John McGrath

• Born: June 1, 1935
• Birthplace: Birkenhead, Cheshire, England
• Died: January 22, 2002
• Place of death: Edinburgh, Scotland

Other Literary Forms

John McGrath wrote dozens of scripts for television and film. Z-Cars (1962), which he cowrote with Troy Kennedy Martin, was one of the most popular series in the 1962 television season, and his Diary of a Young Man ran as a six-part television series in 1964. His films include Billion Dollar Brain (1967), The Bofors Gun (1968), and The Dressmaker (1988, shown again in 1992 on public television). Films have been made for television of several of his major plays—The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (1974), Blood Red Roses (1985), and Border Warfare (1989). His nonfiction works include The Bone Won’t Break: On Theatre and Hope in Hard Times (1990).

Achievements

Known as a socialist playwright, John McGrath wrote mainly for working-class audiences in rural and industrial-urban Great Britain. The key influences on his work begin with the approaches of the Unity Theatre of the 1930’s, the Workers Theatre Movement formed in 1924, and the early Theatre Workshop of the 1950’s, which combine popular tastes as defined by working-class culture with political themes. Furthermore, McGrath deeply admires the revolutionary theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Erwin Piscator, and films with a social conscience such as those produced by Jean Renoir and Sergei Eisenstein. Many of McGrath’s plays employ skitlike agitprop techniques that feature humor, the songs and satire of the music-hall tradition, and folk, rock, and carnival music. Even so, the plays make new, challenging demands on their audiences with the serious underpinnings of ideological and ethical issues that endorse a revolutionary rather than a reformist perspective.

McGrath received the writers award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 1994 and he also received the Writers Guild Lifetime Achievement award in 1997.

Biography

Although his father was a middle-class secondary-school teacher, John Peter McGrath identified with the working classes through his Irish Catholic immigrant grandparents and, especially, his paternal grandfather, who worked as a boilermaker in the Birkenhead yards. McGrath was reared in Merseyside (near Liverpool) until World War II, when the family was evacuated to a working-class district in North Wales, returning to Merseyside in 1951.

From 1953 to 1955, McGrath fulfilled his National Service as a gunner, bombardier, then artillery officer in the British army, which sent him to Germany and Egypt. His officer status helped to qualify him in 1955 as a student at the University of Oxford, where he took a Dip.Ed. in directing and writing in 1959.

McGrath gave up a promising career in commercial theater and the popular media to commit his talents to alternative groups. After being associated with the Royal Court Theatre and the Script Department at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) from 1959 to 1965, he lent his energies briefly to Centre 42, the Writers’ Action Group, and Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. One of the crucial turning points for McGrath was in 1968, when he went to Paris and was deeply influenced by the para-revolutionary fever during the May strike, when students joined nine million workers to shut down the French system.

In 1962, McGrath married Elizabeth MacLennan, a gifted actress who was also a 1959 graduate of the University of Oxford. Their marriage produced three children. To make their own statement about mainstream theater, McGrath and MacLennan helped found the 7:84 Theatre Company in 1971 (known as 7:84), the name being a reminder that 7 percent of the population in Great Britain at that time owned 84 percent of the wealth. For seventeen years, the company played to packed houses, particularly in the Highlands of Scotland and around England. Moreover, McGrath’s innovations in working-class theater inspired a new generation of political theater in Great Britain; many of the original members served as catalysts for other companies, such as the Belt and Braces Roadshow and the Monstrous Regiment.

In 1982, 7:84 began a series of revivals written by earlier playwrights called the Clydebilt Season. These shows, exploring the heritage of popular culture, complemented McGrath’s own plays, which filled out the greater part of each new season. Despite 7:84’s successful track record, or perhaps because of it, the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, in 1985, withdrew the Arts Council grants for 7:84, England. In 1988, McGrath resigned as artistic director of the Scottish branch of 7:84 in response to fatal cuts announced by the Scottish Arts Council, and the company effectively died. After leaving 7:84, McGrath wrote for Wildcat, in Glasgow, and Freeway Films, a company that he founded in the late 1980’s.

