ARTICLES: CHRIS HANNAN/NTS

April 2006

© MARK FISHER edited version published in Scotland on Sunday

New lease of life for rent strike heroine

A lot happens in 21 years. In 1985, Chris Hannan was the 27-year-old spearhead of a promising generation of Scottish playwrights. He'd written a couple of short plays for Edinburgh's Traverse and an agit-prop collaboration with John McGrath for 7:84 and was about to make a name for himself with a play called Elizabeth Gordon Quinn, a powerful historical drama infused with the miners' strike politics of the day.

Directed by Stephen Unwin at the Traverse, with Eileen Nicholas in the title role, it had an initially lukewarm reception which built to a roar of approval by the time it was revived on the Fringe. The Guardian said it confounded "all expectations" and created something both "startling and provocative".

Set in the Glasgow rent strike of 1915, it was about the eponymous Elizabeth Gordon Quinn, who refuses to accept the fact of her own poverty, clinging on to her independence and the piano she can't even play, rather than be swept along by a tide of social unrest. Anticipating Margaret Thatcher's 1987 claim that there was "no such thing as society", here was a character in denial about the living community around her.

There was something heroic in her blinkered self-belief and, for all her dislikeable qualities, audiences were irresistibly drawn to her. She was one of those rare characters who become bigger than the play they inhabit.

Fast forward to 2006 and everything's changed. Hannan's name as a playwright is firmly established, thanks to Shining Souls, his 1996 black comedy, a hit twice over in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and he's about to make a major splash on both sides of the Atlantic as a first-time novelist.

Meanwhile, the National Theatre of Scotland has been born, a body prepared to put its weight behind a play such as Elizabeth Gordon Quinn, not seen professionally since 1992, and to proclaim its worth on five of the biggest stages in the country. With the brilliant Cara Kelly in the title role, it'll play Glasgow, Perth, Aberdeen and Edinburgh after this week's opening in Dundee.

The company's revival gave Hannan the chance to look again at the play and he came up with two conclusions. One was he could no longer expect an audience to see parallels between the rent strike and the miners' strike as they had done in 1985. The other was he could see how to make the character of Elizabeth Gordon Quinn an even more forceful presence when set free on the big stage.

He set about rewriting it and, although the order of the scenes, the characters and the general arc of the story remain intact, he reckons he's changed anything up to 75%.

"I realised I was writing a personal family play and disguising it as a political play," he says. "So I've concentrated more on her as a character to give it more universal appeal. The character can work in Edinburgh, Dundee, Perth, but nobody's interested in the rent strike wherever they live."

Expecting to work on the original script, Siobhan Redmond backed out of the production just before rehearsals began to be replaced by Cara Kelly whose performances in Molly Sweeney and Blood Wedding have been recent highlights at the Glasgow Citizens'. If there's any bad blood between Redmond and the NTS, they're keeping tight-lipped about it. For his part, Hannan reckons the play is in a better position than ever to reach out to a broad popular audience.

"The NTS means being able to cast really good people in tiny parts," he says. "John Kielty, for example, is a musical genius and we've got him as one of the workers who carries in the piano. When he plays the piano, it makes it a bigger moment, because he can play it and Elizabeth Gordon Quinn can't.

"The fantastic thing the first time round was people's incredibly visceral response to the character - that's terrific and, knowing that's the case, I've tried to write the play the character deserves."

As his career as a playwright is consolidated at home, Hannan is about to reinvent himself in the international arena as a novelist. His debut as a fiction writer - as yet untitled - will be published next spring by HarperCollins in the United States and Canada, followed soon after by Chatto and Windus in the UK. It's also slated to appear in "most of the Commonwealth" and is being translated into Italian.

What's more impressive is that a novel bought first by the Americans begins in the Nevada of 1862, where a young woman, Dol McFadden, tries to escape her life as a prostitute and go straight.

"It's an exciting place to set a story," says the Glasgow-born writer. "It's got a mythical aspect but at the same time there's a completely realistic element to it. Instead of a western populated with John Wayne types who are skilled in a wilderness environment, I wanted to populate it with people like you and me who are completely clueless about that kind of thing. When urban folks come across Indians, it changes it completely.

"Selling it to the Americans first was terrifying - would they buy the voice? But that is exactly what the editor at HarperCollins bought: the voice is what she adored. That was a massive relief because it could have been the biggest folly of all time."

Elizabeth Gordon Quinn, Dundee Rep, April 25-29 and on tour until June 10

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