The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil: Revival of a defining moment in Scottish theatre

Why is one of Scotland's most radical and essential plays only now being revived after 24 years?

Say "the Scottish play" to your average theatregoer and, quite rightly, they think Macbeth. Ask them to forget Shakespeare and instead consider the defining moment in Scottish theatre, and many of them will probably turn to Black Watch, the National Theatre of Scotland's huge success from 2006.

Ask anyone with an inkling of knowledge about the recent history of the country's theatre tradition, however, and there is only one production which defines the landscape.

First performed in Aberdeen in 1973 and subsequently toured across the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, the country's major cities and to urban and rural Ireland, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil was created by the writer and director John McGrath. A Liverpudlian by birth and Oxford-educated, McGrath's early career years were spent working for the BBC in London, where he was one of the driving forces, both as a writer and director, behind the success of police drama Z Cars in the 1960s.

With his wife Elizabeth MacLennan and her brother David, he founded the radical theatre company 7:84 in 1971, the name inspired by a 1966 Economist article that stated that 7 per cent of the population owned 84 per cent of the world's wealth. The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil was the group's first success, both shedding light upon history and capturing a wave of topical energy by conflating the hitherto largely unknown tale of the brutal 18th-and 19th-century Highland Clearances with the oil rush to the North Sea, which was then in its infancy.

It's an essential and much-quoted piece of Scottish drama that has only gained in reputation since the conversations which surrounded the Scottish independence referendum. Which is strange, because it hasn't been seen on a professional stage since original cast member John Bett directed a version for 7:84's successor company Wildcat in 1991. Until now, that is, with a new version set to appear at Dundee Repertory Theatre this month.

"It's huge, and as it comes closer you realise how much a part of the psyche it is," says Joe Douglas, director of the 2015 update. "The original was seen by something like 300,000 people – that's about eight per cent of the population of Scotland. You get an idea of how important it was when you speak to some of those people and they tell you how much it meant to them. It's not about sentiment; it really awakened something, or at least articulated it – a political view that was latent, just bubbling away for so many people across the country."

The Cheviot appeared six years before the first Scottish independence referendum in 1979, and it captured the energy of this political conversation as it emerged with a madcap satirical energy with roots in music hall, in the Gaelic ceilidh tradition of story, songs and dancing, and in the sharp-edged political consciousness which 7:84 brought to all their work.

"It was an exciting time, the 1970s," muses Bett. He was cast for the play by McGrath alongside fellow future 7:84 regulars Alex Norton (who replaced Mark McManus in crime drama Taggart) and Bill Paterson (who has starred in The Killing Fields and The Crow Road) when the director saw them appear alongside Billy Connolly in The Great Northern Welly Boot Show at the Edinburgh Festival in 1972. Together with London-born fiddler Allan Ross and Gaelic singer Dolina MacLennan (no relation), McGrath would found the show around the trio.

"There was a radical newspaper called the Scottish International," recalls Bett of The Cheviot's first public airing. "They had organised a conference in (Glasgow's) George Square, which was called "What Kind of Scotland?" We were invited while we were still in rehearsal with Cheviot, so it was a reading with music, and the reception we had… cheering, standing ovations. We knew we'd hit upon something special, something that captured the zeitgeist and the feeling of the nation. We knew it might catch fire."

He remembers whole villages turning out in the Highlands and Islands, with children and grandmothers in the audience. "The play had a living quality to it in places. There were new things happening every day with the oil boom, and John would extract them from the papers and put it in that night's performance. It had a real up-to-the-moment feeling to it."

To read the play now, it's a story which has deep relevance to conversations ongoing in Scotland in 2015, and to political arguments experienced across the wider world. "It's the story of capitalism," says Douglas.

"For me, it's overwhelmingly about land use and ownership, and the use of the resources of that land for the benefit of the people versus the destructive effects that unfettered capitalism can have on the lives of human beings. And then there's the political unity of people who are oppressed by market forces, who band together and say 'no, that's enough of that, let's try something different.'

"The play's a comment on the system itself," Douglas concludes. "Part of the reason I'm putting it on was that I just wanted to see it. If plays are sitting on a bookshelf then they're not really a play. You have to be able to see it and feel it and hear it and experience it for yourself to really understand."

'The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil' is at Dundee Rep Theatre, 9 to 26 September (dundeerep.co.uk)