A Gray Play Book by Alasdair Gray sampler

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12 L IKE MOST BRITISH CHILDREN living in cities, or within easy reach of them, the first stage plays I saw were Christmas pantomimes based on well-known fairytales with happy endings. I loved the way these mingled comedy and melodrama with lovely women, grotesque clowns, songs and colourful scenery. I saw these pantomimes in big music halls – sometimes called vaudeville theatres – built in the 19 th century and mostly destroyed by the spread of television in the 1960s. Oddly enough, the spread of popular cinemas in the early 20 th century had done them no harm. They had been training grounds for all the great cinema comedians from Chaplin to Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. When sound came, Hollywood also drew on them for singing and dancing stars who, in their declining years, often toured the music halls where they were still sure of big audiences. These theatres had old machinery to create effects now only expected of films – demon traps letting actors leap up through the stage from under it or disappear into it, with or without claps of thunder, fireworks and clouds of steam. The Demon King often arrived and left that way. Nearly every pantomime had a transformation scene from the days before drop curtains were invented and audiences expected to see scenery changed. The Fairy Queen would wave a wand, the furniture of a royal palace slide away, trees and a lake slide in, the palace walls be drawn up to disclose moonlit hills under a starry sky and the audience would heartily applaud. After World War 2 the Gray family often visited the Glasgow Citizens Theatre which I will say more about later. There we saw the late plays of James Bridie, Robert McLellan’s Jamie the Saxt with Duncan Macrae playing the first king of all Britain, also a wonderful pantomime called The Tintock Cup, a grotesque parody of Scottish history. The Battle of Bannockburn was presented as a Scotland-England football match seen from the Scottish end, where Bruce and De Bohun, encumbered by chain mail armour, tackled each other for the ball under the eyes of the referee, a huge whistle-blowing spider lowered on a cable from above. This Christmas show was so popular that it ran for three months into the following year. Each year the D’Oyley Carte company brought a Gilbert and Sullivan opera to Glasgow which we usually attended. My sister Mora and I enjoyed Iolanthe so much that we borrowed a piano score of the libretto from Riddrie Public Library and I learned to sing the Lord Chancellor’s Nightmare song to her accompaniment. By that time our secondary school had introduced us to Shakespeare. I had the luck to read Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merchant of Venice, Macbeth and Hamlet with teachers who enjoyed them. In 1944 we saw Laurence Olivier’s film version of Henry V and in 1948 his Hamlet. The great soliloquies from the soundtrack were available on a record we bought and often played on our wind-up gramophone. But from a much earlier time the popular cinema was almost certainly the biggest part of my dramatic education – Disney, the Marx Brothers and Tarzan films, The Wizard of Oz, Destry Rides Again, The Ghost Goes West, Hellzapoppin, It’s a Wonderful Life, and such odd British forerunners of the Ealing comedies as Alf’s Button, The Ghost Train, The Black Sheep of Whitehall and George Formby films. And even more important than that was BBC Radio. Nobody born after TV grew more popular in the 1950s can imagine the communal strength in Britain of BBC Radio. It is even less imaginable now as it competes with a flood of commercial channels, and the relaxed tone of BBC announcers has mostly become a rapid, attention-seeking advertisers’ gabble that would have horrified John Reith, the BBC’s first director. British politicians gave this obscure Scottish electrical engineer the job in 1922 because he had been a dependable British Army officer, and they did not think public broadcasting important. They realised its power during the 1926 General Strike, but also found Reith was a strong supporter of things-as-they-are. They trusted him so he held the job until 1938. But he was a Tory who disliked commercialism. The BBC mainly broadcast popular entertainment but Reith said it should also make the
