John McGrath's Scottish Drama
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2022
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Bill Paterson is a founding member of the 7:84 company established by John McGrath, his wife Elizabeth and her brother to create radical, popular theatre. Fusing techniques popularised by Bertolt Brecht with Scottish performance traditions, their best-known play The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (1973) explored class struggle, the clearing of the Scottish highlands and the impact of drilling for oil. With energy in the news again, and the resurgence of political theatre on the British stage - Anne McElvoy looks at the writing of John McGrath with Bill Paterson, theatre critic Joyce McMillan and Joe Douglas, who directed a successful revival of the play for the National Theatre of Scotland, Dundee Theatre and Live Theatre which toured Scotland in 2019 and 2020.
Producer: Tim Bano
BBC Radio 3's Breakfast programme is travelling through Scotland this week. You can listen live or find Petroc's journeys on BBC Sounds.
You can find a series of discussions about influential plays, films, books and art collected together as Landmarks on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01jwn44
A blu-ray DVD of The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil is available.
Transcript
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| 0:35.8 | BBC Sounds, music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:40.1 | Today we tour Scotland, its politics, its geography, its history through the lens of one of the nation's most influential pieces of theatre. |
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| 0:55.8 | Ray Fulm Williams can claim to be Britain's favourite classical composer, but what keeps us coming back to his music 150 years after his birth? |
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