One night Hector
MacMillan was sitting backstage in the old Pool theatre in Edinburgh
with the actors who'd just performed in his play, The Sash. MacMillan
was told there were two men in the auditorium who wished to see him.
On making his way out front, MacMillan was greeted by what he
describes as “two very polite Orange men from Leith, who took issue
with the content of the play.”
Given that The Sash
looked at inter-familial conflicts on the day of the Orange Order's
annual parade in Glasgow, this came as no surprise. The pair had to
admit that, while they'd thoroughly enjoyed the play, you would never
find anybody like Bill MacWilliam, the monstrous loyalist patriarch
at its heart, in the Order itself.
MacMillan hadn't
noticed that there were other people lingering in the Pool's tiny
shop-front auditorium as well as the two Leithers. Only when a
dissenting voice boomed out “like the Reverend Iain Paisley,”
according to MacMillan, to interject, did he become aware of their
presence.
“Excuse me, sir,”
declaimed the man. “There most certainly are men like him.”
Then, turning his
attention to MacMillan, “You'll never take that play to Northern
Ireland,” he said, “and for that I am very sad.”
“That shut people
up,” MacMillan remembers of an incident that occurred in 1973, when
the Troubles in Northern Ireland were aflame and sectarianism in
Scotland was volatile on both sides of the religious divide.
Whether such strength
of feeling will be provoked by the first revival of The Sash in
twenty years in a production by Rapture Theatre remains to be seen.
What is clear is that, while things have moved on in Northern
Ireland, sectarianism is still a huge issue in Scotland and
elsewhere.
“I was aware when I
wrote it that was a risk,” MacMillan says of his best known of some
thirty-odd plays, which include Scots adaptations of Moliere and
works for both radio and television as well as the stage. “I warned
the company in advance that it was going to be controversial, and
when some leading actors started turning it down, I think they
realised they had something different.”
MacMillan wrote The
Sash after being approached by the BBC to pen an educational drama
for young people based around prejudice. Having grown up in the
Tollcross district of Glasgow, MacMillan had seen religious
intolerance close-up in his neighbourhood. A stint in the army saw
him stationed in Omagh during Orange parades season. Curious, he went
into town to gauge the atmosphere.
“You could have cut
the tension with a knife,” he says. “I'd never known anything
like it.”
All of which fed into
his twenty minute TV play, set in a folk club where the singing of
Scots and Irish songs led to conflict. The level of interest the play
garnered encouraged MacMillan to write an adult play, which, as The
Sash, became the first two-act play to be produced at The Pool. The
production later transferred to the Citizens Theatre, and proved so
successful that it was later mounted at Glasgow Pavilion and
Hampstead Theatre, while 7:84 Scotland also picked it up. A
performance at the Pavilion was filmed in 1974, but never broadcast.
A sequel, The Funeral,
which looked at the demise of MacWilliam, appeared in 1988 at the
Tron Theatre in Glasgow. A decade on from its predecessor, The
Funeral looked at racial prejudice as well as religious intolerance.
“It did very well,”
MacMillan says, “but because it dealt with a black character, I
think there was a bit of discomfort about some of the language used.
I'd been in India, so I knew the truth about what people thought and
said.”
While MacMillan has
been off radar for several years, he hasn't stopped writing, and at
least two plays remain unproduced. He is also planning a book, what
he describes as a “resume” of some of the more interesting people
he's met over the years. These include a busking violinist who
MacMillan encountered in Glasgow when he was employed in his first
job as an office boy. One notable trait of the violinist was that he
resolutely refused to play on Argyle Street because of what he saw as
having acoustics that weren't up to scratch.
“People like this
need to be recorded,” MacMillan states.
MacMillan's sense of
history extended to a rare public appearance recently at Edinburgh's
Traverse Theatre at a week-long celebration of the Scottish Society
of Playwrights, the organisation set up to provide a forum and
collective voice for the country's playwriting community. The
Traverse event looked at a different decade on each day, and, given
his senior status as Honorary President of the SSP, MacMillan was
tasked to introduce and give an overview of the 1970s.
“It was sad in a
way,” MacMillan reflects, “because there was only one other
writer there who I knew, who was Donald Campbell. My feeling is that
an awful lot has been forgotten which shouldn't be. I spoke on the
SSP, and why it was necessary for it to exist. I also paid tribute to
some of the people who are dead now, but who did really important
work.”
As well as playwrights
such as Tom Gallacher, MacMillan, cites BBC producer Gordon Emslie,
who championed MacMillan's own work, and whose idea it was to
incorporate The McCalmans into his radio play The Rising. MacMillan
also mentions former director of Dundee Rep, Stephen MacDonald, who
directed the same play for the stage/
“He was crucial to
what I wanted to do,” MacMillan says. “He took plays of mine that
had been turned down by the Citizens and Royal Lyceum Theatres, and
was a breath of fresh air for Dundee.”
With The Sash dating
from that same exciting era of Scottish drama, what today's audiences
will make of the play isn't clear.
“I've no worries
about it as a play,” MacMillan affirms, “but what audiences with
no direct experience of a very real potential for serious violence on
both sides will make of it, I've no idea.
Sectarianism is still
there, but it's not as threatening in Scotland as it once was. I'm
pleased that the play is now a part of the history of Scottish
theatre, but I'd be very happy if the subject was no longer
relevant.”
The Sash, Adam Smith
Theatre, Kirkcaldy, Wednesday-Saturday, then tours.
The Herald, April 23rd 2013
ends
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