An ordinary genius

Bill Boyd
Norman MacCaig didn’t want lunch. A cigarette would do

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Two images

Photographs for Armistice Day

When the oil runs out

Christopher Harvie
A weekend essay on the prospects for Scotland

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David Harvie
The colours of politics

First village in
the Borders

Islay McLeod
is enchanted by Broughton

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Rear Window
J P McCondach’s war diary

This Scotland

The Scots have always been an unhappy people; their history is a varying record of heroism, treachery, persistent bloodshed, perpetual feuds and long-winded and sanguine arguments.
Edwin Muir (1887-1959), Scottish Journey

There is an incurable nosiness in the national character.
Cliff Hanley (1922-1999), The Scots

We take a pleasure, a malicious pleasure, I am afraid, in pricking bubbles; and, though we are very sentimental ourselves, we like to pour cold water on other people’s sentiment.
John Buchan (1875-1940), Some Scottish characteristics

I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.
Charles Lamb (1775-1834), Essays of Elia

It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.
P G Wodehouse (1881-1975), Wodehouse at Work

In Scotland, everybody represses you, if you but propose to step out of the beaten track.
James Mill (1773-1836), James Mill: A Biography

Scotland is indefinable; it has no unity except on a map. Two languages, many dialects, innumerable forms of piety, and countless local patriotisms and prejudices, part us among ourselves more widely than the extreme east and west of that great continent of America.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), In the Valley: The Scot Abroad

‘A small family in the congregation of Europe’
Moray McLaren, The Scots

Ena

Kenneth Roy

This is the essay about Ena Lamont Stewart in the National Theatre programme for the current production of ‘Men Should Weep’

The radical group of young writers and artists gathered around Glasgow’s Unity Theatre in the immediate aftermath of World War II reads like a who’s who of the arts in Scotland. The poet Hugh MacDiarmid, the sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay, the folk singer Ewan MacColl (father of Kirsty), the playwright Eddie Boyd, the actors Russell Hunter, Andrew Keir and Roddy McMillan – all of them regarded Unity as their spiritual home. Into this melting pot of left-wing idealism ventured Ena Lamont Stewart.

     Ena must have cut an incongruous figure as one of the few women in the circle and as the delicately spoken, somewhat genteel daughter of a Scottish manse. But her childhood of relative privilege in one of the poorest districts of Glasgow, where her father served in the parish ministry, gave her a keen sense of the appalling deprivation on her doorstep: she knew how the poor lived, if only as an observer and instinctive sympathiser. Her brother offered her sixpence to continue with a story she had started. She discovered she had a flair for dialogue, and liked the idea of being paid to write it.
     Out of these early experiences came a play. It was inspired by her job – no higher education for Ena – working as a receptionist in a Glasgow hospital and noting the comings and goings of patients and nurses. ‘Starched Aprons’ scooped up the language and character of the streets of her city and put them on the stage. Far removed in setting and style from the fashionable theatre of the time, the cocktail party artifice which Ena disdained, it suited Unity’s evangelical purposes. She could not understand why ‘Starched Aprons’ was never revived. She thought as highly of it as she did of her subsequent masterpiece.

Ena Lamont Stewart, at the age of 35 and with a clutch of rave reviews to her credit, should have had a glittering career ahead of her. It was not to be.

