Journey's Beginning: The Gateway Theatre Building and Company, 1884-1965

JOURNEY’S BEGINNING THE GATEWAYTHEATREBUILDING AND COMPANY,1884-1965

THEATRE&PERFORMANCEintellect

Edited by Ian Brown

Ian Brow

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The Gateway Theatre Company was from 1953 until1965 a major force in developing modern Scottishtheatre. Yet, until now, no scholarly text hasexplored the history of the Gateway Theatrebuilding – in turn veterinary college, roller skatingrink, cinema and theatre – while only memoirs offormer Gateway Company members exist as arecord of this highly influential company.

This book fills a gap in knowledge aboutEdinburgh’s historic Gateway Theatre, offering:

• new information on the nature of the Gateway • Theatre and Company,• re-evaluation of their significance in modern • theatre,• fresh understanding of key twentieth-century • figures.

This book is a must for those interested in theatrein general, Scottish cultural history and culturalaffairs. It will be particularly valued by theatrescholars and an essential text for Universitylibraries and Drama departments.

intellectPO Box 862 Bristol BS99 1DE United Kingdomwww.intellectbooks.com

9 781841 501062

ISBN 1-84150-106-9

PPrrooffeessssoorr IIaann BBrroowwnn isfounding editor of theInternational Journal ofScottish Theatre andGeneral Editor of theforthcoming EdinburghHistory of ScottishLiterature.

intellect

9 781841 501086

ISBN 1-84150-108-5

Journey’sBeginning:

The Gateway TheatreBuilding and Company,

1884–1965

Edited byIan Brown

First Published in the UK in 2004 byIntellect Books, P.O. Box 862, Bristol, BS99 1DE, UK

First Published in the USA in 2004 byIntellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 97213-3786, USA

Copyright ©2004 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, ortransmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Electronic ISBN 1-84150-899-3 / ISBN 1-84150-108-5

Cover Design: Gabriel SolomonsCopy Editor: Holly Spradling

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd.

The Editor would like to thank Queen Margaret University College,Edinburgh, for its financial support in the publication of this book.

Contents

1 Gateways from the past to the futureIan Brown 1

2 The Gateway building and its early manifestationsKsenija Horvat 15

3 Kirk and TheatreDonald Smith 29

4 Sadie Aitken: the ‘Caledonian Lilian Baylis’Kathleen Gilmour 37

5 The Gateway Theatre CompanyDonald Smith 53

6 The Founding of a Modern Tradition: Robert Kemp’sScots Translations of Molière at the GatewayBill Findlay 65

Notes on contributors 81

Façade of Gateway Theatre showing billboard for last repertory production, 1965

Location of Gateway Theatre in relation to centre of Edinburgh

Gateways from the past to the future

Ian Brown

The Gateway Theatre and the Company that occupied it from 1953 until 1965 areremarkably under-researched. While the Edinburgh Gateway Company compiled in1965 as an envoi to its twelve seasons a book of vivid memoirs, photographs andproduction records under the title, The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh GatewayCompany: 1953-1965,

1this book has been out of print for many years. No other

substantial research into either the company or theatre has been published, althoughfounding Company member, Michael Elder, has recently had a book of reminiscencespublished.

2It is not that the Gateway Company and Theatre are forgotten or their

influence denied. It seems to be rather that, in the rush of professional creative activityin, and new scholarship addressing, Scottish theatre in the last thirty years, competingdemands have scarcely left room to address in any detail the work of such a significantcompany. Further, the importance of the Gateway Theatre is often seen entirely interms of its role as accommodating the work of the Company between 1953 and 1965.As a result, the building's history, the important work developed at the Gatewaybetween its being so named in 1946 and the launch of the Company in 1953 or the roleof key figures in the development of the company and building have also been largelyneglected.

This book, then, seeks to begin to fill such lacunae. It provides a brief history ofboth the building and the Company until the date of the Company’s serendipitoustransition into the present Royal Lyceum Theatre Company. In so doing, it provides acontext for both by relating them to contemporary attitudes to theatre. In this, itspecifically addresses the relationship of the Church of Scotland — the building'sowner from 1946 until it was sold to Scottish Television in 1968 — to contemporarytheatre and, to some extent, the arts in general. It considers the importance of such keyfigures as Sadie Aitken (1905–85) and Robert Kemp (1908–1967), not only in the contextof the Gateway, but in the wider context of their work. In short, while it does not seekto replicate such general contextualising material as is available concerning the Scottishrepertory system, it sets the Gateway Theatre and Company in the context of a varietyof theatrical and dramatic developments, particularly in the period from 1946 until1965. In so doing, it shows the building, the company and their leading figures to havehad a wide-ranging influence beyond the repertory theatre system itself andparticularly in contributing to the development of the vision of theatre now current inScotland.

It is idle, of course, to pretend that the Gateway Theatre Company’s work during itstwelve years of existence was always admirable. Donald Smith talks of

1

a well-nigh disastrous season in 1960-61 [when] the Gateway managed to lose itshome audience and manifest the ethos of the, by now, stale 1950s by producing RobertKemp’s less-than-inspired Master John Knox and Bjornson’s [sic] Mary Stuart in Scotland atthe Edinburgh Festival.

3

He goes on in the passage immediately following:

The audience situation was stabilised in the next year but the floreat of the mid 1950s,when the Gateway was the focus of a school of Scottish dramatists, including RobertMcLellan, Alexander Reid and Robert Kemp was never recovered. In 1965, the GatewayCompany was absorbed into the larger enterprise of Edinburgh's new Civic TheatreCompany at the Royal Lyceum.

In other words, the Gateway Theatre Company should not be seen with a halo. It hadthe highs and lows that mark the history of any theatre company of any duration. It is,nonetheless, remembered with much affection and nostalgia. This may in part arisefrom the fact, in Randall Stevenson’s words, that

What openings did exist for Scottish work at the time [the 1950s and much of the1960s, drab times for Scottish theatre

4] were to be found at the Citizens', which staged

some Scottish material, and at the Gateway Theatre in Edinburgh.5

The Gateway has, then, with its sister theatre in Glasgow, a key role in thedevelopment of the modern Scottish theatre. As Donald Smith observes, reviewing theprogrammes of the early 1950s, ‘Perth, Pitlochry, the Byre, in its professional seasons,and Dundee were more inclined to the English repertory pattern’.

6In contradistinction,

he then notes that ‘the mix does vary significantly in emphasis at the Citizens', perhapsthe theatre most committed to Scottish work at this period, followed by the Gateway’.The emphasis on Scottish work may have been made more possible by the fact thatboth Citizens' and Gateway produced in cities where the existence of other theatresallowed them to focus more on new writing. The producing theatres in other locationswere the sole suppliers of all forms of professional theatre for their communities and soare likely, as is the case in such theatres even today,

7to have felt the need to provide

more general repertoires.The repertoires of the Citizens' and the Gateway were in many ways similar during

the period 1953–1965. Michael Coveney typifies that of the Citizens' in this period as ‘amixed repertoire of new Scottish plays and standard classics during the 1950s’, whilethe 1950s and 1960s were ‘two decades of solid rather than spectacular programming’.

8

Coveney's assertions offer an example of a sometime prevailing view of the work ofthe Citizens' and, by extension, the Gateway during this period as being somehow ofsteady worthiness rather than special interest. While Coveney's sense of the balance ofthe programmes seems fair, his judgement of its quality may be affected by hispurpose, which he himself makes quite clear, of praising the work of the Citizens'under the directorship of Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse and Robert David MacDonald.

– Journey’s Beginning –

2

In doing so, he may be seen to slight the work of the fifties and sixties by promoting amyth of pre-Havergal gloom.

Tony Paterson, for some years in the sixties Literary Manager at the Citizens', hasexplored this myth and the related one that there was little of interest to be seen at theCitizens' between Bridie's departure in 1951 and Havergal's arrival in 1969, largelyrefuting them both.

9In fact, during this period, there was much of interest to be seen,

although in the fifties and sixties there were indeed slack periods of programming, asin any decade. In the years before Havergal's arrival, in particular, there was someoutstanding work to be seen at the Citizens'. In 1964, for example, John Arden'sArmstrong's Last Goodnight was premièred during the period of Iain Cuthberston'sartistic directorship, which also included an innovative 1963 production of Pirandello'sHenry IV. Later, Michael Blakemore and Michael Meacham produced such landmarkproductions as the 1967 première of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and the 1968 Arturo Uiwith Leonard Rossiter in the title role. The latter was acclaimed and transferred first tothe Edinburgh International Festival and subsequently via Nottingham Playhouse tothe West End. There is a danger that other, later, peaks overcast such brightachievements. In the case of the Gateway, in the fifties, as already noted, a school ofScottish plays was developed, including work by Kemp and McLellan, some of whichremains central to the repertoire in Scotland. Later, beginning in 1958 when Look Back inAnger was presented soon after its London première, challenging new European andAmerican work was presented in the context of a continuing programme ofcontemporary Scottish works. The work of the Citizens' and the Gateway in the fiftiesand sixties, although of mixed quality at times, was of significant and lasting value andthis book addresses some of the factors which made the innovative work of theGateway Theatre and its Company so valuable.

Before the Company, of course, there was the building. The Gateway building hasexisted under a variety of names and for a variety of quite distinct functions for wellover a century. Ksenija Horvat in her chapter makes use of a carefully compiledchronology researched by John and Lesley Stone to provide the first comprehensivehistory of the building itself. She addresses the history of a building that has in moderntimes more often been identified by its occupants, whether the Gateway Company,Scottish Television or, now, Queen Margaret University College School of Drama andCreative Industries, than seen for itself. The origins of the building as a veterinarycollege were known when Queen Margaret University College acquired it and, in itsrefurbishment, care was taken by John Stone and the present author to ensure that thehistory of the building was celebrated and not obscured. Where small aspects of thebuilding had survived from earlier manifestations, best efforts were made to maintainthose features. From the veterinary college days, for example, remains, not the stuffedhorse that was said to have had pride of place in the foyer, but the tongue and grooveboarding which now protects the back wall of the present refreshment bar. In suchsmall ways, the history of the building continues to live.

Dr Horvat makes very clear the ways in which the development of the building,after a period serving as the base for a livery stable and undertaker, reflects thedevelopment of cinema and theatre in the first half of the twentieth century. As a

– Gateways from the past to the future –

3

cinema, it for a time offered roller-skating. As a variety hall, it at times offered bills thatincluded films. In the twenties and thirties, the theatre swithered between cinema,variety and serious drama. Dr Horvat reminds us that the Festival Theatre is not thefirst in Edinburgh of that name. When the current Festival Theatre was the 'EmpireTheatre', the current Gateway Theatre was for a period known as the 'Festival Theatre'.

There is an oral tradition concerning the reason A. G. Anderson bought the buildingduring the Second World War. This is that the purchase was to ensure untrammelledrights of access at the rear of the theatre to the building behind, which he owned andwhich now forms part of the Queen Margaret Drama campus. Having bought thebuilding, according to this tradition, he did not know what to do with it and finallydonated it to the Church of Scotland to get it off his hands. Whatever the truth of this,the taking over of the building by the Church of Scotland marked for this chameleonbuilding a period of security in which to operate as a theatre, and one with, in effect, acommunity arts and multimedia outreach centre attached. Its location, in what was forall of the twentieth century a working-class and immigrant area of Edinburgh, marks itas a building that has always been at the service of the marginalised and local, as wellas having, more recently, a national and international role.

