Odd though it may seem, the most popular contemporary playwright in Scotland over the past few years—judged in terms of frequency of productions—has not been a Scot but a Quebecer. In the four years from 1989 to 1992 there will have been four Scottish productions of Scots translations of plays by Michel Tremblay, as well as a revival of one of these shows. Glasgow's Tron Theatre staged The Guid Sisters (Les Belles-Sœurs) in 1989, revived it in 1990, and mounted a double bill of The Real Wurld? (Le vrai monde!) and Hosanna (Hosanna) in 1991; and Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre is staging The House Among the Stars (La Maison suspendue) in the autumn of 1992.

When dawn broke on 1 January 1991, Glasgow's year as European City of Culture was over. It was time to count the cost, £32 million it emerged, to pick up the pieces and to begin the inquest. As Glasgow is a city self-conscious to a fault, with an infinite capacity for self-analysis and self-flagellation, the inquest began long before 1990 had even dawned. The predictable round of ‘Whose City?’ and ‘What Culture?’ articles poured out as soon as Glasow had been awarded the title in 1986. Predictably, many of those early doubters ended up getting involved in the City of Culture events and profiting from them. Indeed, even those most virulently opposed to the whole notion, a group called ‘Workers City’, which rallied around the Glasgow novelist James Kellman, provided what was possibly the year's most entertaining and certainly longest running event. The furious and intensely public debate centred on the ramifications of the £4 million lost by an exhibition called Glasgow's Glasgow.