A Gray Play Book by Alasdair Gray sampler

HOW THIS BOOK
GOT MADE
AT AN EARLY AGE I grew so fond of using pens
that my fingers could never master the keyboard
of a typewriter. Editors, broadcasters and
producers of plays will not read hand writing, so my
manuscripts were typed out by my father at first, then by
friends, then by temporary secretaries.
Mrs Flo Allan was a good secretary who typed for
me in spare moments between working for the BBC. In
the 1970s I visited her in the old Scottish BBC
headquarters in Hamilton Drive, and saw I had entered
an unexpected future. The typists were NOT clicketyclicking
keys to make little levers stamp letters onto paper
round a sliding drum. Behind their keyboards was a thing
like a white plastic fungus, the stem swelling out into a
half-globe with a screen in the flat surface facing them.
Before that moment I thought, like most people, I was
living in Modern Times. When word processors became
standard writing tools, smart intellectuals started saying
we are now living in Postmodern Times.
I still cannot master keyboard technology but have
come to depend more and more on helpers who can.
All my pages are continually revised, so time is saved
when I can see them on the screen and dictate corrections
without having each one retyped. Nowadays I revise work
for publication while sitting beside a friendly secretary
using a desktop computer. A file of the result is then
passed to a typesetter, usually Joe Murray, with whom I
design the final form of the book, so less time is spent
correcting the printer’s proofs. Joe has suffered me
longest, for this is our ninth book together.
In 2002 the young novelist Rodger Glass became
one of my temporary secretaries. He helped me finish a
collection of stories, begin a novel, and start a website
on which I put scripts of plays written in the late 1960s
and early ’70s. I had always hoped they would one day
be published as a step toward to having them acted again,
but no publishers I knew wanted that book. Rodger
declared that publishers should want it, and got me writing
urgent letters about it to my English literary agent and
publisher in London. These led to nothing, so he
persuaded me to ask Jenny Brown for help. Though
Scottish, she is Rodger’s literary agent and got his first
novels published by Faber. Jenny got Luath Press of
Edinburgh to publish this book. It is therefore dedicated
to Rodger, and to Helen Lloyd who has now been my
secretary and assistant for over three years, and to my
wife Morag who read the proofs, and to Joe Murray.
I hope you are the kind of reader who enjoys
enacting plays in the theatre of your mind. Most
publishers (who would not last without knowing their
own business best) think there are too few of you to make
playbooks sell profitably. The plays of Shakespeare,
Shaw, Singe, O’Casey, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett and
Friel are perhaps only profitable because schools and
universities teach them. My novels are taught in some
universities, which is why Luath Press thinks this
collection of mostly forgotten plays may still pay for itself.
Readers of my novels and stories will find some of
them here in their earliest form, though not in immature
or clumsier forms. When staged or broadcast most gave
pleasure to both the actors and audiences. But many will
be new to you, having been acted in Scotland long ago
and never turned into books. There is also a verse play,
an opera libretto and a film script that have never been
performed, but not (though this may be an author’s vanity
talking) because they don’t deserve performance. In the
1890s the poet Yeats and Lady Gregory created the
Abbey Theatre with the declared purpose of staging Irish
plays that had not yet been written! Shaw and Oscar Wilde
were then noted playwrights in London, but the Abbey
wanted plays on Irish themes for Irish audiences, which
led to an internationally acclaimed school of Irish
playwriting. For most of the 20th century several brave
Scots struggled to make theatres as successful in their
own homeland, but with less success. But at last we have
a National Theatre of Scotland, which may be heralding
an improvement.
The plays are printed in chronological order with
introductions telling how they were written and
produced, thus amounting to an occasional playwright’s
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