When a woman called
Coralie turned up at Dundee Rep's box office to say that the
theatre's next production was about her, the company sat up and took
notice. The late Tom McGrath's play, Kora, after all, is set in a
Dundee housing estate where a community fight against the local
authorities attempts to decamp the residents out of their homes ids
led by a powerful matriarchal figure whose home is bursting at the
seams with her offspring.
Nicholas Bone, director
of the Magnetic North company, who are co-producing Kora with the
Rep, and actress Emily Winter, who plays the title role in a play
first seen at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1986 before being
revived a year later in Dundee, met Coralie. The result was what Bone
describes as “a slightly surreal hour, spending time with this
woman who Tom met almost thirty years ago, and based this whole play
on. It was hearing from her what's true and what's not true in the
play, but then you have to put it to one side and carry on working on
it without thinking about it.
“She said she has a
whole load of friends who didn't know anything about the play, and
obviously her life's moved on a lot since it was first done. In the
play she had five sons, though in real life she only had four,
although she eventually did have another one. There were a couple of
big changes Tom made, but she seemed very open to that, and I can
imagine her and Tom getting on very well.”
Given its themes and
the period it is set and was written in, it's all too fitting that
the first day of rehearsals for Bone's revival of Kora was on the day
that former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's death was
announced.
“That was a bit
weird,” Bone admits, “because the play is set over a two-year
period between 1982 and 1984, and there's no mention of Thatcher or
anything else that was happening in the rest of the country, there's
a political edge to it. It's about people trying to take control of
their circumstances and their lives and change things, and not
succeeding in what they set out to do, but discovering things about
themselves. That's something that doesn't change. There are always
people trying to change things, and thirty years on, in another
recession, it feels like a lot of the same stuff is going on. The
bizarre thing for me, being a person of a certain age, discovering
that the 1980s is now a period. What was a contemporary play when it
was first done is now a period piece.”
McGrath wrote Kora
after initially being commissioned to make a BBC TV documentary about
women in adversary. McGrath was put on to Coralie and a group of
people attempting to execute change in their community. By the time
he decided he wanted to make the film about her, however, it had been
cancelled, and Kora was re-born as a stage play.
McGrath passed away in
2009 following a mercurial and polymathic career as poet, playwright,
pianist and founding director of two of Glasgow's great arts spaces
in the form of the Third Eye Centre, which morphed into the CCA, and
Glasgow Theatre Club, which became the Tron. Outside of his two best
known works, Laurel and Hardy and The Hardman, the latter written
with Jimmy Boyle, McGrath's plays have had few revivals.
While McGrath's role as
an artistic catalyst has quite rightly been celebrated via the
setting up of the Tom McGrath Trust, which gives small amounts of
funding to projects which may not sit easily in other funding
strands, his importance as a writer himself is something Bone
stresses.
“It's partly the work
he did with other playwrights,” he says, “but I think it's to do
with form. Tom experimented with all these different styles, and I
think it's something to do with that experimentation. He brought his
influences in music and his background in jazz and poetry really
infects his writing, and I think it's that freedom to experiment in
form had had an effect on lots of people who worked with him or saw
his work.”
Bone and Magnetic North
seem as natural a fit for Kora as it does the play being presented in
Dundee. When McGrath was still alive, Bone's company ended up
producing three new plays by him, The Dream Train, Safe Delivery and
the quasi-autobiographical My Old Man. Following Kora and a major
revival of The Hardman a couple of years ago, Bone would like to see
further neglected gems from McGrath's back catalogue revisited.
While McGrath's
science-fiction play, The Android Circuit, and his
semi-autobiographical account of the 1960s counter-culture, The
Innocent, both spring to mind, Bone would like to see a restaging of
McGrath's 1979 epic, Animal. Set in a jungle and with a large cast
playing a community of apes, with all the sound-poetry-like array of
grunts, squeaks and squawks that entails.
“It would be an
extraordinary play to do,” says Bone, “Even now it seems very
pertinent about humans and animals, and about society, but it would
have to be on such a huge scale, with people being monkeys. It's such
an extraordinary conception.”
With such a sprawling
back-catalogue, Kora sounds like an uncharacteristically documentary
piece for McGrath, a writer who, aside from his enabling role as
Scotland's literary director, managed to fuse a love of popular music
hall with a 1960s counter-cultural aesthetic, think again.
“Tom's laid this
other story on top of it,” Bone reveals, “which it took me a
while. The last line of the play is a very unusual way to end on if
you read it as a piece of documentary theatre, which is what I was
reading it as at first. On first reading it almost seemed like a
verbatim piece, which is very different to the music hall
theatricality that there is in Tom's other plays. But there was
something about the ending, and I did some research, and the penny
finally dropped that also there was a character from Greek
mythology, who was goddess of the cornfield, and was this image of
fertility. So on one level its a straightforward kitchen-sink play
about a woman living in a council flat on a scheme in Dundee, but on
another, it's this thing about hope, and that life has to carry on.”
Kora, Dundee Rep, May
21st-June 7th
Tom McGrath – A
Literary Life
1960s – Decamping to
London, McGrath edited Peace News and International Times, and tread
poetry alongside Allen Ginsberg at the Royal Albert Hall.
1972 – Back in
Glasgow, McGrath is musical director on The Great Northern Welly Boot
Show, which made Billy Connolly a star.
1973 – McGrath
becomes the 1st artistic director of the Third Eye Centre.
1976 – McGrath's
first play, Laurel and Hardy, premieres at Edinburgh's Traverse
Theatre.
1978 –
Science-fiction play, The Android Circuit, appears.
1979 – McGrath writes
The Hardman, based on the life of convicted murderer turned artist,
Jimmy Boyle. Animal and The Innocent also premiere.
1986 – Kora.
1987 – McGrath is
appointed associate literary Director for Scotland, a post which will
eventually sire playwright's Studio Scotland.
1992 – Merlin, a
translation (with Ella Wildridge) of Tankred Dorst's two-part epic
appears at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh.
1995 – Stones and
Ashes, a translation of Quebecois writer Daniel Danis' play,
premieres.
2005 – My Old Man,
the last of three plays produced by Magnetic North, appears.
The Herald, May 13th 2013
ends
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