{"id":22018,"date":"2025-03-05T13:23:23","date_gmt":"2025-03-05T13:23:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/?p=22018"},"modified":"2025-03-07T12:26:35","modified_gmt":"2025-03-07T12:26:35","slug":"hands-up-for-trads-women-in-music-and-culture-2025-rona-munro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/hands-up-for-trads-women-in-music-and-culture-2025-rona-munro\/","title":{"rendered":"Hands Up for Trad’s Women in Music and Culture 2025: Rona Munro"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Picture by Lesley Martin<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Hands Up for Trad\u2019s Women in Music and Culture 2025 list has been announced to celebrate just some of the women working in Scotland.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Launched as part of International Women\u2019s Day 2025<\/a>, we shine the spotlight on 12 women who all contribute towards Scotland\u2019s cultural landscape through their work. Read the 2025 list here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We asked\u00a0Rona Munro<\/strong>\u00a0to tell us more about her work, influences and ambitions for the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did you first get involved in the arts and who were your early influences?<\/strong>
I saw a performance by senior pupils at my primary school when I was about six or seven. For some delusonal reason I decided in that moment that I wanted to make plays. I didn\u2019t actually see a live, professional production until I was in my late teens and, possibly because of that, at first I started trying to write novels instead. My biggest early influence was my Uncle Angus, my mother\u2019s second cousin, the late great Angus MacVicar. He was a prolific and eclectic writer who wrote everything from radio thrillers to young adult science fiction over a career that stretched from post world war two into the 21st century. He read my early attempts at writing as if I was a fellow writer already. He encouraged me to believe I could be a writer, that it was a possible profession. He taught me that great writing is almost all craft and effort. It\u2019s what you do to feed your family and entertain others, not some tortured inner journey to a personal vision. The idea that writers, any creatives, are some special kind of human being is absolute anathema to me. That\u2019s a truth thats saved my mental health more than once. I\u2019m so lucky to have had such a mentor so early.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a time when many artists and creative professionals are facing significant challenges, how have you developed and evolved your creative practice over the past few years?<\/strong>
It has never been easy to write for theatre at any point in my career. It became, briefly, a bit easier about fifteen years ago when new writing was more likely to be produced, but new writing and more diverse voices have always, (inaccurately in my opinion,) been seen as a financial risk. However, if you firmly believe, as I do, that you have it in you to tell a story that is worth telling and could reach an audience, you can\u2019t always  bend that narrative to fit what\u2019s considered \u2018marketable\u2019, (well I can\u2019t). At this stage in my career I\u2019m ploughing on doing what I did at the very start, I\u2019m looking for collaborators who want to tell the same stories, I\u2019m trying to keep my focus on what matters most, the potential audience for whatever story I\u2019m telling and how I can reach them and make them care. And,  I\u2019ve always tried, like my early mentor Angus MacVicar, to be flexible enough to write across a range of platforms, radio, film, tv as well as stage. As a single Mum with no financial support I learned in my thirties and forties that you had to find somewhere, anywhere to get the stories out and, at the same time, hold onto that thing that made them special to you, that put them in your authored voice. That is as desperately hard as it ever was and the places to put plays are rapidly disappearing but I have no pivoting tactics but to keep battling on with the same strategies!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am incredibly lucky, at this point in my career, to have been able to collaborate with the talented and determined producers, Raw Material, who share so much of that ethos and can still get theatre on stages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who or what interests you creatively?<\/strong>
Creatively I have always been drawn to the stories of people who are invisible or marginalised in our broader culture. I\u2019m also very drawn to historical stories at this point in my career. Historical narratives, like futuristic ones, which I also love, allow me to write more epic stories, more metaphorical narratives that speak to our present moment. I find that really liberating. Almost all Scottish history, particularly earlier Scottish history, is completely unknown, but it formed the world we now live in. I\u2019m still fired up and passionate about making those stories visible, accessible and exciting for an audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are your plans for the next year or so and\/or what are your longer term creative ambitions?<\/strong>
I want to keep trying new forms and finding new collaborators and somehow getting work out to everyone who can appreciate drama, particularly live drama, (and that is pretty well everyone.) I want to finish the mad, and potentially arrogant ambition of telling the story of Scotland through the lives of our medieval Stewart kings. ‘The James Plays\u2019 began with a trilogy and, against the odds, the stories of the next three monarchs have also now been staged. There\u2019s only one to go, James VI who became James 1st of England. With Raw Material I am excitingly close to seeing that play hit stages in 2027, so I want to finish it and make it as good as I felt the others were! I want everyone who has forgotten since the first plays were staged (or who never saw them and so can\u2019t know), to realise that a \u2018history\u2019 play is not necessarily a dusty, inaccessible, culturally elitist chore to suffer through but an exciting, tragic, comedic epic about people like us, in all our diversity, people who made the ground we stand upon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would also quite like to make my current habitation look a bit less like the abode of a mad, dangerous crone who neglects dusting or decoration and keeps books in heaps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the Hands Up for Trad\u2019s Women in Music and Culture 2024 List<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hands Up for Trad are an organisation who work with Scottish traditional music, language and culture. If you would like to support our work you can donate here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hands Up for Trad\u2019s Women in Music and Culture 2025 list has been announced to celebrate just some of the women working in Scotland.   Launched as part of International Women\u2019s Day 2025, we shine the spotlight on 12 women who all contribute towards Scotland\u2019s cultural landscape through their work. Read the 2025 list here. We asked\u00a0Rona […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22019,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,336],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-22018","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"category-women-in-music","9":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/files\/2025\/03\/images.jpeg","featured_image_src":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/files\/2025\/03\/images-600x400.jpeg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/files\/2025\/03\/images-600x452.jpeg","author_info":{"display_name":"simon","author_link":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/author\/simon\/"},"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcv15g-5J8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22018"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22053,"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22018\/revisions\/22053"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.handsupfortrad.scot\/handsupfortrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}