In 1979, McGrath became a Judith E. Wilson Fellow, a guest lecturer at the University of Cambridge. His lectures became the basis for A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class, and Form (1981), a seminal work on the theory of working-class theater as a political forum. He returned to the University of Cambridge a decade later to discuss the problem of government subsidy for oppositional theater, a problem resulting from a clash in tastes between those who fund working-class theater and those who enjoy it. The lectures were published as The Bone Won’t Break: On Theatre and Hope in Hard Times.

Analysis

John McGrath’s works, numbering more than forty plays, roughly fall into three periods—the plays written before he began to define working-class theater for the contemporary stage, the plays of the 7:84 years that applied his theories, and his direction in theater since the collapse of state-run socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

His earliest works feature lone, rebellious men who openly oppose middle-class institutions that stand for moneyed success, dehumanizing deference, and conformity. Though these rebels are able to define the system of values that they reject, they provide few practical solutions that might alleviate oppression of the individual spirit. Although positive about their own values and their attack on society, these loners never form adequate relationships, particularly with allies in causes that might help them create change, so their dissent remains fixed at a certain level. Being authentic—that is, living by their own principles—is more important to these men than joining others, lest they are forced to compromise. They have, therefore, a commitment largely to themselves and their own dissent. Nevertheless, they are compelling figures for the moral integrity that they articulate and the intensity of their resistance to mainstream values.

Bakke’s Night of Fame

McGrath’s early heroes in Random Happenings in the Hebrides, Events While Guarding the Bofors Gun, and Bakke’s Night of Fame are thus best understood through the values of French existentialism, which influenced McGrath at the time. As an inmate on death row awaiting imminent execution, Bakke, in Bakke’s Night of Fame, insists on defining his own humanity. He does this by drawing attention to himself as an individual unlike his predecessors on death row. He goads the attending priest, who tries to deal with him as yet another penitent parishioner, into consciously acknowledging Bakke as a person like any other, with contradictions, desires, fears, and whims. Bakke similarly toys with the guards and needles the executioner into catering to his mercurial moods. It is Bakke’s way of struggling against the limitations of life itself and the humiliation of his fate. Teasing the priest into trying to guess whether he was guilty of his crime, Bakke attacks the traditional Christian notion of morality that judges human guilt.

It is never established whether Bakke committed a murder—some of the time he seems guilty and at other times he seems innocent—but the question of culpability is not important. Bakke wants to make it clear that he is a testament to the infinite mystery of human liberty. At the center of his being he has an inchoate but irreducible potential that gives him a freedom to assert his own autonomy. Whatever his fate, he attains dignity by virtue of his inviolable freedom to define himself as a human being and to amend that definition with each new act. The priest fails to grasp what Bakke is trying to teach him about life. He sees Bakke’s patter as mere play-acting. Of course, that is what people around Hamlet accused him of doing too, and Bakke teases the priest with echoes from William Shakespeare that suggest that Bakke, like the Prince of Denmark, is conscious of being able to shape life’s boundaries through each crucial decision and act.

For McGrath, Bakke’s Night of Fame also provides an opportunity to protest the inhumanity of capital punishment, an issue that materializes the abstract nature of Bakke’s struggle. Bakke insists on confronting his executioner and asking about the executioner’s children, who might themselves have to face a death sentence some day. He is trying to force the person who will kill him to put a face on the man he will soon electrocute. Bakke makes no equivocation about capital punishment as an act of murder and the human life that is at stake.

The 7:84 Period

By contrast, McGrath’s plays written during the 7:84 period deemphasize individualism. Their protagonists are likely to be female as well as male, and they stress solutions to topical issues of economic and social injustice through communal interests. Convinced that the sources of the working-class struggle could not be readily visualized and fully understood through the surface reality of everyday situations, McGrath rejected naturalism or realism as choices for dramatic forms. To reveal the underlying economic forces that are normally suppressed in the dominant culture, McGrath draws on Brechtian forms of art that attempt to force the audience to contemplate and question what they see. Specifically, his strategy is to draw on very stylized scenery and dialogue—often exaggerated, cartoonlike, and humorous—which creates some distance between stage and audience, inhibiting identification with the characters and situations.

