INSIGHT Magazine - Issue 4

Interview
Elaine C. Smith is a national treasure. So it
was HUGELY embarrassing when I had to text
her after the interview we’d done saying I had
lost the recording and could we redo it. I was
downstairs berating myself for being an idiot,
when I heard my phone vibrating... It couldn’t
be, could it?? Almost throwing one of the
children out of the way I galloped up the stairs…
“Hello?”
“Hello daaarlin’, it’s Elaine C. Smith”
What an absolute legend! Here she is
talking to me about the part she plays in the
dramatization of Scotland’s Makar Jackie Kay’s
wonderful memoir – Red Dust Road.
By Rona Simpson
The story of Red Dust Road sees a young Jackie Kay navigating
the challenges of growing up as a mixed-race adopted Scot in
1970s Glasgow. Through her journey to find her birth parents,
Jackie discovers that inheritance is about much more than
genes: that we are shaped by songs as much as by cells and that
what triumphs, ultimately, is love. One reviewer describes the
book as a love letter to her adoptive parents – Helen and John
Kay. Elaine agrees with this description.
Can you explain to our readers a wee bit about
Helen – Jackie Kay’s adoptive mother – who you are
playing in Red Dust Road?
I just think she is a remarkable woman, with an amazing amount
of compassion and heart and these days when people with her
politics are seen as zealots and a bit mad, it’s refreshing to see
them presented in such a compassionate and rounded way.
[Jackie Kay’s parents were members of the communist party –
not such an unusual thing back in the 60s in Glasgow.]
Helen and her husband John had very strong convictions
of how the world should be. But very often these [left wing]
people are presented as narrow, hard edged, humourless types; Jackie
Kay blows that out the water. Helen is such a warm, very funny, intelligent,
compassionate, political woman. She’s remarkable, not just to have done what
she has done in her life politically, but to have earned that love from Jackie
and her brother… I mean, it’s just a wonderful story to give out into the world.
You told me in the last interview that you knew the family?
Yes. I knew them from years ago. John and Helen were huge figures in my
early career and when I was with 7:84 Theatre Company and ‘Wildcat’ John
was on the board. I was very involved with the actor’s trade union and they
were people I would see socially all the time, and, of course, that was where
I first met Jackie. Everyone would know the kids because there were very
few mixed-race children around at the time. Everyone loved them and paid
attention to them, whether they liked that or not!
(Through a chance meeting in Edinburgh many years previously, Jackie and
Elaine had remembered each other and struck up a friendship.)
I texted Jackie and told her that I had been cast and accepted the role. And
she replied saying that the one thing her mum kept asking was “Who’s playing
ME?” And I just said, “Well, I hope she’s not disappointed!” [Elaine laughs.]
14 | INSIGHT