The links with the Church of Scotland form the theme of Donald Smith's chapter,Kirk and Theatre, whose title echoes that of the important Church of Scotland HomeBoard Report of 1961 to the General Assembly. Dr Smith reminds us that it is too easyto be surprised by the Kirk's, on the whole, enlightened role as landlord of theGateway from 1946 until 1968. The medieval Scottish Church supported as wide arange of religious drama in Scotland as anywhere else in Europe. James II gave toEdinburgh its playfield at Greenside in 1456, more or less on the site of the presentPlayhouse Theatre and only a few hundred yards from the position of the Gateway.Indeed, the third, 1554, performance of Lindsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis tookplace on that site, a piquant thought given the role of Robert Kemp and Sadie Aitken ofthe Gateway in the revival of a version of that masterpiece in 1948. Yet, while Dr Smithreminds us that John Knox himself enjoyed the theatre, he also reminds us of the veryreal antagonism of the Kirk to the theatre during the century after 1603 when James VItook his love of, and support for, theatre south of the Border. James left the field clearfor post-Knox zealots to seek to suppress theatre. Yet, as Adrienne Scullion has clearlyshown,

10this suppression was already being moderated by the early years of the

eighteenth century.The ambivalent relations between the Kirk, its ministers and the theatre in the first

part of the 1700s may be seen to achieve a climacteric in the production of John Home'sDouglas in 1756. Not only was Home himself a minister, but his play and its productionappears to have attracted the support of key Enlightenment figures. Adrienne Scullionnotes:

One early rehearsal featured luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment: the historianWilliam Robertson read Randolph; David Hume played Glenalvon; Dr Carlyle, OldNorval; John Home, the Douglas; Adam Ferguson, Professor of Moral Philosophy at theUniversity of Edinburgh and himself a minister, Lady Randolph; and Hugh Blair, minister


4

of the High Kirk, Greyfriars, and later Professor of Rhetoric at the University, Anna; andthis before an invited audience, which included the lords Elibank, Kames, Milton andMonboddo.

11

The cast here, let alone the audience, is breathtaking and it is hard to see the politics ofthe presentation of Douglas as other than a considered stance by leading thinkers andsocial leaders against repression of the theatre by the Kirk. What is more, this stancewas led or strongly supported by a number of the Kirk's own ministers, includingsome of its most senior. Given this, Douglas’ production is surely linked to conflictwithin the Kirk where, as described by Arthur Herman, ‘The battle raged back andforth in the General Assembly and in a series of public controversies’ between the ‘oldconservatives, the so-called Evangelicals’ and the ‘Moderate Party’. The latter ‘boastedchampions such as [William] Robertson . . . and John Home’, author of Douglas. AsHerman points out, ‘In 1756, the Moderates managed to prevent an official censure ofDavid Hume by the General Assembly’.

12The production of Douglas later in the same

year with the involvement not only of Home, but of Robertson, Blair and Hume is atleast suggestive of a link between the progressive politics of the Kirk and those of thetheatre. While, as Dr Scullion vividly recounts, the Kirk reacted angrily through itscourts to the production, the effect was of creating sympathy for the theatre and thetheatre-supporting ministers. Meantime, Douglas was met with popular and criticalacclaim. The play is, of course, famous as that at whose first night an audiencemember, perhaps carried away more by enthusiasm than insight, is supposed to havecried at the end, 'Whaur's yer Wullie Shakespeare noo!’. More verifiably andsignificantly, Douglas came to mark a freeing of the theatre in Scotland from theoppressive influence of the Kirk.

13While it remained in its own right a popular staple

of the theatre north and south of the Border for a century after its first production, itwas also a cultural and theatrical watershed.

Donald Smith's chapter, then, provides a detailed study of the ways in which theKirk, which in an earlier manifestation had set its face against theatre, steered a courseas landlord through the politics and concerns of post-war British Theatre before beingcaught by a late sucker punch. This was the Lysistrata scandal referred to at a numberof points in this book. As all who contribute here observe, it was an unnecessary andfoolish scandal. Yet, as Dr Smith suggests, it led, through the Kirk and Theatre report, toa sensible and positive — even Enlightenment — stance being taken by the modernChurch of Scotland towards the arts, one which continues with the work of theNetherbow Arts Centre, of which Dr Smith is himself Director.

The importance of individuals in facilitating the changes wrought in the Kirk'sattitudes are emphasised by Donald Smith in his references to the work of GeorgeCandlish and Sadie Aitken and Kathleen Gilmour provides us with a privileged viewof the work and character of the latter in her chapter. Ms Gilmour draws on interviewmaterial, much of which was collected by her at the latest opportunity: sadly, a numberof her informants, who were, of course, of advanced years when she spoke with them,are now deceased. Ms Gilmour makes use of her material to present a vivid sense ofthe personality of Sadie Aitken, herself a legendary figure in theatre, but in doing so


5

takes care to provide a clear sense of the social, cultural, institutional and theatricalcontexts in which Sadie Aitken worked.

Earlier work of Ms Gilmour's has reminded us of the importance to Sadie – the firstname familiarity marks her prominence still in the collective memory of theatre nearlytwenty years after her death – of her drama work in the thirties in Edinburgh'sPleasance, then a slum area.

14Born in 1905, Sadie's commitment to theatre was always

one that recognised, even in her early twenties, its social and political power. As MsGilmour shows, Sadie's long-term commitment was very clearly to the Gateway –once, sensibly, she had checked her employment conditions would be secure! Her rolein the development of theatre in Scotland, however, went further, involving continuingwork for and with the Scottish Community Drama Association and what was to be theKirk Drama Federation, while her generous, and often anonymous, support to youngertalents is highlighted in Ms Gilmour's chapter. The analogy drawn between SadieAitken and Lilian Baylis does not imply that there are one-for-one parallels to bedrawn in all aspects of their respective careers. Nonetheless, the commitment to analmost religious belief in the power of theatre, the capacity to drive and enthuse others,the enterprise of their ambitions and their achievements mark out both as exceptionalwomen of the theatre. As Michael Coveney, talking of the location of Bridie's Citizens'south of the Clyde, draws attention to the parallel location of Baylis's Old Vic 'on thewrong side of the Thames',

15so Sadie's Gateway was, some way down Leith Walk, then

on the wrong side of Edinburgh.Sadie's love of theatre lasted throughout her life. Into her seventies, she continued,

as Ms Gilmour points out, to work in, with and for drama. Inter alia, she managedvenues such as St Cecilia's Hall for the Edinburgh International Festival and was seenby the present author as the last trains left Glasgow Queen Street station, working asan extra for an advertising film. Her sardonic view of John Rankin's precipitation of theLysistrata crisis is reported by Ms Gilmour. An afternote to that event offers aninteresting insight into the oddness of Rankin's attitudes and the catholicity of Aitken's.Rankin, a senior banker, became a Board member of the Royal Lyceum in the earlyseventies, where, according to its Director, Clive Perry, he expressed opposition to theproduction of the present author's Carnegie, critical as it was of the philanthropist'sbusiness and industrial methods. This paradoxical tendency to censorship wascompounded when, as a member of the Festival Society, Rankin suggested that adramatic presentation of Rabelais's work be produced. When the script by the presentauthor was presented, Rankin sought to have the text cut, in this case on the groundsthat it was 'indecent'. Certainly, Rankin had suggested that the text used for theevening show should be taken from Sir Thomas Urquhart's version in the Scots of 1653and the text actually used was a modern version that was less obscure to a generalaudience. Since Rankin can hardly have failed to notice in his reading of Rabelais thatthe content was at times indecent, one can only assume that, by then, he preferred hisindecency obscure. The highly amused venue manager for that 'indecent' 1973 festivalshow was Sadie Aitken.

The second of Donald Smith's chapters deals with the background and nature of theGateway Theatre Company. Dr Smith sets the foundation of the company in the


6

context of the development of Scottish theatre in the first half of the twentieth century.There, he reminds us of the importance of the Wilson Barrett Company, whichpresented repertory theatre mainly at the Royal Lyceum from 1941 until 1955. After thedemise of the pre-First World War Glasgow Rep, in the early days of repertory theatrein Scotland, notwithstanding the failed attempts of the thirties at the Gateway buildingreferred to by Dr Horvat, the common practice was for a company in effect to hire atheatre for a repertory season without itself being building-based in the sense latercompanies sought to be. David Hutchison notes that '[t]hese companies cooperatedclosely with the theatrical management of Howard and Wyndham, the Edinburgh-based [touring theatre] organisation'.

16As antecedents to the Wilson Barrett Company,

Mr Hutchison identifies of the work of the Masque Theatre (1928–33) and the BrandonThomas Players (1930–38).

It was only, then, in 1935 that the first of the modern Scottish building-basedrepertory companies was founded. This was at Perth, to be followed in 1939 byDundee Repertory Theatre. In Glasgow, the Rutherglen Repertory Theatre ran from1939 to 1944, when its founder, Molly Urquhart, joined the Citizens' Theatre, itselffounded in1943 by James Bridie. Also in Glasgow, the small-scale Park Theatre ranfrom 1940 to 1949, after which, in 1951, its founder, John Stewart, launched thePitlochry Festival Theatre. Meantime, during the War, the Byre Theatre in St Andrews,which had begun in 1933 as a purely amateur project, adopted a professional companyfor a large part of the year. From this, it is clear that the development of building-basedrepertory theatre in Scotland was well established in a number of centres before theGateway Theatre Company was founded in 1953. Indeed, this date seems late in thecontext of the activity already seen in Perth, Dundee, Glasgow, St Andrews andPitlochry. This is especially so, since, as Bill Findlay cites in his chapter, Robert Kempwrote 'In the years immediately following the Second World War several people wereintent upon founding a Scottish theatre in Edinburgh'.

17Perhaps the delay may be

explained, at least in part, by the existence of the Wilson Barrett Company with anEdinburgh base at the Lyceum, though that did not serve the desire, to which Kemprefers, for a 'Scottish theatre in Edinburgh'.

In any case, as Dr Smith makes clear, the Gateway Company, once established, veryquickly made a strong impact, drawing together a company of actors of high quality,several to become household names, and developing a strong school of playwritingaround the work of Robert Kemp, the Company's first Chairman. This Company,nevertheless, faced a number of crises towards the beginning of the sixties, in commonwith other theatres. These were in part related to the development of the challenge oftelevision, in part due to specific local crises of programming and in part due to thechanges in public taste arising from the new, more iconoclastic, playwriting emergingin the late fifties. The Gateway survived this crisis under the management of SadieAitken and the artistic direction (1963-65) of the charismatic Victor Carin.

18Meantime,

the theatre scene in Edinburgh was undergoing rapid change. The Traverse had beenfounded in 1963 and, as Donald Smith notes elsewhere, as Howard and Wyndhamgradually sold its theatre stock through the UK as a result of its inability to meet thecompetition of television, the Edinburgh Corporation


7

reluctantly agreed, in 1963, to buy the Lyceum Theatre to safeguard an emergingscheme for the development of an ambitious Civic Centre, which was to include an OperaHouse, on Castle Terrace. Characteristically it took a property deal to push theCorporation towards supporting a repertory theatre equivalent in scale and artisticambition to the Citizens' Company, which Glasgow had enjoyed since 1943. TheEdinburgh Civic Theatre commenced operations at the Royal Lyceum in 1965.

