Coffee-Table Notes

1 There were two words I thought might come up when I started thinking about what was going on in Scottish playwriting and Scottish theatre throughout the 1990s, and which seemed deeply relevant to its trajectory. I wondered whether to mention them or not, but after events of this week, I can't really avoid them. Those words are Margaret. And Thatcher. Because the 1990s were a curious decade, in that what Margaret Thatcher did in the 1980s seemed to fuel some kind of artistic dissent, yet by the 1990s, it seemed to have disappeared. Whereas in the 1980s, it was obvious who the bad guys were, to the point were anger sometimes got in the way of art, in the 1990s, while things seemed to become cleverer and more expansive, it was also more complex and ambiguous, and less easy to recognise those bad guys. So for much of the 1990s, it felt that things were in a state of flux en route to the end of the century. Many plays – though by no means all - were about trying to ...

In August 1977 I bought a seven inch single by a punk band called The Adverts. It was a song called Gary Gilmore’s Eyes, which presented a two and a half minute narrative told in the first person by a man who’d undergone an eye transplant which had seen him fitted with the corneas of Gary Gilmore. In January that year, the real Gary Gilmore was killed by firing squad after insisting that the death sentence he was given following two murders he committed in Utah be fulfilled. Gilmore also requested that his eyes be used for transplant purposes, and within hours of his execution, two people received his corneas. So, here was a record taking a real life incident and turning it into a fiction that fitted perfectly with the self-destructive, nihilistic iconography of punk. There was mild tabloid outrage, although Gary Gilmore’s Eyes made the lower reaches of the UK pop charts, and The Adverts even appeared miming to it on Top of the Pops. It didn’t end there. In 1979, Norman Mailor fictiona...