A Gray Play Book by Alasdair Gray sampler

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
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