McGrath wisely chose, however, not to adopt the full measure of audience alienation but to develop a modified form of Brechtian theater that would have a wide appeal among his audiences and still achieve the effect of revealing the hidden forces of capitalism, corporate monopoly, power, and greed. Noting that art’s appeal is not universal and that most standards for art are determined by middle-class tastes, McGrath set out to discover what characterizes working-class entertainment in particular. He determined, above all, that he must be direct in his message for the working classes—that it must not be embedded in artistic form—and that he should use plenty of variety with comedy, music, and moment-by-moment change of effect. Working-class audiences like a fast pace, with a variety of emotion and rhythms defined by laughs, silence, song, and tears. He also decided to employ topical subject matter especially linked to local concerns and to work informally with the audiences using plenty of give-and-take with the crowds. Audiences are sometimes asked to join the actors on the stage with dancing and singing, as one of several ways audiences participated in 7:84’s shows.

The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil

The best-known play of this period is The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil. The play protests the appropriation of Scotland’s land over the centuries for raising sheep, hunting grouse, and exploiting oil reserves. It begins with the tragedy of the Clearances, a period in the 1800’s when the crofters (tenant farmers) were thrown off their land at the whim of the large landholders, who wanted the land for recreation or income. So many of these people were burned out, chased to the sea, and put on ships for Canada that their number today is a mere fraction of what it once was. After repeated torture and harassment by the authorities, whole villages disappeared. Throughout The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil are a parade of crofters who tell their stories with poignancy and humor, and their version of history contrasts with the aristocrats who, by their own words, reveal a profit motive and callousness. This history of the Clearances finds its analogue at the end of the play with the displacement of Scots in the Shetlands and Orkney islands by North Sea oil development. Because the cost of living has become too high for local inhabitants, they have had to sell out to developers.

The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil was enormously popular on tour largely because it expressed the concerns of people in the Highlands, but also because it successfully employed the techniques that McGrath had earlier identified as characteristic of working-class theater. The scenery was a giant pop-up book, all the music—both rock and Highland fiddle tunes—was live, and the play drew on the Gaelic Ceilidh as a paradigm, a folk party with whiskey, storytelling, Scottish poetry, local music, and general entertainment.

Border Warfare

With plays such as The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil, McGrath found his voice in the issues defined by Scottish history, especially in celebration of folk heroes who protest colonization by outsiders and decry mistakes made by the Scots themselves, who have, in effect, relinquished control over their own affairs. These plays—among them Little Red Hen, Joe’s Drum, and Mairi Mhor—point the way to Border Warfare, a work of epic proportions that brings together many of the themes of McGrath’s earlier historic drama with themes on the nationalist cause. In this play, Scotland is the primeval land corrupted by cross-border raids between England and Scotland, diminished by foreign rule, and ennobled only by the contemporary hope of devolution (transfer) of power from the British parliament. All the key points of Scottish history concerning home rule are here—the battles over Northumbria, the clan rivalry that allowed the English an early foothold in Scotland, the scheming of King James I of Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots, the Union of 1707 that legalized absorption of the Scottish parliament by England, and the political infighting during the nineteenth century that has kept devolution almost within reach, but not quite. Once again, the play uses a combination of folk and contemporary music, stylized scenery, and a pageantlike structure that calls forth spokespeople from each generation. Despite the size of the production, Border Warfare was mounted without government subsidy.