     It was with ‘Men Should Weep’ two years later, directed by Unity’s Robert Mitchell, that she made her name. Mitchell, always anxious to give young people a start, hired a struggling art school graduate, Bet Low, to design and paint the set. With Mitchell’s rough stage plan, Bet went off to Unity to tell the usual designer, expecting encouragement. ‘He was thoroughly put out,’ she wrote to me years later. ‘Miffed. No help. Never looked near the workshop.’ From a ladder in that freezing workshop, she painted and stencilled the 18-foot-high flats, thinking the result not at all brilliant.
     The other struggling talent involved in the production was personally unhappy. The author’s marriage – to the actor Jack Stewart – was breaking down and Ena faced the prospect of bringing up their young son on her own. Despite these unpromising auguries, ‘Men Should Weep’ opened on 30 January 1947 to warm critical approval. It swept from Glasgow to Edinburgh and then on to London. Robert Mitchell said in a letter: ‘On the first night [at the Embassy Theatre in London] we had a tremendous reception, the audience cheering and whistling, and every performance since has had a very big reception’.
     Ena Lamont Stewart, at the age of 35 and with a clutch of rave reviews to her credit, should have had a glittering career ahead of her. It was not to be.
     Part of the problem was O H Mavor (who wrote as James Bridie), the powerful impresario of the Scottish theatre, founder of the Glasgow Citizens’, co-founder of the Edinburgh Festival, distinguished playwright, of whom the critic Ivor Brown said that he spoke in whispers; you had to strain to hear him. Ena Lamont Stewart heard him plainly enough. Mavor, who ought to have nurtured Ena’s exceptional gifts, lifting her from the impoverished fringe into the subsidised mainstream, instead patronised and dismissed her. Forty years later, the insult still rankled. She was not produced at the Citizens’, then the nearest thing to a Scottish national theatre. Professional jealousy? Surely not. Male chauvinism in a small, insecure society? Very possibly.
     Whatever the explanation, Ena Lamont Stewart virtually disappeared as a writer. With the exception of a pot-boiler staged at Pitlochry Festival Theatre in the 1950s, she did not have a play professionally produced for 35 years. A book about the post-war Scottish theatre mentioned her almost in parenthesis. It was as if ‘Men Should Weep’ had never happened. She earned a living as a reference librarian in Glasgow, kept writing, submitting scripts, having them brutally rejected when acknowledged at all. The neglect of her ability was complete. It amounted to starvation. The memory of Scotland seemed short indeed.
     Was Ena bitter? She was a great giggler, even in severest adversity; she inscribed my copy of ‘Men Should Weep’, when at last published by the Scottish Society of Playwrights which she helped to found, ‘in memory of much laughter’. But the laughter masked a deep and enduring disappointment. In the nadir of her fortunes, I urged her to submit a one-act play for a competition being promoted by the Scottish Community Drama Association, thinking this might lead somewhere. It won the competition and led nowhere. Then, out of the blue, John McGrath of the 7:84 Theatre Company rediscovered ‘Men Should Weep’ and persuaded Giles Havergal, artistic director of the Citizens’, to direct it in Glasgow.
     There came a night when Ena’s friends gathered on the stage of the Citizens’ to celebrate her resurrection. It was the ultimate acknowledgement of her work in what should have been her natural habitat from the start. But she was in her seventies now. She was written out. She began an autobiography, which might have been a fascinating social as well as theatrical history, but abandoned it.

Of course there was consummate artistry. But of that she spoke little. Ena’s characters – the voices in her head – did most of the real work; so she said.

     As she reflected on her two brief interludes of recognition so many years apart, she was baffled but amused by her growing reputation as a playwright of the far left. She insisted that there was no conscious ideology behind her plays. She had written of what she knew: that was as far as she was prepared to go. Indeed her view of her own characters bordered on detachment. She told me they spoke to her, often in chunks of dialogue which she then hurried to set down on paper. During these creative bursts, she was so absorbed she tended to bump into the furniture in her small windswept house on the west coast of Scotland. She made the job of the playwright sound almost like transcription. Of course there was consummate artistry. But of that she spoke little. Ena’s characters – the voices in her head – did most of the real work; so she said.
     Nor did she speak of politics. She spoke of God. God was ‘the boss man upstairs’ and when she returned to writing after a break she would say that she had received a ‘God-prod’. Her memory faded. In the end she remembered nothing. By the time ‘Men Should Weep’ achieved the status of a modern classic, having been voted one of the 100 greatest plays of the 20th century, its author was beyond reach – unaware that she had ever been a writer. She died four years ago, in a nursing home in Ayrshire, on the eve of her 94th birthday.

The production continues at the National Theatre until early in the New Year

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