All the way from the Silvery Tay to Trump

Downstairs in the basement of Glasgow’s Oran Mor, vegetable scraps remain scattered on the stage from when, minutes earlier, McNair had recalled a scene common in the poet’s later life – of being pelted with stale food.

In the late 1880s, with McGonagall having returned in vain from visits to London and New York to seek his fortune, the pelting was reportedly a condition of employment for the penniless poet at a local circus. McGonagall would be met with a sea of penny trumpets when he appeared at the city’s Theatre Royal.

“Every time he would try to speak, the crowd would blow them,” says McNair. “And this would go on – he would keep trying, and keep trying. He was even pelted with bricks. His kids were in and out of prison for defending the flat. It was terrible.”

Having said goodbye to cast members Brian James O’Sullivan and Frightened Rabbit musician Simon Liddell, multi-award winner McNair, one of the most consistent young theatre-makers working in Scotland today, says he feels much affection for the late poet.

The show, McGonagall’s Chronicles (Which Will Be Remembered For A Very Long Time), he says, “genuinely comes from a place of love.” The second part of that title comes from McGonagall's most famous poem, The Tay Bridge Disaster:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember’d for a very long time

McNair wrote the play in a style that echoes McGonagall’s love of rhyme at the seeming expense of all the other rules of poetry. It must have been fun to rhyme “reekin’” with “Brechin”.

“It was – hugely so,” McNair says. “The biggest challenge was making it good enough to be bad enough to be good enough. That is, it’s not enough that it’s bad, it has to be enjoyably bad. But when you come away from a session of working on it, you find you want to read everything like that.”

McGonagall’s Chronicles, which shows at Dundee Rep tonight before more dates are announced in the near future, began life as part of McNair’s Three-Minute Thursdays, a night he ran in autumn 2013, also downstairs at Oran Mor.

It’s fitting that the show just premiered here as part of the now world-acclaimed A Play, A Pie And A Pint programme. It was a quip from the series’s founder, the late David MacLennan, that encouraged McNair to develop it into a full-length show.

“My three minutes had ended up being six minutes – it was totally my fault,” remembers McNair. “It went down really well and when I came offstage the lovely David MacLennan said: ‘That was marvellous’. I was like: ‘So, we’ll do the full show?’ And he was like, ‘Not a f***ing chance’. I took that as a provocation. When I’ve been writing, if I came across a stumbling block, his voice would come into my head.”

Another inspiration was the music of Liddell – a collaborator on the show since those early days. “It was actually because I wanted to hear more music at first that I did a longer piece; so Simon would write more music,” says McNair, explaining that, when he first got in contact with Joe Douglas to direct the piece, he sent him Liddell’s music rather than his own script.

Raucous, witty and touching, the play affords a respect denied to the poet during his lifetime. Many of his poems were printed in the city’s popular weekend newspapers, part of a lost Victorian culture of reading, appreciating – and criticising – submitted poetry.

“They would pick on him a lot,” says McNair. “It would be a case of: ‘here’s a total s***er’. But he would get his work printed in full. Being the guy he was, he was delighted by this, and kept writing.”

McGonagall wrote more than 200 poems, many of which addressed celebrities of the day, disasters and other items he believed newsworthy.

One theory says he deliberately simplified his work so as to be understood by the public, and that these poems were to be performed rather than read from the page.

Though such complexities are largely outwith the reach of the play, McNair says, we should not forget that the man who died penniless in 1902 was an extraordinary man. McGonagall’s schooling lasted only a couple of patchy years: aged seven, he was working at the loom.

“When he died, his wife signed the death certificate with an X, she was illiterate, like a lot of his neighbours were,” says McNair. “And for someone from Dundee to go to New York then was like someone going to the moon. It was unheard of.”

In the play, O’Sullivan performs as the Laughing Man, an upper-class figure who mocks McGonagall with assured glee. But the weaver-poet wasn’t accepted by his fellow workers either. Read by McNair in the play, McGonagall’s poem Genius says:

What is genius?