greatest cultural achievements available to “the labourer in his tenement and the crofter in his cottage”. Though working in London he was the son of a Presbyterian minister, and had not noticed that outside Scotland labourers live in terrace houses and no farm workers are crofters. But he had the BBC broadcasting Mozart and Beethoven along with ragtime (the nearest thing to jazz the British then recognised) and Elizabethan plays along with 20 th century West End successes. Throughout my childhood I enjoyed Children’s Hour every evening from 5pm till 6pm between school and the evening meal. Half of it, broadcast from London, usually serialised a children’s adventure story though I also remember the Wind in the Willows and an adaption of The Old Curiosity Shop. The rest would be songs, stories and comic poems from a local station so that children could hear the kind of accents spoken around them. Each station was introduced by an Uncle or Aunt. West of Scotland Children’s Hour had Aunt Kathleen Garscadden, who once invited interested children to devise a five minute broadcast of their own. I got dad to type and send her puerile verses I had written and my version of an Aesop’s fable. She invited me to the Glasgow Broadcasting House in Queen Margaret Drive where I read them over the air. The BBC paid for my tram fare there and back, and the glory of reading it more than compensated for lack of other payment. I was then eleven, and enjoyed my first illusion of embarking on a great career. In 1946 the BBC started a third broadcasting channel which ran each evening from 6pm to midnight, and broadcast nothing that was not artistically or scientifically or historically educational, or avante garde. It was an open university for whoever enjoyed learning more than they could usually hear, so was denounced as elitist and finally scrapped as uncommercial in 1970. The Third Programme gave me the whole of Goethe’s Faust in Louis MacNeice’s translation, MacNeice’s own poetic drama, Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came, Auden’s The Ascent of F6 with Britten’s music, Wyndham Lewis’s The Childermass and splendid dramatisation of Peacock’s Nighmare Abbey. Dad’s Socialism had either made him a lover of Bernard Shaw’s work, or Shaw’s writing had converted him to Fabian Socialism. Among his books was a hefty volume containing all Shaw’s plays written before the year of my birth, and Shaw’s Quintessence of Ibsenism, and Ibsen’s plays in the Everyman edition. By my seventeenth birthday I had soothed hours of adolescent insomnia by reading those 42 Shaw plays, which I enjoyed because most are truly playful – none of his characters end by being badly hurt, not even Joan of Arc. I also dipped into Ibsen, but Peer Gynt was the only play I could then appreciate, gladly identifying with the irresponsible hero whose wild imagination makes him an outcast at home before making him a corrupt millionaire in the world beyond. Unlike the hero of Goethe’s Faust this does not lead to him being welcomed into Heaven; he loses everything and finally sees he only truly existed for the woman whose love he betrayed. That was my experience of drama before the autumn of 1952 when I became a student at Glasgow School of Art. In those days the school hired buses each year to visit the College of Art in Edinburgh. A scratch football team there would play one of ours on The Meadows, then we were entertained with an amateur concert, a meal in their refectory, a dance to end the evening. We did as much for Edinburgh art students when they visited us in Glasgow, and I was one of several voluntary exhibitionists who wrote or acted revue sketches for the Glasgow concerts. This led to the school’s Interior Design department asking me to provide entertainment for a party they were giving. The department head, Henry Hellier, had invited Joyce Grenfell, a popular actress and comedienne, so to win more public attention than usual I wrote a dismal symbolic drama, partly inspired by The Ascent of F6, called To Hell with Everything. For years I hoped nobody remembered that play but I recently met Jennifer Campbell, illustrator and retired head art teacher of Dollar Academy, who reminded me that in Art School I had chosen her to play Peace. My hero, a kind of Everyman, returns to Peace at the end of World War 2, but she refuses to let him embrace her. He is also troubled by folk representing political forces I cannot now recall, though I painted them in a symbolic backdrop. I remember one looked like a giant anthropoid ape clutching a stone. The action took place before something hidden under a cloth that Everyman finally tears aside, showing a figure representing Science (played by Archie Sinclair of the Industrial Design Department) who blows everybody up. The play combined fear of my sexual unattractiveness with widespread fears of 13
Page 3: A GRAY PLAYBOOK
Page 6 and 7: First published in Great Britain 20
Page 8 and 9: 6 TABLE OF 9 HOW THIS BOOK GOT MADE
Page 10 and 11: 8
Page 12 and 13: 10 autobiography. When a radio or t
Page 16 and 17: 14 JONAH nuclear war. (Historical n
Page 18 and 19: 16 JONAH SCENES 1) Outside Nazareth
Page 20 and 21: 18 JONAH CAPTAIN [scratching his ea
Page 22 and 23: 20 JONAH In the belly of Hell I rem
Page 24 and 25: 22 JONAH The GENERAL leaves. CHIEF

A Gray Play Book by Alasdair Gray sampler

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