19

In effect, this Civic Theatre Company, now called the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company,is the Gateway Theatre Company in mutation. Its first Artistic Director was TomFleming, Robert Kemp was a leading Board member of the new company and manyGateway Company members moved seamlessly to employment in the Lyceum whenthe Gateway Company wound itself up after the 1965 Edinburgh Festival. This it didrather than see the funding, audience and creative energy of Edinburgh theatre dividedbetween two comparable companies. Moultrie Kelsall, then Chairman, offers evidenceof this act of creative altruism:

20

We had known that the foundation of a Civic Theatre was being planned, but none ofus had thought that it would materialise for at least another year. Then one evening TomFleming came to see me with the news that he had been invited by the Civic TheatreTrust to direct it, and that October 1965 was suggested as the opening month. I wasdelighted that he should have been chosen, and urged him to accept, but it necessitatedan immediate decision by our Council as to the future of the Edinburgh GatewayCompany. We had an assurance that if we decided to continue, the Arts Council wouldmaintain its grant to us, though that would reduce the grant available for the CivicTheatre. We hardly felt that we could expect the Town Council to support two repertorycompanies, nor did we feel confident that the potential audience was yet large enough todo so. It seemed to us that both companies would suffer to some extent, howeversedulously they tried to avoid clashes by offering complementary rather than competingprogrammes. Our financial position, though sound, was not such that we could take inour stride the probable loss of the Town Council grant and a drop in box-office receipts:costs would continue to rise, and a further Equity wage increase was forecast. To launchout on another season, as a bold gesture of confidence that more theatre would createmore audience, had an undeniable attraction, but if we failed, the Civic Theatre, with itsmuch greater resources, would be seen to have killed us, which would surely be an unbe-coming end for the old venture and an unfortunate start for the new. We had maintainedprofessional repertory in Edinburgh through thick and thin for twelve seasons, in thehope that stronger hands than ours would ultimately take over the responsibility, andthat time had now come. Having completed our mission we should stand aside. It shouldbe seen that the new enterprise had sprung from our loins, not our ashes – that here wasgrowth, not murder. We had every confidence that under Tom Fleming's direction, andwith two other members of our Council (Kemp and Miller) on the trust, the Civic Theatrewould pursue a policy similar in essence to ours: we would not be open to the chargethat, by closing, we had deprived our audience of the sort of theatrical nourishmentthey'd come to expect from us. Such were the considerations which decided us, after


8

much heartsearching and with many pangs of nostalgia, to accept the propheticimplications of "Journey's End".

21

Journey's End was, of course, the last repertory season production of the GatewayTheatre Company, although it was followed by a final Festival production, Ada F Kay'sThe Man from Thermopylae.

A name that recurs throughout the chapters of this book is that of Robert Kemp. Itis clear that his was a central role in the development of the Gateway TheatreCompany and, before that, an important contribution to the repertoire of the GatewayTheatre under Sadie Aitken and George Candlish. His general role in the developmentof Gateway Theatre and Company was manifold, but its central core was his own workas a playwright. It would be fair to say that, in general, Kemp's own plays are ratherneglected now. Yet, as Bill Findlay demonstrates with great clarity and insight in hisconcluding chapter to this book, Kemp's greatest contribution to theatre as aplaywright was arguably in his translation of the plays of Molière.

Dr Findlay argues, surely incontrovertibly, that Kemp in this specific dimension ofhis work founded a modern tradition of translation into Scots which still forms acentral element in modern Scottish theatre. To argue this is not to slight Kemp's ownwork, which was in its time often highly regarded, while a number of his plays are stillheld in respect. Yet, somehow, in his translation of Molière Kemp appears to havestruck a chord at the time and set a pattern for the future. Certainly, Kemp's techniquewas to go beyond a simple translation. It is clear that Kemp himself not onlytranslated, but also adapted. In this, he adopted a process on which Ceri Sherlock andthe present author have commented, with regard to the presentation in Scots of Greekmyths, rather than the myths underpinning Molière:

The process usually called 'adaptation' is actually one of transposition of a mythicstructure from one cultural frame to another in a way analogous to the translation ofspoken text from one language to another.

22

When Kemp translates into Scots, indeed, he transposes not only a significant mythicstructure from France to Scotland, but also names, geography and social ambience. InLet Wives Tak Tent, for example, Arnolphe becomes Mr Oliphant and the play is clearlyset in the urban and social milieu of the Old Town of Edinburgh.

A key point in Kemp's success, then, may be the fact that in his translations ofMolière he achieves an acculturation which allows Scottish audiences to receive theplay as adopted within their own traditions. Such translation and adoption, in part atleast to enhance the repertoire and prestige of the target language and culture, waswell known in the Renaissance. Then, every European language of substance becamethe means of translating classic texts from Latin and Greek: Gavin Douglas's Aeneid isonly one such example. Kemp has shown that such a process may have a lasting and,indeed, popular effect: his Let Wives Tak Tent was produced as recently as 2001 atPitlochry and The Laird o Grippy was produced by Dundee Rep in 2003. This aspect ofKemp's writing may be seen to be in tune with the views of Alexander Reid whose


9

work was presented at the Gateway while Kemp was Chairman. Reid famouslyobserved in 1958 in his Preface to his Two Scots Plays:

The return to Scots is a return to meaning and sincerity. We can only grow from ourown roots and our roots are not English . . . If we are to fulfil our hope that Scotland maysome day make a contribution to World Drama . . . we can only do so by cherishing, notrepressing our national peculiarities (including our language).

23

Kemp's translations represent the bringing of masterpieces of 'World Drama' into therepertoire of plays in Scots. In this, he not only cherishes 'our language', but, followingthe Renaissance tradition, asserts its dignity, power and range by using it as a targetlanguage for the translation of classics, here of the dramatic stage. Just as DonaldCampbell was later to say of his own work, for Kemp a central concern in his Molièretranslations was with 'exploration of the complexities and potential of the idioms ofScottish speech'.

24A major part of Kemp's contribution in the forties and fifties was to

make the use of that speech in serious translation an acceptable procedure.Kemp's specific form of adaptation has led to the accusation by some commentators

that he creates, rather than a faithful translation of the original, a popular versionisingof Molière for the Scottish stage, 'the MacMolière industry'. Nonetheless, it is true thatthe vitality of what he has done is hard to gainsay, that his fidelity to Molière'stheatricality and themes is very clear and that a significant number of Scottishplaywrights have followed him. Victor Carin, Hector Macmillan and Liz Lochheadhave been Kemp's successors in the translation of Molière, while Carin also translatedGoldoni and von Kleist and Lochhead has made an award-winning translation ofMedea, soon to be followed by her current work-in-progress on the Theban Plays.Meantime, Tom McGrath and Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman have translatedCanadian work into Scots, the latter two famously in their long series of Tremblaytranslations. Findlay has further translated or adapted into Scots texts by Goldoni,Gerhart Hauptmann, Pavel Kohout, Teresa Lubkiwicz, Jeanne-Marie Delisle andRaymond Cousse. Other examples include Edwin Morgan with his outstandingtranslations of Cyrano de Bergerac and Phaedra, Bill Dunlop with Klytemnestra's Bairnsand the present author with Antigone. In short, the tradition Findlay sees as beingestablished by Kemp is by now well grounded and vitally alive.

The same might be said for the tradition of Scottish theatre that Kemp saw hisGateway Company as being founded to develop. That tradition has been maintainednot only throughout and beyond Scotland, but is also now again to be found at theGateway Theatre itself. The purchase of the Gateway by Queen Margaret UniversityCollege on 14 October 1994 and its subsequent redevelopment was, of course, madeespecially attractive to the University College by the history of the Gateway Companyin the Gateway Theatre. This book seeks to address the history of that building andcompany, setting both in a broad context. It is published in 2004, marking the fiftiethanniversary of the Gateway Theatre Company’s first season in 1953–54. Hence, in aconscious reference to that company's last repertory production in 1965, Journey's End,the title of this book is Journey's Beginning. By this, it signifies that its topic is the


10

beginning of the journey of the Gateway Theatre building and of its Company's long-term influence. It also signifies that that journey continues.


11

Notes1 [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh Gateway Company: 1953-1965(Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965).2 Michael Elder, What Do You Do During the Day?: A Reminiscence Mainly About theEdinburgh Gateway Company (Edinburgh: Eldon Productions, 2003).3 Donald Smith, ‘1950 to 1995’ in Bill Findlay (ed), A History of Scottish Theatre(Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998) p. 264.4 Randall Stevenson, ‘Snakes and Ladders, Snakes and Owls: Charting ScottishTheatre’, in Randall Stevenson and Gavin Wallace (ed.), Scottish Theatre since theSeventies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996) p. 8.5 Randall Stevenson, ‘Snakes and Ladders, Snakes and Owls: Charting ScottishTheatre’, in Randall Stevenson and Gavin Wallace (ed.), Scottish Theatre since theSeventies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996) p. 19, fn. 9.6 Donald Smith, ‘1950 to 1995’ in Bill Findlay (ed), A History of Scottish Theatre(Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998) p. 255.7 The author makes this assertion in the light of his experience of theatre programmingpolicy in England during his service as Drama Director of the Arts Council of GreatBritain (1986-94) and, in the Scottish context, his term as a Board member of PerthTheatre (1998-2001).8 Michael Coveney, The Citz: 21 years of the Glasgow Citizen Theatre (London: Nick HernBooks, 1990) p. 3.9 Tony Paterson, Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre 1957-69: The Middle Years (Unpublished PhDthesis, University of Strathclyde, 1990).10 Adrienne Scullion, ‘The Eighteenth Century’ in Bill Findlay (ed), A History of ScottishTheatre (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998) pp. 80-136.11 Adrienne Scullion, ‘The Eighteenth Century’ in Bill Findlay (ed), A History of ScottishTheatre (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998) pp. 98-99.12 Arthur Herman, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World(London: Fourth Estate, 2001) pp. 186-187.13 Bill Findlay, during the preparation of this text, has remarked that a number of theScottish philosophes wrote about drama and presumably had a philosophical view ofthe place of drama with regard to the human condition. Walter Scott later, of course,was to support the work of the Edinburgh Theatre Royal and to see much of his workpresented in adaptation first on that stage. Clearly, he also felt that the stage was animportant vehicle for the communication of his work. The views of ScottishEnlightenment figures on drama and the stage appear to be an under-researched area.14 Kathleen Gilmour, ‘Sarah (Sadie) Ross Aitken, M.B.E.: A Study of a Career inTheatre’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre, Vol. 1, No. 2 (December 2000)http://arts.qmuc.ac.uk/ijost/Volume1_no2_gilmour_g.htm, pp. 3-5.15 Michael Coveney, The Citz: 21 years of the Glasgow Citizen Theatre (London: Nick HernBooks, 1990) p. 32.16 David Hutchison, ‘1900 to 1950’ in Bill Findlay (ed), A History of Scottish Theatre(Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998) p. 219.


