In this paper Sıla Şenlen Güvenç surveys the key plays staged in the run-up to the Scottish Independence Referendum of September 2014, with special emphasis on the six Theatre Uncut plays – Rob Drummond's Party Pieces, A. J. Taudevin's The 12.57, and Lewis Hetherington's The White Lightning and the Black Stag (composed in 2013), and Davey Anderson's twin plays, Fear and Self-Loathing in West Lothian and Don't Know, Don't Care, and Kieran Hurley's Close from 2014. Written prior to the referendum and performed together for the first time at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2014, these plays became even more meaningful with developing events in the United Kingdom, especially Brexit and the potential for a second independence referendum in Scotland. The plays reflect many of the issues discussed in both the ‘Yes Scotland’ and ‘Better Together’ campaigns. Sıla Şenlen Güvenç is currently Associate Professor at Ankara University's Department of English Language and Literature. Besides articles and theatre reviews on English drama, she is the author of ‘Words as Swords’: Verbal Violence as a Construction of Authority in Renaissance and Contemporary English Drama (2009) and ‘The World is a Stage, but the Play is Badly Cast’: British Political Satire in the Neo-classical Period (in Turkish, 2014).

The Cape Granites are a granitic suite intruded into Neoproterozoic greywackes and slates, and unconformably overlain by early Palaeozoic Table Mountain Group orthoquartzites. They were first recognised at Paarl in 1776 by Francis Masson, and by William Anderson and William Hamilton in 1778. Studies of the Cape Granites were central to some of the early debates between the Wernerian Neptunists (Robert Jameson and his former pupils) and the Huttonian Plutonists (John Playfair, Basil Hall, Charles Darwin), in the first decades of the 19th Century, since it is at the foot of Table Mountain that the first intrusive granites outside of Scotland were described by Hall in 1812. The Neptunists believed that all rocks, including granite and basalt, were precipitated from the primordial oceans, whereas the Plutonists believed in the intrusive origin of some igneous rocks, such as granite. In this paper, some of the early descriptions and debates concerning the Cape Granites are reviewed, and the history of the development of ideas on granites (as well as on contact metamorphism and sea level changes) at the Cape in the late 18th Century and early to mid 19th Century, during the emerging years of the discipline of geology, is presented for the first time.