‘I THINK it’s the first play to be performed at the Hydro,” says Tony Roper about the forthcoming production of his hit 1987 drama The Steamie, which will be staged in Scotland’s biggest indoor arena. The 78-year-old writer and actor is not, he hastens to add, casting any aspersions on the three live versions of the TV comedy Still Game which have played the mammoth auditorium (in fact, he saw the first two of Greg Hemphill and Ford Kiernan’s live trilogy and liked them very much).

The Still Game live shows were, he says, extended versions of a popular television sitcom. Bringing The Steamie, his comic play about working-class, Glaswegian women of three generations in the 1950s, to the 13,000-seater arena is, he believes, a very different proposition.

Roper remembers going to see one of the Still Game live productions with his producer Neil Laidlaw. They talked about the possibility of staging The Steamie at the venue, but concluded that the piece was too small and too intimate for the Hydro.

However, after about a year or so, they had a change of heart. “We thought ‘this play has served us both so well, it deserves to get an upgrade, and to be dragged into the 21st century.’”

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The Steamie, surely, defines Roper (above) even more than his role as Jamesie Cotter opposite Gregor Fisher in legendary TV sitcom Rab C Nesbitt. The Hydro project was driven, Roper insists, by the desire to see his best-known, and most loved work on this biggest of stages.

“We haven’t done it for the money, Neil and I,” he says emphatically. In fact, he continues, he doubts that the box-office receipts will do much more than recoup the £1 million cost of the production.

Talking with Roper, it’s impossible to doubt his sincerity. In his late-70s and having, just six years ago, fought off prostate cancer, the writer could be excused for deciding to take life easy.

Staging The Steamie at the Hydro has clearly sparked his imagination. “To fill the Hydro, to not just be in the Hydro, but to take over the Hydro, with just four women, standing in a [washhouse] stall, no movement, no plot, nothing like that, it’s a big ask.

“What attracted me to doing it at the Hydro was doing it differently than I’d done it before.” For instance, he says, “[middle-aged character] Dolly sings about going to the dancing when she was younger, and we have dancers to recreate that”.

“That opens out her song. Before it was just a woman singing in a spotlight. Now, it opens it out and she relives her dream.”

ROPER won’t say a word beyond this teaser about Dolly’s song becoming a big stage musical number (he doesn’t want to be responsible for “spoilers”, he says). However, it seems pretty clear that Hydro audiences can expect to see this celebrated, wee play about Doreen, Dolly, Magrit and Mrs Culfeathers chatting while they work on New Year’s Eve given a considerable, arena theatre makeover.

In moments such as Dolly’s song, we will, says the playwright, see 21st-century theatre technology in action. “I’ll no know how they’ve done it”, Roper adds, “but I’ll know if it’s what I want.”

The woman playing the nostalgic Dolly in the new production is Gayle Telfer Stevens, who appears in The Steamie alongside her close friend and artistic collaborator Louise McCarthy (who takes on the role of Magrit). Telfer Stevens is well known to audiences of TV soap River City for her long-standing role as Caitlin McLean, while McCarthy’s TV credits include DC Andrea McGill in the award-winning sitcom Scot Squad. Together, they are known as raucous stage double act The Dolls.

Telfer Stevens considers the Hydro shows to be a heaven-sent opportunity. “I was seven when I first watched The Steamie,” she remembers. “It’s the reason I wanted to become an actor.

“Louise and I met through a love of the play as well. When we first worked together, doing a wee cabaret, we spoke about The Steamie and how we’d love to be in it.”

For her part, McCarthy remembers that she “got a knockback” when she auditioned for the role of young dreamer Doreen in a production of Roper’s play some years ago.

She’s delighted to have been cast as Magrit in the new production, not least because her character and Telfer Stevens’ character (two middle-aged women who take adjacent stalls in the washhouse) are, effectively, a double act.

I wonder if the two actors consider Dolly and Magrit to be, in some sense, 20th-century forerunners of Agnes and Sadie, aka The Dolls. “I suppose you could ask are The Dolls like Jack and Victor [from Still Game]? Or are they like Francie and Josie [the famous character double act performed by Jack Milroy and Rikki Fulton]?

“Any pairing of comic characters who are pals is going to have similarities with The Dolls.”

The obvious difference between Dolly and Magrit, and Agnes and Sadie, on the one hand, and Jack and Victor, and Francie and Josie, on the other, is that the former quartet is female. It is, Roper believes, that foregrounding of working-class women characters that, more than any other factor, explains the enduring success of The Steamie.

