A Voice from the North

GEORGE GUNN is a Caithness man born and bred, and the county is never far from the heart of his writing, whether in his poetry or in his theatre work. He began writing as a child, completed his first play for the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, and launched Grey Coast Theatre Company in Thurso in 1992. This is part two of George’s interview with KENNY MATHIESON.

ARTS JOURNAL: We spoke in the first part of this interview about the centrality of Caithness in your work – were you born in Thurso?

GEORGE GUNN: Like almost everybody in the west end of Caithness, I was born in the Dunbar Hospital in Thurso, and now I overlook the hospital from my front window, so I’ve come full circle! I was brought up in Dunnet, which is the most northerly village on the mainland. When I was a bairn growing up there it was essentially a crofting township. Almost everyone that lived there had a croft – we were one of the exceptions because we lived in what were called the new houses, eight of them.

AJ: What did your parents do?

GG: My mother was a district nurse, and my father had a threshing machine, and would go round the farms. As a bairn I would be passed along to the neighbours when they were out at work, and that was common. It is as close as I can imagine to what it must have been like to live in a Viking long house – at New Year it would take a day and half to get round the eight houses. That has all changed, it’s really just a des res suburb of Thurso now.

 AJ: When did you start writing?

GG: I’ve always written, really. My mother comes from a very literary family in Wick, the Mores. We always had books at home and I could read and write before I went to school, which was always annoying for the teacher, because I would always be reading ahead of the rest of the class to see what happened.

AJ: What is your first memory of writing?

GG: The first thing I remember writing was at primary school. I wrote a wee story about a huge monster coming along and eating the primary school – little did I know at the time that it was actually called the Highland Council! The village really took a nose-dive after they closed the school.

AJ: Did you go to Thurso for high school?

GG: Yes, and that was important, because I had an inspirational teacher there called Margaret Gunn, or as we used to call her, Granny Gunn. She came from Keiss originally, and her husband and some of her family were lost at sea in a herring drifter, I think less than a week after her marriage. The tragedy was also a liberation for her, though, because she then went off to Edinburgh University and studied Classics, but if the tragedy hadn’t happened, she would probably have spent her days in Keiss. She came back and taught at Thurso High School, and she was great one for local history and also things like The Iliad and The Odyssey.
 
AJ: Were there any other significant influences on you?

GG: She was a big influence, and so was an uncle of mine, George More. He and his brother went off to Edinburgh University before the war, and at the end of term they would walk back from Edinburgh to Wick to get jobs for the summer in the herring fishing. It was a different world then! George was a great inspiration to me – he lived in Edinburgh and had a fantastic library, and was also a good friend of Sydney Goodsir Smith, and knew Christopher Murray Grieve [Hugh McDiarmid] and a lot of that group of writers. He did some writing himself, and he could speak Italian and German, and knew a lot about Brecht and so on. He was a very dynamic character, and was one of the founder members of the Traverse Theatre in the original days when it was in the Lawnmarket, but he was just a wee guy from Wick.

…she is the only theatre director I ever had a conversation with about my play through a toilet door.

AJ: That was your mother’s side of the family?

GG: Yes. They were involved in fishing. My father’s parents were from Kildonan, and were Gaelic speakers, but they didn’t pass it on to my parents. I take issue with people in Caithness who say Gaelic has nothing to do with them. My uncle George encouraged me to keep writing poetry at a time when I was writing sub-Neil Young lyrics, thinking I could write lyrics for Led Zeppelin or something. He would read them, and we would talk for a bit, and he would disappear and come back with a can of McEwans Export and a book and say read that – the beer was the bribe to get me to read the book. Eventually I started to see what he was on about.

AJ: You mentioned the Traverse – did he introduce you to theatre as well?

GG: Because of him I started going to the Traverse, but never thinking I would write anything for the theatre. I was working offshore on the rigs – I did that for seven years, and you get less than that for burglary! I began to meet some of the actors from the Traverse, and a couple of them were in a play at the time that had bored them out of their minds – I won’t say what it was, but it was what Peter Brook calls dead theatre. One of them, Hugh Lauchlan, said to me I want you to write a play for us about being offshore. The next time I came back he said I’ve got a slot for October at the Traverse, and I have money to do it. Peter Lichtenfels was in charge of the Traverse at the time, and I think he was just glad to fill in what he saw as the back end of the season.

AJ: An easy business this, you must have thought?

GG: I couldn’t believe it, but I wrote the play in about a week – this was 1984, and it became my first play at the Traverse. That was ‘Roughneck’. Peter then commissioned me to write another one, and I thought well, this is better than working!