12

17 Robert Kemp, ‘The First Seven Years’, in [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of theEdinburgh Gateway Company 1953-65 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 7.18 For further information on Carin’s contribution to the Gateway as actor, director andtranslator see Bill Findlay, ‘Motivation, and Mode in Victor Carin’s Stage Translationsinto Scots’ in Margaret Rose and Emanuela Rossini (ed), Italian Scottish Identities andConnections (Edinburgh: Italian Cultural Institute, 2001) pp. 121-42.19 Donald Smith, ‘1950 to 1995’ in Bill Findlay (ed), A History of Scottish Theatre(Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998) pp. 264-5.20 For a fuller version of this see Ian Brown, ‘The New Writing Policies of Clive Perryand Stephen MacDonald at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, 1966-79’, International Journal ofScottish Theatre, Vol. 2, No. 2 (December 2001),http://arts.qmuc.ac.uk/ijost/Volume2_no2_brown_i.htm, p. 2.21 Moultrie R Kelsall, ‘The Last Five’ in [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the EdinburghGateway Company 1953-65 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) pp. 40-41.22 Ian Brown, John Ramage and Ceri Sherlock, ‘Scots and Welsh: Theatrical Translationand Theatrical Languages’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre, Vol. 1, No. 2(December 2000), http://arts.qmuc.ac.uk/ijost/Volume1_no2_brown_i.htm. p. 2.23 Alexander Reid, ‘Foreword’, Two Scots Plays (London: Collins, 1958) pp. xii-xiii.24 Donald Campbell, ‘A Focus of Discontent’, New Edinburgh Review (Spring, 1979), p. 4.


13

The Gateway building and its early

manifestations

Ksenija Horvat

Before being re-opened by Queen Margaret University College in 1999, 41 Elm Row,Edinburgh, was surely most identified in theatrical terms as the home of the GatewayTheatre Company from 1953 to 1965. The building, however, was used as a theatrevenue long before then, having housed a number of short-lived amateur and semi-professional theatre and professional variety companies, particularly in the thirties. Yeteven before that, the history of the Gateway building had been colourful and unusual.An anonymous article in The Scotsman of 18 May 1948, ‘The Drama Repertory inScotland – Gateway Theatre’, describes the building as follows:

It was an early home of cinema, a skating rink, a variety theatre, and the scene ofmore than one short-lived attempt to establish a repertory company. The O’Mara OperaCompany has appeared here and De Valera has delivered an address within its walls. Justbefore it came into the hands of the Church it had reverted to films.

1

As we shall see, this understates the exotic history of this famous building, which haschanged hands and functions many times since it was built in the 1880s. Most of thedata about the pre-Gateway period consists of fragmented pieces of information fromvarious newspapers (mostly the Edinburgh Evening News, the Edinburgh EveningDispatch and The Scotsman), personal correspondence and some manuscripts and sothere are often lacunae. While a definitive account of 41 Elm Row’s history is thereforedifficult to provide, this chapter nonetheless seeks to offer an overview of thedevelopment of the uses of the building until its opening as the Gateway in 1946.

Before the development of the buildings that surround the Gateway, its site waspartly a wood yard and partly a dying green. Indeed, during the modernrefurbishment of the Gateway Theatre, the well that served the dying green wasunearthed, requiring an adjustment of the footings of one of the walls of the presentdrama school building.

2The Gateway building itself appears to have found its present

form, that is, of a large construction containing an open hall with attendant offices,built behind the rear building line of a tenement block facing Leith Walk, and includingthe tenement’s ground floor, in the period 1883–84. In Lesley and John Stone’schronological study, Gateway Theatre: History Research 1883-2000,

3it is noted that,

according to the 1883 Plan of Edinburgh and Leith with Suburbs from Ordnance and ActualSurveys, compiled for the Post Office Directory by John Bartholomew FRGS, the ‘site of

15

The Gateway was a collection of small, unnamed buildings’.4

Indeed, the Stones notethat, according to the Edinburgh and Leith Post Office Directory 1883/1884, the site wasactually between 9 and 10 Leith Walk,

5while A.D. Mackie observes that in the

Edinburgh and Leith Post Office Directory 1887-88, Elm Row ‘stops at number 23’.6

TheStones identify the first mention of the present building as having nothing to do withtheatre, but as a ‘Veterinary College’, so identified in 1884 in the Edinburgh OrdnanceSurvey Map of Edinburgh, Leith and Portobello. According to A. D. Mackie, the address of41 Elm Row was not included in the Edinburgh and Leith Post Office Directory until 1889.

7

This is odd, given the clear evidence of the Ordnance Survey, although it may be thatthe Directory took time to catch up with new building. Meantime, an anonymousauthor in The Scotsman of 18 May 1948, talking of the Gateway building, says:

if we look at the façade of this block, we might think that it was erected as a theatreand not as a home for the New Veterinary College which occupied it from 1873 to 1904.

8

The evidence of both Mackie and the Stones is that this claim that the Gatewaybuilding was ‘home for the New Veterinary College’ from 1873 is the result of amisunderstanding. The New Veterinary College was founded according to Mackie as abreak away in 1873 from the Dick Veterinary College, now part of EdinburghUniversity, and was first located in Gayfield House round the corner from Elm Row.

9

Mackie dates the move to Elm Row to 1888, talking of the then ‘newly built premises at41 Elm Row’.

10The Stones’ reference to Ordnance Survey evidence, however, seems to

point to 1883–4 as the more likely building date.The lacunae in the historical data continue into the first decade of the twentieth

century. Mackie notes that the New Veterinary College ‘finally closed’ in 1904.11

TheStones, accordingly, note that the firm of Adam Cramond (now Adam Cramond & SonLtd) occupied the premises in 41 Elm Row between 1905 and 1906, as ‘car hirers, busoperators and funeral directors’. This firm had been established in 1891 and operatedin Gayfield Square before moving to Elm Row. Though today Adam Cramond & SonLtd, ‘Independent Funeral Directors’ do ‘not hold information on the company’

12going

back to this early period of its existence, one can be fairly certain of the accuracy of thisinformation since it is included in the 1905–06 Edinburgh and Leith Post Office Directory.According to the Stones, ‘Mr Cramond is listed […] as being a jobmaster, coach and cabprovider’,

13with addresses at The New Veterinary College and Easter Road. This entry

in the Edinburgh and Leith Post Office Directory continues in 1906–07, with additionalentries under ‘Horse Dealers and Postmasters’, ‘Jobhorse hirers’ and ‘Livery StableKeepers’.

Meantime, on Monday 16 November 1908,14

Ralph Pringle, ‘the old trouper fromHuddersfield’,

15opened his ‘Pringle’s Picture Palace’ in the former Alhambra Theatre

in Grove Street, Haymarket. After Adam Cramond left, probably in 1909,16

Pringleopened his Elm Row premises, which also doubled as a local ‘Skating Rink’. A. D.Mackie recalled that:

16


When Sadie Aitken aroused my interest in the Gateway in the 1940s and 1950s, therewas still a glass panel, sandblasted with the words ‘Roller Skating’ over the entrance.Pringle’s Palace was a skating rink, like its rival cinema in Annandale Street, FredLumley’s Olympia.

17

Another witness, Miss Dorothy L. Forrester, notes, in a letter to John Stone in 2000,that, when she frequented the theatre in Sadie Aitken’s time, ‘on [the] way to theauditorium, [one] passed through doors which had something like “roller-skating rink”engraved on the glass’.

18

George Baird, in Edinburgh Theatres, Cinemas and Circuses 1820-1963,19

also mentionsthe existence of a roller skating rink, known as the Belle-Vue Roller Skating Rink, priorto 1911, and as early as 1909. According to Baird, the rink was advertised in theEdinburgh Evening News from 22 October 1909:

20

Belle-Vue Skating Rink44A Elm RowRoller Skating RinkBilliard Room, 16 tablesMiniature rifle range, 6 targetsBowling, 6 rinksOpen today by invitation, at 3 o’clockAdmission 6d. Skates 1s

21

Baird mentions another advertisement in the Edinburgh Evening News, from 8November 1909, which demonstrates Belle-Vue’s aim of attracting a wide audiencerange (note the reference to ‘popular prices’):

Belle-Vue Skating RinkElm RowPopular prices 3 sessions daily11-1 Admission free Skates 6d2.30-5 Ladies free, Gents 6d Skates 6d7-10.15 6d Skates 6dBooks of tickets now ready

22

In 1911, the building was referred to as both Pringle’s Picture Palace and Pringle’s NewPicture Palace. Baird suggests that Pringle’s Picture Palace was a household name inLeith Walk for almost twenty years, from 1909 to approximately 1928. He notes that hismother and her neighbours visited it regularly until she migrated to Kansas in 1919,and he heard the name mentioned as late as in 1963. An article in the Edinburgh EveningNews of 3 January 1948 also mentions Pringle’s as one of ‘the pioneering houses’.

23The

cinema was mentioned under the latter name, ‘Pringle’s New Picture Palace’, in theEdinburgh Evening News of 31 December 1910:

– The Gateway building and its early manifestations –

17

Pringle [sic] New Picture Palace opens Monday January 2nd 1911. Popular prices 2d,4d and 6d. Big Picture Show. The Engineer’s Daughter. Nellie Watson. The FamousSongstress. Sandy and Carl. Pantomime favourites. Holiday Programme. MondayJanuary 2nd at 2, 4, 7 and 9; Tuesday January 3rd at 3, 7 and 9; Wednesday January 4th at3, 7 and 9; Thursday January 5th and Friday January 6th at 3, 7 and 9.

24

Both Pringle’s in Grove Street and Pringle’s in Elm Row were advertised in the sameissue of the Edinburgh Evening News on 5 January 1911. From the above advertisementfor 2 January 1911, it is evident that, besides films, Pringle’s in Elm Row also presentedvariety and pantomime. An article in the Edinburgh Evening News of 15 April 1944mentions this practice as widespread in most British cinematographs of the latenineteenth century:

The cinematograph alone was not then considered of sufficient importance or to beinteresting enough to provide all the evening’s fare, and was treated more as a scientificwonder to be shown at intervals between turns on the stage.

25

An unnamed Evening Dispatch film critic wrote in 1946 that, for a number of years, filmshows continued to be part of the music hall programmes:

Baillie J.R. Poole, Edinburgh, whose family were pioneers in the entertainment world,can remember seeing, as a boy, a film programme in his father’s show at the Albert Hall,Sheffield, in 1897. Baillie Poole told me that frequently the film shows consisting of fouror five subjects came at the end of the variety programme and sometimes the peoplewalked out before they finished.

26

It appears from this and other similar newspaper sources that such pioneer cinemassteadily grew to be popular entertainment in Edinburgh and wider. It was not until1899 that the cinematograph separated from the music hall and established itself inEdinburgh, amongst other places, as an entertainment mode in its own right, but, forthe time being, the combination of silent picture and variety sketches provided escapefrom everyday reality. The 1910 advertisement already cited clearly shows thecontinuing Pringle’s tradition of combining variety and film shows. From 1915onwards, Pringle’s Picture Palace (or merely the Palace

27as it was called in most local

newspapers) was frequently mentioned as a silent movie theatre, which interspersedits films with live performances. Regular visitors recalled a life-size cardboard cut-outof Charlie Chaplin that stood in the doorway, and A. D. Mackie commented on a liveevent from his childhood:

The one turn which sticks out in my mind from childhood visits to the place beforethe 1914-18 war is a team of dwarfs dressing in traditional pokey-hats and with longbeards, swallowing fire and performing their tricks.

