A Heideggerian Approach to Female Scottish Identities in Nat McCleary’s Thrown

This study explores the representation of female Scottish identities in Nat McCleary’s play Thrown through the lens of Heidegger’s concept of “thrownness” which aligns with the title of the play in Time and Being (Heidegger 174). Premiered in 2023 at the Edinburgh International Festival, Thrown portrays the ideological and existential struggles of five Scottish women who, despite their diverse backgrounds, are united by their Scottish heritage and gender. Using the metaphor of backhold wrestling in the Highland Games, McCleary explores the challenges of finding unity amidst fundamental disagreements. Each character, through direct-address monologues, confronts their limitations rooted in their physicality, age, gender, and ethnic origin, reflecting the human condition’s tension between agency and cultural embeddedness. Heidegger’s notion of “thrownness”, which signifies human existence’s situatedness within a specific context, provides a theoretical framework to analyse the characters’ struggles with their identities and the societal expectations imposed upon them. The play delves into the navigation of female/Scottish identity within the constraints of their thrownness, by revealing the complex interplay between individual agency and predetermined life conditions. Depicting their journey of self-discovery and fulfilment, Thrown underscores the existential dilemma of being trapped between the desire for freedom and the awareness of existential limitations. Within this light, the main aim of this paper is to illuminate how McCleary’s representation of Scotland’s cultural, historical, and environmental contexts varies among the characters by shedding light on the complex dynamics of identity formation in contemporary Scottish society.