AJ: Presumably you had no formal training in writing?

GG: No, but I was also involved with the Edinburgh Playwright’s Workshop, and I must have done that for five years or so. I must have worked on 200 plays in that time with hundreds of actors – it was probably the best dramatic education a writer could have had.

AJ: How did you gravitate back to Caithness?

GG: From there things moved on – Cath Robins at Eden Court was doing a show about the Crofting Act in 1986, and she commissioned me to write ‘The Gold of Kildonan’. She was a remarkable woman – she is the only theatre director I ever had a conversation with about my play through a toilet door. The Arts Council at that time had a small scale touring budget, and that meant that a lot of the plays that came up here weren’t really appropriate to the Highlands, but to get the money they had to bring them here. Catherine put together a number of very successful tours, but in 1990 she put the proposition to the board that she wanted to base a touring company in Eden Court, starting with money that had come from an Arts & Business award for ‘The Gold of Kildonan’, but the board kicked it out.

AJ: Where did that leave you?

GG: That left me with what was laughingly called a career path, and an audience, but no means of production. I took soundings, and people were saying you have to create your own company, and that is how Grey Coast was born in 1992.

AJ: Do you feel the Highland companies are marginalised?

GG: It’s a bit of a best of times and worst of times situation. People say that we have 19 or 20 or whatever professional theatre companies in the Highlands, and then there are people like me who say well, no, there aren’t really – in actuality there are maybe five or six, and then some more working on project funding. It looks good on paper, but there is no funding structure to sustain it. It is hard to predict the long term future for any of the companies, but I don’t think you can develop a genuine Highland theatre culture growing out of Highland traditions and serving that constituency without that support, and if we don’t support that kind of work properly, we will lose it. I don’t think the funding bodies engage with that issue, to their discredit.

Because you are dealing with public money in a situation like that you owe it to the taxpayer to get it right…

AJ: Do you see a future for these companies?

GG: I can foresee a time in the future when there will be no theatre companies in the Highlands. I can’t see how it is going to move forward under the present funding structures, but I suspect changes are coming whether you like them or not, with the Cultural Commission and so on, and I actually embrace them. What we need is money put into the culture and the artists that produce it rather than a series of half-thought-out phenomena and years of this or that. I think the funders like to have us all competing with each other, and I think that reluctance to support a seriously funded production company in the north of Scotland is still there.

AJ: Tell me a bit about your method of working – do you do a lot of revising of your work?

GG: I do. As I get older the process gets more distilled, I think, but with a poem there is usually the initial scribble, then there is a draft of it, then there is what I call a black ink draft, which goes into a book. The next stage is a typed draft onto the computer, so it has four drafts before anyone sees it. Then I show it to my partner, Christine, because she is my best audience, then it goes off to Joy Hendry at Chapman. The main changes are generally made in the first three stages of that process, and anything after that is usually honing.
 

AJ: What is the process for your theatre work?

GG: The process for plays is somewhat different, although they also go through a drafting process. They come from a kind of messy explosion of ideas in the first instance, and it is a matter of drawing out the narrative from that. I never actually write anything until I am absolutely sure where it is set and who is in it and what is going to happen, and that can take months to get to that stage. I’ll fill notebooks and be like a bear with a sore head, and eventually I reach a point where I know what is happening, and start writing dialogue. I’ll have done three drafts of it before anyone sees it. Then the actors get it, and it is no longer really yours any more, but that is when you know if it is any good or not. Readings are very useful in that process – I can see what is wrong and try to put it right, rather than see it collapse on its knees on the main stage at the Citz!

AJ: And then you get the audience reaction?

GG: It reminds me in some ways of my grandfather’s engineering workshop, full of machinery and washers and bits and pieces. Writing a play is a lot like that – you have all this jumble of bits and pieces of ideas and you need to go through that process of putting them in order, and I think you need to work with the actors to get that, otherwise you can end up with very well rehearsed mistakes. Then you put it on in front of an audience, and that stage is vital – they have their input as well. Because you are dealing with public money in a situation like that you owe it to the taxpayer to get it right, and to do that you need information, and the way to get information is through experimentation. A lot of that is done behind the scenes, but getting the reaction of audiences is also part of that process, but you owe it to them to arrive at that point with the best possible play that you can, and I don’t always see that in Scottish theatre.

AJ: George, thanks very much for that. I‘m not sure I’ll be able to squeeze it all in, though.

GG: Aye, well, just leave in the juicy bits and get us all into trouble again, Kenny.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2005

Link

• Grey Coast Theatre website