28

18


This sounds even livelier when contrasted with Margaret Tait’s description of the statein which Scottish theatre found itself by the 1920s:

An enormous cloud of apathy and indifference to the interest and stimulationprovided by the theatre lies like a dark weight upon the inhabitants of Auld Reekie . . .Too many others here still suffer from seat snobbery (‘stalls are so expensive we don’t gooften’), social timidity (‘The Empire? Nobody goes there’), or a puritanical antipathy torevivals of the classics because Elizabethan and Restoration playwrights expressthemselves with a broad wit and earthy gusto too strong for minds attuned to the styleand innuendo and sly inference adopted by writers of chromium plated cocktail anddivorce comedies hailing from New York.

29

According to Tait, this kind of mood would continue until the late 1940s.In 1929, Pringle’s Picture Palace was renamed ‘The Atmospheric Theatre’. George

Baird comments that this was Pringle’s in disguise.30

The building remained under thatname until 1931, when it was renamed yet again, this time ‘Pringle’s Theatre’. TheEdinburgh Evening News of 23 February 1931 published the following advertisement:

Pringle’s TheatreElm Row, Leith Walk6.45 Twice Nightly 8.45The New Road ShowPunch and PepFeaturing:Carr and Finch, comediansTwo Carrs, real dancersNellie Forbes, comedienneThe Six Victoria GirlsAnd supporting companyPrices: 6d and 1s

31

Exactly one year later, Pringle’s Theatre was renamed ‘The Studio Theatre’, and so itwas called in the Edinburgh Evening News of 20 February 1932, where the theatreprogramme starting 1 March included The Infinite Shoeblack by Norman Macown.Ticket prices, including tax, were 7d, 1s, 2s and 3s, significantly higher than thosecharged in 1931 for a variety bill in the same theatre. The Edinburgh and Leith Directoryshows that the Studio Theatre was situated at 41 Elm Row, and identifies Mr Leonardas its manager.

On 13 November 1933, an article in the Edinburgh Evening News identified theStudio Theatre as an environment where creativity and diverse stage expression werenurtured, and a close relationship with its audience encouraged:

For some time past the Studio Theatre made [sic] a most praiseworthy attempt tostage at popular prices a variety of plays, many of which are of outstanding merit and are


19

not, if at all, too frequently seen on the regular stage. During the period of its existencethe venture enabled a number of young actors and actresses to acquire experience in partswhich differed widely in the demands they made upon a player, and members of theStudio company acquired a personal popularity with the audiences.

32

In 1932 and 1933, the Studio Theatre appears to have grown in popularity under itsmanaging director, Earle D. Douglas. It included amongst its ranks a number of thenwell-known theatre practitioners, including Cyril Grier, Norman Chidgey, andMillicent Ward, who made her first appearance in Edinburgh with her Company at theStudio Theatre. Baird mentions in his manuscript that ‘(…) for some eighteen months[February 1932 – November 1933] Miss Ward and her Company appeared at the StudioTheatre, Elm Row’.

33Today, of course, Millicent Ward’s name is usually connected with

another venue, the Palladium Theatre in East Fountainbridge, where she worked as aproducer for a number of years. Edinburgh-born, on leaving school, she had enteredSir Frank Benson’s school, followed by several other training centres, gaining wideexperience of different acting styles. At the beginning of the Great War, she went toVancouver, where she joined the Empress Stock Company. After working with them fora year, she travelled around America and Canada, acquiring further practicalexperience in production and vaudeville. In 1930, she returned to Edinburgh where sheplayed in the Studio Theatre from its launch in February 1932 until its sudden andunexpected failure in 1933.

During its short existence, the Studio Theatre staged new writing and built aworthwhile and varied repertory, as is evident from the following examples of itsweekly repertory:

Noel Coward, I’ll Leave It to You (20-25 February 1933);Arnold Ridley, Third Time Lucky (6-11 March 1933);Rodney Ackland, Dance With No Music (26 June – 1 July 1933);

On 30 October 1933, it presented ‘Special Revival – Shakespeare’s Life and Death of KingRichard II’ running for six nights. The next week, the audience were able to see VincentDouglass’s The Optimist. Everything seemed to be going well until suddenly, onSaturday, 11 November 1933, Earle D. Douglas announced after the final curtain that‘unless a miracle intervened, the theatre would not re-open’

34on Monday, 13 November

1933. His announcement was followed by brief speeches by two company members,Cyril Grier and Norman Chidgey. The production planned for the next week,Galsworthy’s The Skin Game, never opened. On the following Wednesday, 15November 1933, a letter appeared in The Scotsman:

SIR – I venture to think that I shall be expressing the opinion of many in this city inpaying tribute of admiration to the Studio Theatre Company for its work here and ofdeep regret that it has been compelled to close its doors. For more than a year thiscompany has been providing for what its audiences prove to have been a need – actorsand attendants all evidently keen to give pleasure, good plays frequently changed, cheap

20


seats, and an agreeable informality which prompts people to attend their performanceswithout previous arrangements whenever the spirit moves them. I would especially liketo single out a performance of Richard II given in their penultimate week, a play veryrarely presented by the regular companies.

It has been a welcome and a plucky venture, the end of which will be regretted bymany who will wish them luck in their future undertakings. I am &tc BASILWILLIAMS.

35

Two days later, The Scotsman published another letter, this time by Earle D. Douglas,the Theatre’s managing director:

SIR, - May I be allowed, on behalf of the company and myself, to offer our verysincere gratitude to the many patrons and friends who have expressed their sympathyand regrets on the closure of the above theatre?

I, personally, feel our inability to carry on meantime very deeply, and can only saythat every effort is being made to formulate a scheme whereby the Studio Theatre mayachieve a fresh start.

I am &tc. EARLE D. DOUGLAS,Managing Director

36

This was the end of this intriguing theatre company, although its name remainedlinked with 41 Elm Row until 1953–4, as shown on The Edinburgh Leith and PortobelloOrdnance Survey Map. On 25 November 1933, it was announced in The Scotsman that Mrand Mrs Leonard Clarke were making arrangements for the opening of a newrepertory theatre at the same address. The Clarkes were amongst the foundingmembers of the Studio Theatre and, according to the article, ‘their wide knowledge ofprofessional acting and management, extending over many years, was an importantfactor in its initiation’,

37before they severed their connection with the venture in 1932.

Now, one year later, they were back with the new venture, an attempt to create anEdinburgh repertory company:

The same house is being opened by Mrs Leonard Clarke under entirely newconditions. It is to be known as the Repertory Theatre, and an effort is to be made, byenlisting a company of capable professional actors and actresses, and by the selection ofsuitable plays, to attract the support of the kind of audiences who are interested in thenew repertory movement. The services as producer have been secured by Mr LawsonButt, who is well known as an actor-producer and who is at present in London selectingartistes to join the company and arranging for suitable plays. The opening is to take placeearly in December.

38

An advertisement in the Edinburgh Evening News of 21 December 1933 makes it clearthat the new theatre was indeed by then in operation. It announced that the RepertoryTheatre, Elm Row, was now showing at 8pm with theatre prices at 3s, 2s and 1s 3d.


21

The founders lacked no enthusiasm but, despite its hopeful beginning, the RepertoryTheatre fizzled out into obscurity by the end of 1934.

After a short spell of use as the ‘Mr Bruce Morgan Edinburgh Elocution Club’, agroup of amateur actors and businessmen rented 41 Elm Row in 1935. They renamed itthe ‘Festival Theatre’, after spending £4000 on the reconstruction of the building. Anarticle in the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch of 3 June 1935, gives details of this newventure, based on a letter accompanying the annual report of the South-East Divisionof the Scottish Community Drama Association. The letter states that a company calledthe Festival Theatre (Edinburgh) Ltd. was formed in order to facilitate those amateurorganisations in the south-east of Scotland who found it difficult, in economic andartistic terms, to put on shows in the city’s limited spaces such as church halls. Thearticle gives evidence that a lease was signed:

A lease has been secured of the premises in Elm Row, Leith Walk, sometime known asthe Studio Theatre, with the option of purchase, and it is proposed to run the theatre oncommercial lines for hire, with preference to be given to amateurs during the months ofNovember to March.

39

The article further mentions the nature of the reconstruction to the property:

A fireproof curtain is being erected to conform to the city regulations, the stage will bedeepened, and overhead a grid will be installed, making it possible to ‘fly’ scenery. Thelighting is to be improved and a master dimmer added which, with the new and up-to-date dressingroom accommodation to be provided will make the back stage arrangementscomplete. It is proposed also to provide scenery and stage draperies with necessary doorand window ‘flats’.

40

In addition to this, it was agreed that the front of the house be re-modelled and re-decorated, and the audience capacity was to be 800. The Edinburgh dramatic societiesaffiliated to the Scottish Community Drama Association expressed their confidence inthis venture by investing one £50 share, on the condition that they would be able tosecure the hall for festival purposes. As a desire had been expressed that the amateurmovement should control the scheme, it was decided that participation be open to allmember clubs and to individual members of the Association who were entitled tosubscribe minimum sums of £1. The SCDA annual report stated that the rent foraffiliated clubs would be £7.7s per night, which included all lighting, electrician, twosets of curtains with flat-doors and windows, and other scenery.

Once the reconstruction was completed, Councillor Will Y. Darling, Acting LordProvost of Edinburgh and MP for South Edinburgh, performed the opening ceremonyand the Edinburgh Evening News of 12 October 1935 advertised its scheduled openingon 14 October 1935. For six nights the Festival Theatre presented Rupert Griffith’sYouth at the Helm with prices of 3s, 2s (reserved) and 1s (unreserved).

41Unfortunately,

this proved to be another short-lived venture, and, on 27 November 1936 the Edinburgh

22


Evening News made the following announcement: ‘FESTIVAL THEATRE CLOSESTONIGHT’.

42

One day later, on 28 November 1936, the former Festival Theatre rose from theashes under the title ‘Broadway Theatre’. On that very night, as announced in theEdinburgh Evening News, it showed Pleasure Bound with Hope and Lang. The followingproduction was The Miltonians of 1936 (with Tommy Loman, Bert Mack, Lex McLean,Jimmie Reid, Reg White, Douglas and Evans, Royallan, Carr and Vane, the MiltonianGirls and the Miltonian Boys) shown at variety prices: 6d, 9d, 1s and 1/6d. The onlyother record of the Broadway Theatre’s activities that appears to have survived is aposter from 1937, advertising Geo. Gillespie’s production of the pantomime, Little RedRiding Hood, by Bobby Telford, which was performed during the week of 25-30 January1936.

43The show featured Olva Trio, Billy Maurice, Jack Tennant, Carse and Dix,

Ricardo and Rona, the Sarony Girls, Mona Waddell, Janice White, the Dale Sisters,Albert H. Dunlop and Jeanette Adie. The poster reads as follows:

You’ll laugh until you cry at Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck and Beauty, thehorse trained by Bobby. See the Three Little Pigs and Big Bad Wolf.

Prices of Admission:Fauteuils, 2/-, Stalls 1/6, Pit Stalls 1/-, Balcony 6d.Children Half-Price to all parts excepts SaturdaysShows start at 6.50 and 9.00. Matinee on Saturday at 2.30.

Clearly the Broadway Theatre was working within the variety tradition and drawingon cinematic characters. Indeed, by 1938, the venue was re-named the BroadwayCinema, evidence that ‘talkies’ had taken over. The war, however, disrupted thisdevelopment, and at some point during the war the cinema became disused.

