A Gray Play Book by Alasdair Gray sampler

10
autobiography. When a radio or television play was
rewritten for the stage, the stage version is printed in
hope that it may be staged again. Stranger things have
happened. Shaw’s success as a playwright led to the
publication of his early rejected novels, which are far
more mentally stimulating than fiction by all but the
greatest novelists. If you find no such stimulation in this
book you will be right to dismiss it as a vanity publication.
But I cannot. On reading them again I was fascinated
by how most, even the domestic dramas, reflect the
political mood of the time they were written.
This cannot be said of the first and shortest, written in
the last year of the Second World War when I lived with my
family in the pleasant market town of Wetherby, Yorkshire.
My father was manager there of a hostel for munitions
workers between the town and its more famous racecourse.
The hostel had a high wire-netting fence round it with gates
through which the workers, over a thousand young women,
were bussed to and from a factory where they made explosives.
The gates were only locked at night and to me it had the
character of a friendly concentration camp. There was a
bungalow for the manager and his family, prefabricated
dormitory blocks where the workers slept, a small hospital
called The Sick Bay, administrative offices, a lounge, a library,
a big refectory for breakfast and evening meals, also a concert
hall where films were shown and plays presented by a band
of actors paid by the government to entertain war-workers.
My only previous experience of staged theatre had been
pantomimes. In the hostel concert hall I saw Night Must
Fall by Emlyn Williams (a modern murder play) and Twelfth
Night – my first meeting with Shakespeare, in which I
sympathised with Malvolio, disliked the heartless
merrymakers who tortured him and have ever since regarded
that play as his tragedy.
And sometimes my Dad helped people in the hostel to
stage concerts in which anyone who presented themselves
with confidence did turns. My mother (who had been in the
Glasgow Orpheus Choir between the wars) sang Weel May
The Keel Row or a song by Burns. I may have sung Over the Sea
to Skye which was my main party piece – the name then given
to a song or poem children were taught to sing or recite at
family gatherings and domestic parties – but I certainly recited
Ten Little Houses and another comic poem from a book for
children by Gilbert Frankau. I must have been excited by
performing on stage before a full audience but can now only
remember taking it for granted. No doubt my parents were
thus encouraging me to be a right little show off, but they
reproved me for showing off at home or in private life. They
only wanted me to get attention when I had something useful
or interesting to say, show or give.
The primary school I attended was called The Church
School, though I cannot remember receiving religious
instruction there. I was generally happy with my classmates
and teachers. The lessons never seemed too strenuous, and I
enjoyed a practice never found in any later school attended
or heard of. When our teacher had an official piece of business
that kept her busy at her classroom desk, she invited any
pupil who wanted the job to come to the front of the class
and tell the rest a story. I was so eager for this job that I
cannot remember anyone else doing it. Under the English
class system I was perhaps treated as a privileged child –
almost one of the big landowning class – because Dad was
responsible to the Ministry of Munitions for employing a
local staff of over two hundred. My parents once invited
home for an evening meal my teacher, Miss Kershaw,
something they would never have thought of doing in
Glasgow. Miss Kershaw let me produce my first play in her
classroom when I was nine.
I found the characters, scene and action in a child’s prose
version of Homer’s Odyssey borrowed from Wetherby’s public
library, a story I found as fascinating as The Wind in the Willows,
Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring and Kingsley’s Water Babies,
read about the same time. I copied the speeches straight from
the book, only shortening them a little, and have never since
written a play so fast or had it produced so swiftly, being
myself the producer. For the part of Odysseus I chose a friend
whose name I can no longer remember unless it was
Raymond Daybell. I acted the most interesting character,
Polyphemus. My dad typed the result
and here it is.