Staging Baillie in a Digital Age: Virtual Reading of The Family Legend
On Saturday 21st November 2026, as part of the ‘Joanna Baillie Project’ initiated and facilitated by Chris Bundock (University of Essex), we will be hosting a virtual reading of Joanna Baillie’s The Family Legend. The reading, accompanied by a closing discussion, is open to international participation and is approximated to run from 6.30-9pm UK time. At this stage, we are inviting anyone interested in contributing to this event, either as audience member, reader, or creative participant, to contact us (see below).
Joanna Baillie’s ‘Highland play’, The Family Legend, was performed at the Edinburgh Theatre Royal in 1810. The play centres on two warring Scottish clans, the Macleans and the Campbells, and provides an early example of the Scottish ‘National Drama’, exploring themes of identity, vengeance, and the politics of peace. This was the first of Baillie’s plays to be performed in her native Scotland. While her earlier tragedy De Montfort (1798) had been staged at a large London playhouse – the prestigious Drury Lane – Baillie had no intention of allowing her Legend to suffer this same fate. She informed her friend, and the play’s dedicatee, Walter Scott, in a letter of 1810, that the play was better suited to Edinburgh’s ‘little theatre’ not only on account of its national theme, but because ‘Large Theatres are a bane & pest to the Drama’ (Slagle, Collected Letters, 1999). As Catherine Burroughs identifies, Baillie called overtly in her third volume of A Series of Plays – now more commonly known as the Plays On the Passions – for a ‘smaller stage’ than that popularised in London, ‘to permit subtler dramatization of both public and private realms’, and to enable ‘a more emotionally expressive, less exaggerated acting style’ (Closet Stages, 1997, 87). The expansive London playhouses, Baillie considered, sacrificed emotional minutia for extravagant spectacle, and were therefore inimical to the dramatic project outlined in her ‘Introductory Discourse’ to Plays On the Passions, which informed her dramatic corpus at large.
Following the successful revival (directed by Robert Price) of Joanna Baillie’s The Tryal (1798) at the Bury St Edmunds Theatre in 2024, we are keen to experiment further with the performability of Baillie’s plays in a twenty-first-century context: this time, assessing the relationship between Baillie’s theory of the drama and the innovative practices facilitated by the digital age. Baillie’s animosity to large stages limited the theatrical reach of The Family Legend to a select, regional audience, confining the tropes and motifs of the nascent ‘National Drama’ to the country of its birth, and contributing to Baillie’s long-held reputation as a closet dramatist. Our virtual reading of The Family Legend, performed via an online platform, will grant Baillie’s ‘Highland Play’ a global audience not confined to the number of seats in a particular playhouse, while taking seriously her call for a theatrical backdrop which complements the dramatic design laid out in her ‘Introductory Discourse’: especially, her emphasis on emotional nuance and the cultivation of an intimate connection between character and spectator. It will do so by experimenting with the synthesis of Baillie’s dramatic philosophy with the visual, aural and spatial opportunities afforded by online technologies.
For further information, or to make your interest known, please contact the event organisers, Sarah Burdett (scb93@cam.ac.uk) and Diane Piccitto (diane.piccitto@msvu.ca) by 30th July 2026.
Sarah Burdett