How far we have come

This blog is about opinions, my opinions. It's not the scene of my acting out any delusions you may think I possess about being a journalist; an arts critic or an expert on football or politics. I can only say that I did or didn't enjoy something, or that I like or dislike something or someone, and, in a limited fashion, I may even say why. It is not dressing those opinions as facts; I leave that sort of thing to other people.

When I can afford the time and/or money, I go out, ostensibly to ‘have fun’, but primarily to convince myself that the world is not the uninspiring, miserable place the daily grind would suggest. I go to concerts (classical and jazz); I go to football (which is, at the moment, uninspiring and depressing); I visit art galleries, museums and castles; I go out bird-watching. The theatre has been somewhat neglected in the past few years, so it is unusual for me to have attended two plays in almost as many weeks. This is an example of what I alluded to earlier; it’s a recounting of my experience, not a review.

I don’t know much about Ena Lamont Stewart, or about the left-wing inspiration behind the plays written and produced by the Glasgow Unity Theatre in the late 1940s. I had, however, seen the title ‘Men Should Weep’ before, associated with the theatre company 7:84. If I cast my mind back to the 80s, and Glasgow’s Mayfest, I’m amazed that I’ve never seen the play, though I do recall seeing 'The Gorbals Story' (not that I recall anything about it).

The play is set in a tenement flat in Glasgow’s East End during the depression of the 1930s. The man of the house, in common with many others, is out of work, and the burden of providing for the family falls on the mother and immediate relatives, with a little help from neighbours, and charity in the form of the local church mission. It’s a slice of gritty, social realism that could almost be treated as nostalgia (even I remember my elders talking in a form of the Glaswegian dialect more akin to auld Scots than the alien language spoken by some of the ‘less-fortunate souls’ who inhabit the poorer areas of the city today), and, in between the undoubted misery, it depicts community spirit and family cohesion (with obvious exceptions like the feckless son and his grasping wife, or the daughter who was the apple of her dad’s eye but grew up and turned to prostitution, or being a ‘kept-woman’, to escape her embarrassing family circumstances) to a degree Cameron and his friends on multi-millionaires row could only dream about for their sham of a ‘Big Society’. I saw a revised version; in the original version, life, and the play itself, were far more harrowing.

The most uplifting aspect was a sign that life was beginning to improve for the Morrison family once John had found regular employment, but it was also sad to think that many of the men of that era only escaped their grinding poverty by joining the armed forces when the war came along, leaving plenty of jobs for anyone else who wanted to work. Living standards eventually increased, the Welfare State became a safety net for some (and a crutch for others, in time) and slowly, over a number of years, the country got back on its feet. Yet I remember visiting a relative in 1970 and having to use a ‘stair-heid lavvy’.

Something went horribly wrong in Glasgow. The money was supposed to be there, but the poverty has never really gone away, we just have poor people in slightly better houses, a thin veneer of respectability. Leaving aside the Scottish Parliament and Government for another time, we still have a Labour council in Glasgow and we have in Westminster, as in the 1930s, a coalition including ‘Liberals’. Then, there was a schism followed by some traitors going off and joining the Tories. Are we on the verge of history repeating, in the same way, in so many ways? I couldn’t help thinking that with welfare reform, rampant unemployment, and the ideological desire to destroy the public sector, the themes and setting of this play could transfer seamlessly to the latter years of this decade or into the next; a terrifying vision of the future.

The strong women were the stars of this, much like they tended to be in Coronation Street of old, and it came as a shock to me that Lorraine McIntosh, in the lead role of Maggie Morrison, is a better actress (albeit in this context) than a singer, bearing in mind that, in a former life, she was the bimbo backing singer in that most superfluous of shit, pointless bands, Deacon Blue. Praise must also go to the woman who played her sister Lily; Julie Wilson Nimmo, better known as Miss Hoolie from Balamory. In between scenes, we were also treated to songs from well-known folk singer Arthur Johnstone, who also had a bit part as a removal man, in this, his first acting role.

As I made my way to the Citizens Theatre for the matinee performance of this National Theatre of Scotland production, I drove close by those who were marching from Glasgow Green to Kelvingrove Park in a protest against the Tory cuts. They were heading in the opposite direction to me. They always used to, but now I am on their side, though yesterday it was only in spirit.