saying: ‘Do not go any further without reporting to reception.’”

“I thought… this is not it,” Smith says. “Kids need to breathe out; it’s a tension buster.”

Closer to home, he fought a specific battle over the Netherbow Theatre itself. The architectural trend of the early 2000s was for retractable seating to maximise multi-purpose use. Smith, obsessed with the “spoken voice acoustics” and the need for eye-to-eye contact, refused.

“The whole rave was retractable seating so it became a multi-purpose space… Just as we were finalising the Arts Centre bit at Pilton, I went down to see their retractable seating. It creaked. The damn thing creaked! We had won an award for the spoken voice acoustics. It is very first class. I had to formally amend the plan… I said: ‘Look, I’m sorry, but this is definitely the thing.’ Eventually, they agreed. I was right.”

The result is a venue so specifically tuned to its purpose that it defies imitation, a fact Smith often has to point out to curious international delegations.

“Multiple people have come from all over the world to visit this place, exploring how to have a storytelling centre,” he says. “I keep saying: ‘You won’t do it this way. You’ve got to begin with the elements you are working with.’”

Faith and Function

The physical construction of the Centre was completed in May 2006. However, the Centre’s relationship with its landlord and partner, the Church of Scotland, has been a constant feature of its existence.

Smith speaks of the initial vision with great warmth – a hope that the Centre would serve as a bridge between the secular and the spiritual.

“I thought it was such an opportunity for all the churches. We had such support from all religions; the storytelling was so natural,” he says. “It was a beautiful relationship. On the day we opened we had a Hindu preacher, a Scottish Traveller blessing, a Native American blessing, a Gaelic blessing, a Jewish blessing. The Moderator of the Church of Scotland just about managed to keep his head! I thought: this is it – new nation, new community, new inclusion.”

While the years that followed saw the inevitable friction that arises between agile arts organisations and large institutions – including periods where the Church leadership appeared to drift away from the Centre’s vision – Smith highlights the ultimate validation of the partnership. When the pandemic struck in 2020, it was the Church’s rigorous infrastructure that provided a lifeline.

“In the crunch, the Church played a good part because they had health and safety expertise,” he acknowledges. “We got ourselves validated as a broadcast studio… That was one of these sideways things: could we be a studio?”

Because the Church could certify the building’s safety protocols, the Storytelling Centre was able to keep operating when other venues were shuttered, pivoting the festival to a hybrid model.

The George Mackay Brown Library at the Storytelling Centre. Pic: Scottish Storytelling Centre

Building the Umbrella: The Birth of TRACS

This ability to “think laterally” – to see connections where others see boxes – is perhaps best exemplified by the creation of TRACS (Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland). As the Storytelling Centre matured, Smith realised that storytelling was sitting with “one foot in the traditional arts and one foot in contemporary arts,” while the broader traditional sector was fragmented.

Smith recalls attending a government working party chaired by musician Dave Francis. “Frankly, some of us thought: these people are all in a mess,” Smith admits. “The Traditions of Dance Trust was on the verge of internal hara-kiri. The TMSA was hanging by a thread.”

With the Storytelling Centre just opening its doors, Smith saw an opportunity for consolidation. “I said: ‘Could we share the building with you? Could we create something?’”

The result was a federal alliance. The musicians had the Traditional Music Forum; the storytellers had their Forum; together, they helped establish a Dance Forum. TRACS became the one umbrella that bound them all.

This structure has since proved its worth, not least during the COVID crisis. Smith recalls the sheer administrative horror of applying for emergency government relief. “I remember sitting at home over a weekend filling in this huge application form… I thought: ‘If we don’t get this, we’re sunk.’ The online system wasn’t working properly; by the end, I had three different computers cutting and pasting.”

Once the funding was secured, and both Storytelling Centre and Festival preserved, Smith found himself as a culture spokesperson, fighting for the sector against arbitrary restrictions. “The theatre companies were complaining that they could operate if there was no physical contact. I said: ‘Just a minute. What about football? Are you going to say we can have football but no physical contact?’ I remember the Health Officer turning a bit pale!”

Unleashed

As he hands over the reins, the ecosystem he helped plant – from the NTS to the Storytelling Centre and the TRACS network – is self-sustaining. Indeed, the infrastructure has overgrown the garden wall of the Royal Mile.

“It’s interesting in Scotland we now have two storytelling centres,” Smith notes with pride, pointing to the West. “We have the Village Storytelling Centre in Glasgow… The potential to multiply it is great.”

His final festival, Lights of the North, bridged Scotland with Scandinavia and the Baltic, a fittingly expansive horizon for a man who always looked beyond the parish well. But don’t expect him to disappear into the night.

“I’m hoping to do more of my own storytelling, more local projects. I’m hoping to get back into doing some theatre things in a quiet way,” he says.

For Donald Smith, retirement isn’t an ending, but a liberation. It is a return to the “Sheila Stewart style” purity that started it all – the simple act of a person standing before an audience, with nothing but a voice and a tale.

“There’s a huge difference between the stress of ‘I am managing this thing’ and ‘I have to do this.’ That weight is off my shoulders,” he smiles. “Even though I had good colleagues, you have the responsibility to deliver… Being retired, I don’t need to scrabble for every penny, so I’m able to help people out without worrying totally about the financial thing. That’s a good place to be.”