By 1945, 41 Elm Row had been abandoned as financially unviable, and as ajournalist wrote in The Evening Dispatch of 17 April 1945:

Dust lay everywhere. The spring sunshine streaming through the leaded panels of thebilliards saloon window made some of the particles rainbow-hued. Perhaps, after all, thiswas fairy dust we were looking at because soon there would be a magic transformationscene.

44

By this point, A. G. Anderson, an Edinburgh businessman, had made a gift of theBroadway Cinema to the Church of Scotland, along with the adjoining shops, housesand a billiard saloon. The value of the property was then estimated at £75,000.

45By

September 1946, the Church of Scotland initiated the opening of the community centrecalled the Elm Row Club, and a month later ‘the Gateway followed suit’.

46The

Edinburgh Evening News of 18 October 1946 announced that:

[The building] donated to the Church of Scotland by an Edinburgh business man, MrA. G. Anderson, will be open to the public on Monday, October 21, 1946. It is handsomelyappointed, with the emphasis on the patron’s comfort, even to the extent of the provision


23

of a promenade café. The GATEWAY will be used as a cinema to show commercial filmsand as a theatre for the presentation of plays of a high standard. The Christmas attractionwill be a new play written by a well-known Scottish playwright and presented by adistinguished cast. Adjoining the theatre is a youth centre, also donated by Mr Andersonwith the theatre project, which will be run for the benefit of the young people of thedistrict.

47

According to The Scotsman, the Gateway was officially opened on 17 October 1946,‘amidst the good wishes of representatives of the Church, the State, the City and thefilm industry’.

48In declaring the Gateway open, Mr Joseph Westwood, MP, Secretary of

State for Scotland ‘welcomed the venture as a sign that the Church, whose attitude tothe film industry had at one time been negative rather than constructive, was notafraid to grasp the opportunity of using the stage and screen for its own purposes’.

49

The Rev. George Candlish was appointed director of the Gateway, and Miss SadieAitken its manager.

In the following two years, the Gateway showed popular films such as The Man onAmerica’s Conscience, Wilson, The Way We Live, Laurel and Hardy and Disney movies,Queen Victoria, Citizen Kane and The Great Failure, while the stage performancesincluded Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre Company in Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight, TheCrucifixion, The Three Maries, Everyman, and Dundee Rep’s Candida. In December 1947,the Gateway’s own Repertory Company performed James Bridie’s Tobias and the Angel,and in early 1948 arrangements were made for completing the Gateway’s owncompany of twelve actors to form the basis of future productions by that autumn. Thiswas, in time, to lead to the foundation of the future fully professional EdinburghGateway Theatre Company. This came into being in 1953, founded by Robert Kemp,Tom Fleming and Lennox Milne, taking its name from that given to the building in1946 by the Church of Scotland and flourishing under the watchful eye of the theatre’smanager, Sadie Aitken. After sixty years of constantly changing name and function, thebuilding had found a name and an essentially dramatic function that would stay withit for at least the next sixty years.

24


Notes1 Anon., ‘The Drama Repertory in Scotland – Gateway Theatre’, The Scotsman, 18 May1948, n.p.2 This information is supplied by John Stone and Ian Brown who were present at thetime of the discovery of the well.3 Lesley and John Stone, Gateway Theatre: History Research 1883-2000 (Edinburgh:manuscript, 2001).4 Lesley and John Stone, Gateway Theatre: History Research 1883-2000 (Edinburgh:manuscript, 2001) p. 1.5 Lesley and John Stone, Gateway Theatre: History Research 1883-2000 (Edinburgh:manuscript, 2001) p. 1.6 A. D. Mackie, ‘Forty-One Elm Row’ in [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the EdinburghGateway Company 1953-1965 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 3.7 A. D. Mackie, ‘Forty-One Elm Row’ in [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the EdinburghGateway Company 1953-1965 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 3.8 Anon., ‘The Drama Repertory in Scotland – Gateway Theatre – Earlier Ventures’, TheScotsman, 18 May 1948, n.p.9 A. D. Mackie, ‘Forty-One Elm Row’ in [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the EdinburghGateway Company 1953-1965 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 3. Mackie notes thatProfessor William Dick started the first Veterinary College in Edinburgh in 1833 inClyde Street and this came to be known as the Dick Vet College. In 1859, a rival college,called the New Veterinary College, was formed by a disgruntled former member ofDick’s staff. This transferred in 1865 to London where it petered out. The NewVeterinary College that came to rest in Elm Row is not to be confused with this, butwas formed by another breakaway from The Dick Vet in 1873.10 A. D. Mackie, ‘Forty-One Elm Row’ in [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the EdinburghGateway Company 1953-1965 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 4.11 A. D. Mackie, ‘Forty-One Elm Row’ in [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the EdinburghGateway Company 1953-1965 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 4.12 Lesley and John Stone, Gateway Theatre: History Research 1883-2000 (Edinburgh:manuscript, 2001) p. 3.13 Lesley and John Stone, Gateway Theatre: History Research 1883-2000 (Edinburgh:manuscript, 2001) p. 1.14 An anonymous article in Evening Dispatch from 1 August 1946 entitled ‘Scots WillCelebrate 50 Years of Cinema – Edinburgh Saw It First’ claims that Pringle’s Palace,Elm Row, was built as a cinema around 1906.15 Lesley and John Stone, Gateway Theatre: History Research 1883-2000 (Edinburgh:manuscript, 2001) p. 2.16 Mackie states (p. 4) that the year of Cramond’s moving was 1910, but this seemsimpossible given the advertisements placed by Pringle in October 1909. It is possiblethat, for a period, Cramond and Pringle co-existed in contiguous sites for somemonths, though such a solution seems impractical.


25

17 A. D. Mackie, ‘From the Silent Screen to Telly’, Edinburgh Evening News, 23 July 1984,n.p.18 Dorothy L. Forrester, letter to John Stone, 28 February 2000.19 George Baird, Edinburgh Theatres, Cinemas and Circuses 1820-1963 (Edinburgh: GeorgeBaird, 1964).20 ‘The new venture in Elm Row, the Belle-Vue Skating Rink, made an auspicious start,and the pretty decoration inside the building ought to make it a rendezvous forrinkers. The maple floor, though well laid, is a bit stiff, and with time should developinto an excellent skating surface. The hanging bandstand from the centre of the roof isa novel idea and is naturally the subject of much comment.’ Edinburgh Evening News, 22October 1909, n.p.21 Edinburgh Evening News, 22 October 1909, in George Baird, Edinburgh Theatres,Cinemas and Circuses 1820-1963 (Edinburgh: George Baird, 1964) p. 494.22 Edinburgh Evening News, 22 October 1909, in George Baird, Edinburgh Theatres,Cinemas and Circuses 1820-1963 (Edinburgh: George Baird, 1964) p. 494.23 Anon., ‘Development of Cinema Industry in the City’, Edinburgh Evening News, 3January 1948, n.p.24 George Baird, Theatres, Cinemas and Circuses 1820-1963 (Edinburgh: George Baird,1964) p. 495.25 M. F., ‘Old-Time Cinemas and Stars’, Edinburgh Evening News, 15 April 1944, p. 6.26 Anon., ‘Scots Will Celebrate 50 Years of Cinema – Edinburgh Saw It First’, EdinburghEvening Dispatch, 1 August 1946, p. 8.27 In the same year, the Kinematograph Year Book mentioned Pringle’s Picture Palace, 42Elm Row as Elm Row Palace (Edinburgh) Ltd. with 850 seats.28 A. D. Mackie, ‘From the Silent Screen to Telly’, Evening News, 23 July 1984, n.p.29 Margaret Tait, The Edinburgh Stage 1921-1949 (Edinburgh: manuscript held at theEdinburgh Central Library, 1949) pp. 5-6.30 George Baird, Theatres, Cinemas and Circuses 1820-1963 (Edinburgh: George Baird,1964) p. 339.31 Edinburgh Evening News, February 1931 in George Baird, Edinburgh Theatres, Cinemasand Circuses 1820-1963 (Edinburgh: George Baird, 1964) p. 155.32 Edinburgh Evening News, 13 November 1933.33 George Baird, Theatres, Cinemas and Circuses 1820-1963 (Edinburgh: George Baird,1964) p. 161.34 Anon., ‘The Studio Theatre – An Edinburgh Venture Ends’, Edinburgh Evening News,13 November 1933.35 Basil Williams, letter to The Scotsman, 15 November 1933.36 Earle D. Douglas, letter to The Scotsman, 17 November 1933.37 Anon., ‘New Repertory Theatre’, The Scotsman, 25 November 1933, n.p.38 Anon., ‘New Repertory Theatre’, The Scotsman, 25 November 1933, n.p.39 Anon., ‘Festival Theatre in Elm Row — £4000 Being Spent on Reconstruction’,Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, 3 June 1935, n.p.40 Anon., ‘Festival Theatre in Elm Row — £4000 Being Spent on Reconstruction’,Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, 3 June 1935, n.p.

26


41 George Baird, Theatres, Cinemas and Circuses 1820-1963 (Edinburgh: George Baird,1964) p. 341.42 George Baird, Theatres, Cinemas and Circuses 1820-1963 (Edinburgh: George Baird,1964) p. 342.43 National Library of Scotland holdings, R.283.c.26 (85).44 Anon., ‘New Community Centre’, Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, 7 April 1945, n.p.45 ‘There was a fairy godfather touch about its inception some years ago, when ananonymous benefactor presented the Church with a block of property in Elm Rowvalued at £75,000’. Mary Fleming, ‘Presenting the Gateway’, Scotland’s SMT Magazine,May 1948, Vol. 41, No. 5, p. 28.46 SMT Magazine incorporating Scottish Country Life, May 1948.47 Anon., ‘From Our Turret Window – The Gateway – Elm Row’, Edinburgh EveningNews, 18 October 1946, n.p. The Christmas attraction in question was When the Star Fellby Robert Kemp, produced with an amateur cast.48 The Scotsman, 18 October 1946, n.p.49 The Scotsman, 18 October 1946, n.p.


27

Kirk and Theatre

Donald Smith

When the disused Broadway cinema was renovated by the Church of Scotland andopened in the autumn of 1946 by the then Secretary of State for Scotland, JosephWestwood, it was an event with strong cultural resonance. How could the PresbyterianKirk of John Knox tolerate far less initiate theatrical entertainment? The impact ofPuritanism on Scottish culture has often been exaggerated, but it is certain that thesixteenth-century church moved from being the principal patron of drama to its fiercestenemy. This movement began before the Scottish Reformation as the Catholic Churchsought to control the exuberant Robin Hood folk plays. The desire for greater socialorder and control was pressed home by the Protestant reformers, who also banned theliturgical plays and mysteries that the new theology regarded as irreverent andpotentially idolatrous.

1Scottish Puritanism mellowed considerably from the mid-

nineteenth century with the gradual re-introduction of stained glass and pipe organs.Music and theatre were well patronised by the urban middle and working classes —including churchgoers — and when in the early twentieth century amateur arts activitymultiplied across Scotland, so did church halls, which became the principal culturalvenue in many localities

2. Individuals also linked Kirk and theatre: Sadie Aitken, a

Church of Scotland employee, who became the manager of the Gateway and whosework is discussed in a later chapter, was a leading figure in the Scottish CommunityDrama Association.