“I think the secret is that it was the first successful play in Scotland that was written about women,” the playwright says. “Women embraced it because the characters represented them.

“It was all very truthful. They were all based on women I knew as I grew up. So, the realism of what they were watching struck home with audiences.

“The characters are very easy to identify with. They make ye laugh, they make ye cry. They like singing.”

Telfer Stevens and McCarthy couldn’t agree more. “The Steamie is still the biggest cultural reference point for working-class women with accents like mine and Gayle’s,” says McCarthy.

Roper was, she adds, “ahead of his time” in writing a play in the 1980s in which the lives of working-class women were to the fore. “Are we any further ahead?” she asks, rhetorically. “The reason we’re still doing The Steamie is because there hasn’t been that next thing [in terms of representation of working-class women].”

“Absolutely!” Telfer Stevens agrees. “It was genius at the time. It was more than 30 years ago.”

“Thirty years ago,” adds McCarthy, “he’s writing a play about women, that’s got only one male character [steamie engineer Andy], who’s got about 15 lines.”

Not that Roper’s claiming any credit for himself as a champion of women in the theatre. “I’m not putting myself forward as a feminist by any means,” he insists.

“If people say I wanted to push the woman’s cause, that’s rubbish, and ye can take that fae me. I just wrote a play that I hoped would be successful.

“There was no political motivation in it for me at all. Wildcat theatre company did it, and, of course, they had a history of left-wing politics, and they brought in the songs by Dave Anderson. They added an overtly political side to it.”

IRONICALLY, if it had been up to many of Scotland’s theatre directors in the 1980s, The Steamie might never have seen the light of day. Roper, who trained as an actor in his late 20s, following work as a shipyard worker, a coal miner and a hod carrier on building sites, had his fair share of rejections for the script.

“It got turned down by just about everybody. I think that was because, in those days, people [in the theatre business] didn’t think women should be so predominant in a play.

“All the directors I offered it to said the same thing: ‘It’s a good attempt. You can tell it was written by an actor.’ That f***in’ annoyed me, I can tell ye that.

“I thought, ‘why can’t an actor write a play? Shakespeare was an actor.’” That said, he adds; “I’m not comparing myself to that man.”

The doubting directors were not the only people to get it wrong where the play was concerned. He may have written The Steamie in just 10 days, but it is still a carefully calibrated drama, rather than a mere collection of gags.

“A long time ago a university professor said [the jokes in the play] were old-time music hall pieces”, Roper remembers. “This man obviously hadn’t a f***in’ clue what he was talking about!”

“There are set pieces in the play, like the Galloway’s mince story and the imaginary phone call,” he acknowledges. However, he insists, they’re far from being mere Vaudeville sketches.

“In order for them to work”, he continues, “you have to have the whole play.”

Having the “whole play” means identifying with the characters. That’s no difficult task, according to Telfer Stevens. “It’s good, honest writing of real characters”, she says. “You identify with every single one of those characters, and you can pinpoint a person that you know.”

There’s no doubt, given the success of the numerous stagings of the play over the years (not to mention the 1988 STV film, starring such luminaries of the Scottish acting profession as Eileen McCallum, Dorothy Paul and Peter Mullan), that generations of people, and women in particular, find themselves able to relate to Roper’s characters. In that sense, it’s like a female version of its predecessor, John Byrne’s Slab Boys Trilogy.

Roper thinks that younger women, in their teens and 20s, see themselves in the character of Doreen. “They’re just starting off in life,” he says, “and they’re all ready to go. The new romance of being married, all that kind of stuff.

“Then you go to Magrit, where it all maybe falls apart. Dolly’s world-weary. She’s been through it all, and she realises there’s no point in greetin’aboot it.

“Whatever’s happened tae ye’s happened tae ye, and ye just have to get on with it.

“Then you get the older women who have to face up to being of an age that isn’t amenable to modern technology. Even in the 1950s, it wasn’t amenable.”

Roper’s clearly over the moon about the casting of this latest production. Mary McCusker (Mrs Culfeathers) and Fiona Wood (Doreen) have, the writer says, impressed in previous productions of the play. He’s delighted to be bringing in Telfer Stevens and McCarthy, who, he says admiringly, “know exactly what they’re doing”. Harry Ward (who completes the cast as Andy) is, he says, quite correctly, an excellent and “underrated” actor.

With the big arena extravaganza version of The Steamie opening on December 27, Christmas is coming a couple of days late for Roper this year. He is, he says, “not excited” but rather “desperate to get started, and see where it goes”.

The Steamie plays the SSE Hydro, Glasgow, December 27-31: www.thessehydro.com