Transcript John Byrne’s Slab Boys Trilogy

John Byrne’s
Slab Boys Trilogy
Bursting with poetic life rather than
the usual despair
Of all Scottish playwrights of the past 50 years,
John Byrne is the most restlessly, relentlessly
original. Born in Paisley in 1940 - and brought
up in what was then a deprived council estate,
though Byrne says he loved it - he emerged
first as a visual artist rather than a writer.
At 19, he left Stoddart's Carpet Factory for
Glasgow School of Art, and never looked back.
He designed the legendary pop-up-book set
for 7:84 Scotland's 1973 debut, and Billy
Connolly's fantastic Big Banana Feet boots for
The Great Northern Welly Boot Show of 1972.
His first play, Writer's Cramp,
appeared in 1977.
But it was with The Slab Boys, premiered at the
Traverse in 1978 in a glittering production by David
Hayman, that Byrne propelled himself to fame as a
key figure in Scotland's theatre renaissance.
A cheeky and inventive variation on the
traditional workplace play - set in a Paisley
carpet factory in 1957 - The Slab Boys was
the first-ever drama about Scottish workingclass life that was neither militantly political,
nor fiercely gloomy, nor self-pityingly elegiac.
Instead, it was bursting with life, brimming
with poetic variations on real west-ofScotland street language, and brilliant in its
recognition of that key postwar moment
when growing affluence, and exposure to
American popular culture, began to open
new creative possibilities for working-class
boys.
The original cast included Robbie Coltrane as a middleclass slab boy with upwardly mobile aspirations, and Byrne
went on to create the cult TV hit Tutti Frutti, now revived by
the National Theatre of Scotland. But it was that cry from the
1950s, filtered through the lens of the late 1970s, which first
signalled his vital postmodern vision of working-class
Scotland as a place full of energy, colour and exotic
possibility.
JOYCE McMILLAN