’Tis a thing seldom rewarded;

If you are in poverty

’Tis sure to be disregarded.

But if you are a rich man

Your company is courted

By the high and the low,

Throughout the world wherever you go.

Whereas the poor man

By his fellow-workmen is spurned;

They look on him with a jealous eye,

And their noses upturn’d

“I couldn’t believe it when I found that poem,” says McNair. “It articulates what I feared would be the case. The Noel Coward character is allowed to pontificate and be silly and do all these things because there’s a sense that he understood what he was doing. Whereas with McGonagall, he was really poor, and there’s a desperation to it.”

Sensing that desperation, McGonagall was the perfect scapegoat. “It’s the tall poppies thing,” says McNair.”People do this sort of thing today too. When I was working on Locker Room Talk people would bring up Billy Connolly all the time. It would be, ‘he changed his accent’ or ‘anyone can do what he does, I could tell you jokes’. And I would be: ‘All right. Tell me a joke’. And it would be: ‘Aye, well, um ...’.”

RETURNING to the Traverse in Edinburgh next week, where it premiered in February 2017, Locker Room Talk was created in response to Donald Trump’s notorious “grab them by the p***y” comment. It’s a verbatim play in which four women speak the words of men – specifically, the words men use about women when talking in men-only spaces.

McNair interviewed hundreds of men across the country, from building sites and prisons to offices and doctor’s surgeries. All were given complete anonymity and were told they were being recorded and that their words might be used as part of a play. As McNair noted in a newspaper article around the time of the show’s premier: “I spoke to at least 20 men who repeated a variation of this statement: ‘Of course I want women to have equal rights, but we’ll never have equality until a man can punch a woman in the face’.”

It’s a shocking piece, and a vital one. These shows premier a new cast member in Rehanna Macdonald, with a view to touring across the UK later this year. Other current cast members Blythe Duff, Rachael Spence and Caroline Deyga performed the piece at Holyrood in November last year – the same day, McNair notes, as the allegations about comedian Louis CK surfaced.

“We were overwhelmed by the turnout of MSPs, policy-makers and various members of staff who came,” says director Orla O’Loughlin, who reveals news on further performances is imminent. “There was clearly an appetite to have this conversation,” she said.

“It felt like a release valve for that particular institution at that moment.”

As McNair points out, Locker Room Talk is a show in two parts, with a 50-minute post-show discussion featuring the highest retention rates he’s seen. “It’s a vital part of the show as it opens up so much for a lot of people,” he says. “Our job is to create the provocation, and in doing so, we realised the necessity for there to be a space for that not to just be thrown in your face, for you to deal with it on your own.”

So far, the post-show discussions have been led by psychologist Dr Nina Burrowes. From next week, Dr Holly Davis from the University of Edinburgh will chair.

“She’s done a lot of work with those men, the men who talk like in the play,” says O’Loughlin. “She’s done a lot of work on sex work and the psychology of pimping. I think she will have something really rich and valuable to offer us. It’s not based on opinions and ideas, but based on solid research.”

The whole point of Locker Room Talk, says O’Loughlin, is to effect change. It invites audiences to ask what such words say about equality, sex and gender just now, and how we might go about shaping the future.

“It’s a piece that wants to make things better,” she says. “The post-show discussion is the thing that will empower us to have a conversation about our complicity and our responsibility. What’s really stood out for us is to remind the audience that this is not a binary thing.

She adds: “If this is a war, we’re all losing. The biggest killer in the UK for men under 50 is suicide. I think this is all part of what it means to be a man, to be tough and aggressive. To not be vulnerable, to not have emotions. That damages women in your life, but it also damages you.”

McGonagall’s Chronicles, tonight [Mar 31], Dundee Rep, 7.30pm, £15, £12 concs. Tel 01382 223530. Tickets: bit.ly/McGDundee

Locker Room Talk, April 4 to April 7, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 7.30pm, £12, £10.50, £7 and £9 concs. Tel: 0131 228 1404.