For decades, Scottish theatre-makers have run up against an invisible wall dividing stage and screen. While the country supports one of the most inventive theatre sectors in Europe, the pipeline carrying those writers, directors, and actors into cinema seems plagued by cracks. Risk-averse broadcast commissioning and the magnetic pull of London production houses mean performers who regularly command the Lyceum or Citizens stages get routinely overlooked for homegrown screen work, while established playwrights are kept waiting in developmental queues.
The National Theatre of Scotland is making a deliberate attempt to breach that divide. Marking its 20th anniversary, the company has partnered with BBC Scotland and independent production house Shakehaus to deliver Future Acts, a slate of six original digital shorts designed to put Scottish stage talent on big screens before landing on television.
The initiative builds upon the foundation established during the 2020 lockdowns. Back then, NTS countered dark stages with Scenes for Survival, commissioning writers and performers to shoot short pieces from living rooms and spare spaces.
That emergency project kept artists working, but Future Acts sets its sights on cinematic scale. Built specifically for picture-house projection, the shorts will tour independent cinemas across Scotland this October ahead of a BBC iPlayer broadcast in January 2027.
Screen Ambitions and Stage Lineages
Hybrid screen-theatre work is familiar territory for director Hope Dickson Leach. In 2022, she directed NTS’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, capturing live performance inside Leith Theatre and projecting it straight into cinemas. Dickson Leach returns to the screen for Still Alive, which she wrote and directed. The film stars Keith Fleming—who played court Makar William Dunbar in Rona Munro’s historical epic James IV: Queen of the Fight at the Festival Theatre in 2022—as Hector, a man resurrected in a cloned body by a questionable biotech firm, acting opposite Nadia Albina as a weary night-shift temp.
The commission list draws heavily on contemporary Scottish writing. Playwright Uma Nada-Rajah, whose 2025 hospital drama Black Hole Sign drew on her career as an NHS nurse to construct a raw, unvarnished look at institutional collapse, writes Optimum. Directed by Stewart Laing, the short strands two strangers in a Glasgow beer garden on a blind date dictated by an infallible AI matchmaker.
The film also triggers an artistic reunion. Lead actor Anna Russell-Martin—who established her reputation in NTS’s 2019 adaptation of Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon before leading Nada-Rajah’s satirical comedy Exodus at the 2022 Fringe—stars alongside Ross Mann. Mann and director Laing worked together in March 2026 on a cinematic, film-set staging of Shaw’s Saint Joan for the Citizens and Perth Theatre, giving the piece a shorthand established across live rehearsals.
From Physical Rings to Vanishing Coasts
Other shorts borrow directly from company ensembles. Natali McCleary’s Un-Static, directed by Josefa Celestin, investigates identity through the surreal premise of a young man (James Dawoud) attempting to summon a unicorn. The production casts Maureen Carr, who provided the emotional ballast and comedic timing as Helen in McCleary’s 2023 backhold wrestling drama Thrown.
Lesley Hart, who shared the stage with Carr as the embattled coach Pamela in that same 2023 staging of Thrown, writes Broth, directed by Sally Reid. The story follows a disgraced former news anchor (Carmen Pieraccini) sent to report on a disappearing shoreline after an on-air breakdown, where she strikes up an unexpected connection with a local played by Ryan J Mackay. Reid, who directed Douglas Maxwell’s two-hander Inexperience at Pitlochry in July 2026 after starring in the Lyceum’s 2024 excellent production of Shirley Valentine, directs Pieraccini, whose dry stage work anchored Scottish Opera’s Carmen in 2023. Mackay, meanwhile, featured in NTS’s 2023 touring production of Kidnapped.
Elsewhere on the bill, playwright James Ley brings his sharp, irreverent comic sensibility to Bed to the Future, which he writes and directs. Following his unforgettable 2021 queer road-trip play Wilf at the Traverse and 2022’s Ode to Joy, Ley casts Martin Quinn—a cast member in NTS’s fabulous but forgotten 2022 stage musical Orphans—and Jay Newton as a couple using a futuristic bed simulator to preview the lifespan of their relationship. Kieran Hurley, whose dark generational clash ADULTS played the Traverse in 2023 alongside his landmark scripts Beats and Mouthpiece, collaborates with director Rianne White on Smoke. The piece pairs performer Nicolette McCormack with spoken narration from Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson to confront climate anxiety.
Bridging the Stage-to-Screen Gap
For NTS, the exercise is about testing whether theatrical craft can feed a sustainable screen pipeline, circumventing the traditional commissioning inertia that leaves Scottish drama underrepresented in cinemas.
“Ninety freelancers and artists have come together to create a future-facing set of surprising and stylish digital works that play with form and content in ingenious ways,” said Jackie Wylie, Artistic Director of the National Theatre of Scotland. “In ongoing challenging times for artists, it is important for NTS to continue to create opportunities for theatre-makers to develop and diversify their talents.”
Gavin Smith, commissioning editor at BBC Scotland, stressed the shared broadcast reach: “Future Acts is an ambitious collection of films that looks ahead with curiosity, wit and imagination. The six shorts reveal an exciting range of voices and filmmaking styles, and we’re thrilled to help bring them to audiences through BBC platforms, ensuring these thought-provoking and entertaining stories are available free for everyone to enjoy.”
Whether these six short scripts make a clean transition from stage logic to the intimacy of the lens will be tested once the projectors roll. Even so, by putting funding behind homegrown writers, actors, and directors on the big screen, NTS is taking direct action to solve a problem the Scottish screen sector has talked about for a generation.
“Ninety freelancers and artists have come together to create a future-facing set of surprising and stylish digital works that play with form and content in ingenious ways,” said Jackie Wylie, Artistic Director of the National Theatre of Scotland
Future Acts premieres at the Glasgow Film Theatre on 1 October at 6pm, before heading to the Macrobert Arts Centre in Stirling and the Filmhouse in Edinburgh on 3 October, and Eden Court Cinema in Inverness on 5 October. The series lands on BBC platforms in January 2027.
Featured Image: Future Acts – Lead Image provided by NTS
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