3

The most striking aspect of this renewed interface between religion and drama wasthat, when the Kirk refurbished and re-opened the Gateway, it was not creating acentre of religious art. Although a tradition quickly established itself of producing areligious play each Christmas, the Gateway programme supported theatre in its ownright and was designed for the general public, not church members in particular. Thiswas a wise, but also a very courageous, move for a Church, not least Scotland’snational Kirk. The credit for this initiative lies with the young minister, GeorgeCandlish, who was asked to develop a policy for use of the premises, which had beengifted to the Church’s Home Board by a businessman, Mr A. G. Anderson. Candlishargued that the Church needed to respond to key areas of modern life. The arts weregrowing in social importance and so the Church should become involved in order tosupport what was worthwhile and to learn lessons about how church organisationsshould relate to modern society. Given its legacy of theatrical repression, the Kirk hadsome ground to make up in this area, even though ecclesiastical engagement with newsocial trends had been energetically espoused by John Knox himself.

The timing of this development was also significant. The impulse towards peaceand reconstruction across Europe was universal and led a year later, in 1947, to the

29

establishment of the Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama. Huge socialchange had been inaugurated in Britain through the landslide Labour victory of 1945,and in Scotland there was an additional upsurge in support for a distinctive Scottishcultural and political identity. The opening of the Gateway was an opportuneacknowledgement of this changed post-war climate and an important contribution bythe Church towards the Scottish cultural renaissance that had begun in the twentiesand thirties with writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Neil Gunn and Lewis GrassicGibbon. In the shape of the playwright Robert Kemp and later through the GatewayCompany the Kirk’s initiative enabled theatre to play an increased role in therenaissance movement. In retrospect, it can be seen that the Gateway signalled a veryimportant change in the Kirk’s official attitudes to both the imaginative arts and toindigenous Scottish culture. Hostility had largely receded in the nineteenth century, butthis was a case of active encouragement and participation.

Between 1946 and 1953, the Church of Scotland management, in the shape ofGeorge Candlish and Sadie Aitken, acted as both programme managers and producersoperating with a range of professional and amateur groupings. The theatre productionswere supplemented with film screenings and complemented by a range of youth andamateur theatre activity that made the Gateway a community arts centre before theconcept had been coined. George Candlish was also very interested in technologicaldevelopments in communication and initiated an audio-visual production arm thatwas later to move into slide, film and video. The most significant achievements of theGateway during this period, however, are associated with the work of Robert Kemp.

When the Gateway opened in 1946, Kemp’s career as a professional playwright wasin its early stages, but he had been actively seeking to establish a professional venue inEdinburgh for the burgeoning Scottish theatre movement. He was delighted and rathersurprised when George Candlish approached him with the news that the Church ofScotland was going to supply the much-needed venue. This was the start of a veryimportant relationship in the Gateway story. As Kemp puts it:

I applauded the courage of that decision, and took to Mr Candlish immediately. Weheld similar views on many matters and looking back I think I can claim that confidenceto quite an unusual degree existed between us.

4

Soon after this first meeting, Kemp agreed to write a nativity play, When the Star Fell,for the theatre’s first Christmas in 1946 and quickly, as both playwright and dramaturg,he became central to the Gateway’s creative direction.

The years between 1946 and 1953, when the Gateway Theatre Company wasformed, were an intensely creative period for the theatre in its own right and notsimply a prelude to the twelve years of the venue-based professional company. Theprogramme was driven by voluntary effort and shoestring pro-am budgets, but thecombination of George Candlish, Sadie Aitken, Robert Kemp — as playwright andsometimes producer — the Scottish Community Drama stalwarts and support fromtheatre professionals underpinned a remarkably broad effort. The Gateway endeavourin fact represented an emergent national drama strategy before such things were felt to

30


be essential. First of all, the Gateway provided a focus and a benchmark for theamateur drama movement. Support was provided through active engagement with theSCDA and through the Kirk Drama Federation, a network of church-based dramagroups. Festivals were held at the Gateway and resources shared. The credit for thisnetworking goes largely to Sadie Aitken, the Gateway’s redoubtable manager, butGeorge Candlish, the director, was also strongly committed to the social role of dramaand, alongside the theatre, a variety of youth groups met in the Gateway 'clubrooms'.Formal and informal training opportunities were also provided while the foyer wasput to good use as an exhibition space.

5

This emergent national strategy for theatre arts placed an emphasis on educationand social inclusion, but it also had dramaturgy at its centre. The aspiration towards a‘national drama’ was shared across the amateur movement and the emerging Scottishtheatre profession. It also engaged with other aspects of the Scottish renaissancemovement in literature, music and the visual arts. The 1940s were marked by politicalactivism as well as with the struggles of the post-war Labour government and anupsurge in distinctively Scottish political aspirations included, in 1949, a mass signingof the Scottish Covenant for home rule.

The relationship between the Gateway and the Edinburgh International Festival inthe period from 1947 until 1953, embodied by Robert Kemp, was an important factor inthe national drama movement of this post-war period. Because the Gateway wasindependently owned and managed, it was able to hold out for its own Festivalprogramme choices and not simply be taken over by the Festival management. In thefirst few years, the Edinburgh International Festival could not do without Kemp, JamesBridie and their Scottish theatre associates, but later the venue issue became importantas Kemp explicitly acknowledged:

Here I may say that in our early history the Festival Director showed signs of wishingto oust us from the Gateway and use the theatre for some import of his own during thethree weeks. I stood firm against this, but I could have achieved nothing if Mr Candlishhad not come down decisively on my side.

6

This issue goes to the heart of the tension between an arts policy favouring ‘theatre inScotland’ and one that fosters indigenous Scottish theatre, and it is interesting to notethat in this instance the Church’s institutional role sustained the creative right ofScotland’s artists to contribute.

7

The tension around these cultural choices was the subject of criticism and debate atthe time, since the opening 1947 Festival featured 'the music of Scotland', Scottish filmsand even 'Enterprise Scotland', but no Scottish theatre company.

8Such tensions though

can be productive and Kemp’s experience of seeing La Compagnie Jouvet in L'École desFemmes at the 1947 Festival led directly to his Molière adaptation Let Wives Tak Tentwhich was premièred at the Gateway, albeit in February 1948, not during the Festival.

9

Apart from beginning a rich tradition of adaptations of Molière in Scottish theatre, LetWives Tak Tent brought together the dramaturgy of the National Drama with thelinguistic riches of Scots and a vigorous physical acting style that plugged into Scottish

– Kirk and Theatre –

31

popular theatre. The opening night at the Gateway, with Duncan Macrae in the lead,was recognised as a significant artistic triumph.

This decisive occasion, however, only foreshadowed an even more significantdevelopment – the staging of Robert Kemp’s adaptation of the sixteenth-century Scotsmorality play Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis at the 1948 Festival. The boldness of thisventure was exceptional, not only because of its huge scale – pageant as well as play –but because it involved resurrecting a scholarly text in medieval Scots which had notbeen performed since 1554 and had lasted a whole day in its full original version. Thestakes for the nascent national drama could hardly have been higher, but the director,Tyrone Guthrie, pushed them through the ceiling by abandoning contemporary stageconventions to recreate his vision of those of the play’s original setting. Compared toKemp’s modest historical contextualising of the Satyre in the 1948 Festival programme,Guthrie’s introduction reeks of artistic and cultural ambition:

The 'Satire of the Three Estates' will be presented in the Kirk Assembly Hall, and theaudience will sit round three sides of the stage. Its relation to the actors will therefore bevery similar to that of the sixteenth century audience. As in the day of Shakespeare, andthat of Lindsay before him, there will be almost no attempt at scenic 'illusion'. Thespectacular side of the entertainment will depend upon the dresses and upon a greaterdegree of plasticity in grouping and movement than is possible inside the 'picture-frame'of the modern stage.

Our aim is to present something for the Edinburgh Festival that is typically andauthentically Scottish; our hope that, in reviving one of Scotland’s few dramatic classicsand presenting it in a 'hall', we shall not be condemned simply because the performanceis considerably unlike those currently fashionable in the West End of London.

It is our confident belief that good Scottish acting has a distinctive quality and canmake a valuable contribution, not only as an amenity of Scottish life, but by interpretingScotland abroad. But this can never occur so long as Scotland’s professional actors haveeither to acquire an English metropolitan style and accent or else be confined to 'dialect'character parts and exhibition of pawkiness labelled 'For Export Only'.

10

The astonishing thing is that Guthrie proved himself right on every count.On a more modest level, this venture could not have been undertaken without the

support of the Gateway and its network, including the Church of Scotland. The storyof how the Thrie Estaitis came to be staged in the Kirk’s General Assembly Hall hasbeen told in slightly different ways by the three main participants, Tyrone Guthrie,Robert Kemp and James Bridie. Kathleen Gilmour is surely correct, however, in herrecent research in giving credit to Sadie Aitken at the Gateway for making vitalconnections and winning Church support:

It was also through Sadie's management skills that Tyrone Guthrie staged The ThrieEstaitis in The Assembly Hall in 1948 although there has been some debate over whoexactly proposed the venue. Some writers such as Priscilla Barlow give credit to RobertKemp, who, as a minister’s son, would have been aware of its properties, but there is

32


evidence that it was in fact Sadie who suggested it and made the appropriate phone call.She of course had prior experience of it after her coup with Bernard Shaw in 1933. Kemprecalled that he, Guthrie, Bridie and Willie Grahame of the Festival Society had spent theday visiting halls all over Edinburgh looking for a suitable venue and, by late afternoon,were in a 'merry' state and running short of cash. They visited the Gateway to ask Sadieto cash a cheque and, once she heard their plight, she solved it within minutes. AlthoughKemp had thought of the Assembly Hall, he had been reluctant to mention it 'in case theyturned it down'. Sadie went with them in a taxi to let them look at the Assembly Hall andthe rest is history. She later provided Guthrie with a dressing room in the Gateway whichhe used as a casting office.

11

The subject matter of the Thrie Estaitis is Scotland’s national community and its reformin the interests of its citizens. This was in fact entirely appropriate to the AssemblyHall, but it needed a particularly Presbyterian theatrical mindset to see it. Fortunately,four people with this rather specific qualification, including Guthrie with his ScotsPresbyterian forebears, were involved. Add to that Guthrie’s immediate perception thathere a Shakespearean thrust stage could be recreated and the equation was complete.In 1999 the new Scottish Parliament, successor of The Thrie Estaitis, convened in thesame venue for some, but not all, of the same reasons!

This brief account sets the Gateway’s role between 1947 and 1953 within a firmlyScottish context, but it is important also to place the Gateway’s work within thedialogue between religion and theatre that has informed so many of humanity’sdramatic traditions. Among the productions of this period were T. S. Eliot's The FamilyReunion (1947 and 1953), Murder in the Cathedral (1947) and The Cocktail Party (1952); APhoenix Too Frequent (1941, 1950 and 1951), A Sleep of Prisoners (1951, 1952) and VenusObserved (1953) by Christopher Fry; a medieval mystery play The Death of Adam (1949);The Golden Gate (1948, 1951), an Icelandic mystery play by David Stefansson; JohnMasefield's Good Friday (1948) and Milton's Samson Agonistes (1953). Some of theseproductions, like the 1951 Festival production of Kemp's King of Scots in DunfermlineAbbey, were performed in church venues, not least St Giles Cathedral. These, alongwith some of the religious dramas also produced by the Gateway Theatre Companysuch as Tom Fleming’s Miracle at Midnight (1952, 1958, 1959), do not add up to theartistic revival of religious theatre sought by Fry, T. S. Eliot and others in the twentiethcentury. They did, however, decisively reaffirm religious drama as part of Scottishcultural life, despite a previously reluctant Presbyterian mainstream. Organisationssuch as the Kirk Drama Federation ensured that this change was at the grass roots andnot just at a prestigious central venue.