Waiting for Dolphins

Waiting for Dolphins possibly marks a third shift in McGrath’s writings because it is aimed more at middle-class leftists who feel alienated and isolated by the breakup of the world’s largest Marxist government, the Soviet Union. With remarkable honesty, the play faces up to the destruction and mistakes of the Left and, with humor and acerbic commentary, takes on the demonization of socialism by reaffirming the leftist belief in a more just system. Its protagonist is Reynalda, a member of one of “the best English radical, non-conforming intellectual families,” who runs a bed-and-breakfast place in North Wales and wonders how she will get along with her capitalist guests. While she reviews the contours of her activist years, she wonders what her response should become to the loss of socialist values. As an analogue, she recalls the dolphins she had once seen frolicking near Cyprus. They represent all that hangs delicately in the balance for both the environment and socialism. If future decisions do not consider their contribution to the world, they could become extinct. Her only recourse is to wait for the dolphins to resurface.

Waiting for Dolphins is an important departure for McGrath because it once again features an individual voice and addresses a new audience without the trappings of big production values. It turns to a more realistic dramatic form with well-developed characterization that invites audience sympathy and identification.

Later Plays

McGrath’s adaptation of The Silver Darlings from the popular Scottish novel of the same name by Neil M. Gunn was staged in 1994 by the Wildcat Theatre Company. It was produced on an “epic scale.” McGrath’s interest in political concerns was reflected in his production of Reading Rigoberta. Based on the life of the Nobel Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchu Tum, the commanding one-woman play featured McGrath’s wife as the renowned human rights activist whose family was brutalized by Guatemala’s harsh dictatorship.

Bibliography

Cherns, Penny, and Paddy Broughton. “John McGrath’s Trees in the Wind at the Northcott Theatre, Exeter.” Theatre Quarterly 19 (September/October, 1975): 89-100. Although describing the workings of an early production, this article offers real insight into the 7:84 Theatre Company’s rehearsal process and the special mix of ideology and theater that shapes the plays.

Craig, Sandy. “Unmasking the Lie.” In Dreams and Deconstructions: Alternative Theatre in Britain. Ambergate, England: Amber Lane Press, 1980. A spirited account of the revolution in British theater beginning in 1968. Craig’s discussion, which describes the whole range of theater in Great Britain, situates McGrath’s work in the continuum between commercial and subsidized theater.

Itzin, Catherine. Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain Since 1968. London: Eyre Methuen, 1980. An invaluable handbook that documents the work of the most important political writers and theater companies between 1968 and 1980. Arranged in chronological order, this book explains the sequence of events that shaped alternative theater and suggests a line of influence among the most creative people in theater at that time. Accurate and complete.

MacLennan, Elizabeth. The Moon Belongs to Everyone: Making Theatre with 7:84. London: Methuen, 1990. Heartwarming and informative, this book records the commitment and will of an entire family to the fulfillment of a dream. Especially valuable are MacLennan’s details about the history of the 7:84 Theatre Company and the battle to keep it afloat financially once the Conservative government had targeted it for cuts. Most memorable are MacLennan’s accounts of caring for the family while handling their many crises through many months on the road.

McGrath, John. “The Theory and Practice of Political Theatre.” Theatre Quarterly 35 (Autumn, 1979): 43-54. McGrath’s own article is the best theoretical discussion of 7:84’s goals and ambitions. McGrath explains these theories simply and elegantly.

Page, Malcolm. “John McGrath: NTQ Checklist Number One.” New Theatre Quarterly 4 (November, 1985): 400-416. This bibliography is the place to begin serious research on McGrath and the 7:84 Theatre Company. It includes not only a brief chronology of McGrath’s career and an annotated list of his plays up to 1985 but also an impressive catalog of the major articles written about McGrath and select reviews of his plays.

Stevenson, Randall, and Gavin Wallace, eds. Scottish Theatre Since the Seventies. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 1996. A look at the development of the 7:84 Theatre Company, as well as other Scottish companies and theaters. Includes a separate chapter featuring an interview with McGrath.

Van Erven, Eugene. Radical People’s Theatre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Covers popular theater around the world and uses the 7:84 Theatre Company to represent Great Britain. Especially good at providing a larger context for the theater company’s politics and practices.