Some of these gains, however, must be offset against the later loss of culturalconfidence in Church circles occasioned by the explosion of social change in the earlysixties and the shifting of previous boundaries of taste and licence in the arts. Althoughthis belongs to the later period of the Gateway Theatre Company, it is useful to dealwith it here since, once again, the Gateway was a key index of change, not to say alightning conductor, in the context of the 1960 Lysistrata affair.

It is the stated view of all the key participants in this very public row about the


33

proposed staging of a racy new adaptation of Aristophanes' Lysistrata at the Gatewayin 1960 that the row need not, and should not, have taken place. In their perception, itwould have been avoided if the careful concordat nurtured between the theatrecompany, local management and Church authorities had been observed.

12For them,

one inappropriately phrased press puff caused the conflagration. This is true as far as itgoes and Sadie Aitken was able to point out that, years before this, the Gateway hadapproached Christopher Fry about commissioning an adaptation of Lysistrata.

13This

reading of events, however, neglects an important underlying trend: audience tastesand artistic aspirations had been drifting apart in Scottish theatre as the fiftiesprogressed. In 1958, for example, a Festival of Scottish Repertory Theatre had beenheld transferring keynote productions to the other Scottish cities. The plays wereSartre’s Crime Passionel (Dundee Rep), Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (Perth Rep), TheCherry Orchard (Glasgow Citizens') and Robert Kemp’s The Penny Wedding (Gateway).Of these, only The Penny Wedding did good box office but, unlike Kemp's adaptations,the satirical style of this contemporary piece is dated and designed to please aconservative audience.

14In the same year the Gateway Company mounted an excellent

production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in its own season and, althoughaudience numbers were respectable, there was also a significant number of complaintsabout content and language. In this context, while the Church of Scotland Home Boardhad no desire to censor the Gateway's programming or even to be directly involved, in1960 it was forced to request cancellation of the Lysistrata production because of publicpressure within and outside the Church. Public attitudes were moving much tooslowly for artistic change and a democratic Presbyterian Church was not well placed tobroker a thorny relationship which was to cause widespread turbulence across Scottishtheatre in the early sixties.

15

After 1960, complaints from Church members about the Gateway Theatreprogramme increased steadily, but, in the wake of the Lysistrata crisis, the Kirk’sGeneral Assembly had set up a 'Special Committee to consider the function of theGateway Theatre'. Its landmark report of 1961, 'Kirk and Theatre', rejected censorshipand advocated trust in those responsible for making creative choices.

16It is a wise

document for any Church body involved in supporting the arts and it enabled theGateway and its theatre company to develop through the sixties despite the complaintsof less tolerant or far-seeing members of society.

When the Gateway Theatre Company was wound up in 1965, the Gateway Theatreitself was unable to recover the elasticity of its early creative period, 1947–53.Inevitably, it had come to depend on its repertory company for the backbone of itsprogramming. The Gateway was sold in 1968 to Scottish Television, but the Church ofScotland developed a new arts centre venue at the site of the former Netherbow Porton Edinburgh's Royal Mile. Subsequent developments on this site were to prove thatthe energy and diversity of 1947–53 had not been forgotten, as the Netherbow ArtsCentre actively participated in the growth of both the professional and community artsin succeeding decades. This it still does.

34


Notes1 The conflict between Kirk and Theatre is well documented passim in Bill Findlay (ed),A History of Scottish Theatre (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998).2 See Everard W. Kent, An Open Gateway to Extend the Frontiers of Faith: Church andTheatre in Scotland from the Reformation to the Present (unpublished MTh dissertation,University of Edinburgh Library, New College, Edinburgh, 1995).3 For an excellent account of Sadie Aitken’s career, see Kathleen Gilmour, ‘Sarah (Sadie)Ross Aitken, M.B.E.: A Study of a Career in Theatre’, International Journal of ScottishTheatre, Vol. 1, No 2(December 2000) http://arts.qmuc.ac.uk/ijost/Volume1_no2_gilmour_g.htm, pp. 1-23.4 [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh Gateway Company 1953-65 (Edinburgh:The St Giles Press, 1965) p. 7.5 During this period the Church of Scotland also supported a visual arts centre inDavidson’s Church in Eyre Place under the leadership of James Chisholm. When thiswas closed in 1953, some of the artists who had been involved looked to the Gatewayas an ongoing exhibition venue.6 [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh Gateway Company 1953-65 (Edinburgh:The St Giles Press, 1965) p. 11.7 See Donald Smith, ‘1950 to 1955’, in Bill Findlay (ed), A History of Scottish Theatre(Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998) pp. 254–9; and Donald Campbell, Playing for Scotland: AHistory of the Scottish Stage 1715–1965 (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1996) pp. 125–7 fordiscussion of this tension.8 George Bruce, Festival in the North (London: Robert Hale & Company, 1975) pp. 21-4.9 For an excellent account of this production and its significance, see Bill Findlay,Motivation and Method in Scots Translations, Versions and Adaptations of Plays from theHistoric Repertoire of Continental European Drama (unpublished PhD thesis, QueenMargaret University College, Edinburgh, 2000) pp. 52–91.10 [no editor], The International Festival of Music and Drama Programme (Edinburgh:Edinburgh Festival Society, 1948) p. 21.11 Kathleen Gilmour, ‘Sarah (Sadie) Ross Aitken, M.B.E.: A Study of a Career in Theatre’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre, Vol. 1, No 2 (December 2000).http://arts.qmuc.ac.uk/ijost/Volume1_no2_gilmour_g.htm, p. 12. See also, RobertKemp, ‘Introduction’in Sir David Lyndsay The Satire of the Three Estaites (Edinburgh: The Scots Review, 1949)p. ii; and Tyrone Guthrie, A Life in Theatre (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1959) pp. 274–6.12 See Robert Kemp, ‘The First Seven Years’, and Moultrie R. Kelsall, ‘The Last Five’, in[no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh Gateway Company 1953-65 (Edinburgh:The St Giles Press, 1965) pp. 7–14 and pp. 31–42 for the considered retrospects of thetwo key insiders.13 Kathleen Gilmour, ‘Sarah (Sadie) Ross Aitken, M.B.E.: A Study of a Career inTheatre’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre, Vol. 1, No 2 (December 2000)http://arts.qmuc.ac.uk/ijost/Volume1_no2_gilmour_g.htm, p. 11.14 Robert Kemp, The Penny Wedding (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1985).

35


15 Donald Smith, ‘1950 to 1995’, in Bill Findlay (ed), A History of Scottish Theatre(Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998) pp 263–9.16 [no editor], Kirk and Theatre (Edinburgh: The Church of Scotland Home Board, 1961).


36

Sadie Aitken: the ‘Caledonian Lilian

Baylis’

Kathleen Gilmour

Theatre history was made when, in 1944, the Church of Scotland accepted the gift ofthe building that became the Gateway Theatre in Elm Row, Edinburgh, and soonannounced the intention of running it with Sadie Aitken (1905–85) as manager. Fewwomen in Britain had held such a position and all of them, apart from Lilian Baylis,had had a stage career. Although she had had very strong amateur and communitydrama links from her early days, Sadie Aitken’s career had actually been in social workuntil she moved to the Gateway. Yet, today those familiar with her name usually knowonly of her involvement in Scottish theatre from her time at the Gateway Theatre.

Even then, it is remarkable that there is little literature relating to Sadie Aitken’s lifein the theatre. David Hutchison

1discusses the sudden, enormous expansion in amateur

drama between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second WorldWar and in this Sadie began her theatrical life. The British Drama League Journal, War-Time Drama

2carried a report of Sadie’s position of Secretary at the popular Scottish

Community Drama Association’s St. Andrews Summer School of Drama in 1942, butgave no indication of what that position would entail. Owen Dudley Edwards,

3in his

discussion on the place of the Edinburgh Festival in Scottish theatre, brieflyacknowledges Sadie’s responsibility for the Assembly Hall becoming a major venue inthe Edinburgh Festival. Albert Mackie

4mentions her management role at the Gateway

and her involvement with Scottish Community Drama while Robert Kemp5

andMoultrie Kelsall

6pay tribute to her skills as Gateway manager. Donald Campbell

7gives

a more detailed outline of her career, including her acting roles, and pays tribute to herorganisational and administrative skills in the Scottish theatre. Until a recent article,from which sections of this chapter are drawn,

8little had been published to illustrate

Sadie’s enthusiasm and ability to involve the younger and more socially remotemembers of the community in the world of drama. An article in War-Time Drama (1945)praises the work of the producers in the Drama Festival organised by the EdinburghAssociation of Girls’ Clubs and the Union of Boys’ Clubs without specifying that Sadiewas one of those producers. Yet, as will become clear, she was a dynamic producer andpromoter well beyond her undoubtedly significant role in managing the GatewayTheatre.

A. G. Anderson’s 1944 gift, already referred to, of the Elm Row Centre, formerly theBroadway Cinema, to the Church of Scotland’s Home Board was accompanied by therequest that the Church create a ‘social and recreational centre, especially for young

37

people, with emphasis on Films and Drama experiments’.9

The buildings housed notonly the theatre-cum-cinema; it was home to a neighbourhood club, a toddlers’ groupand a mixed youth club. The Revd George Candlish was appointed warden of theCentre and Sadie remembered that he ‘came to ask me something about the Theatreaspect of it . . . then a week or two later he came back and said ‘Would you beinterested yourself?’

10After being reassured that transfer from the Social Services

Department, where the Church of Scotland then employed her, to its Home Boardwould not be considered a break in her service, she had no hesitation in accepting thejob. According to Sadie the Social Services ‘had to appoint three people to replace me.One of them a minister’.

11Sadie, believing that ‘life began at forty’,

12relished the

challenge of a new career.The decision of the Church to accept the gift and enter the theatre and cinema

business was greeted with astonishment and derision by many. J. R. Junor observes:

The cynics (and, human nature being what it is, there were quite a few) sat back towatch the fun. Among those who duly disappointed them was Sadie Ross Aitken.

13

Initially the emphasis at the Gateway was more on films than on drama. As a result, inaddition to becoming the first woman to hold a theatre licence in Scotland, Sadiebecame registered at the Scottish Screen Archives. She was only the second woman inEdinburgh to hold a cinema licence, the first being Peggy Baillie who ran the La Scalain Nicolson St., Edinburgh, between 1923 and 1930. Sadie recalled that

there were not many cinemas showing what one calls the better films, documentariesand so on. There was no Cameo then and the best of foreign films and Mr. Candlishthought it would be a good thing to have.

14

According to McAra,

For the first two or three seasons, the majority of the [Gateway] programmes consistedof films, particularly first-class foreign films, at that time a rarity in Edinburgh.

15

In addition to the regular programme, members of the Gateway and members of theEdinburgh Film Guild

16had the opportunity to attend special film screenings of the

‘Famous Film Series’, which included Hitchcock’s Blackmail. There were also specialscreenings of public information films, made for the Scottish Office, such as Seed ofProsperity, about Scotland’s seed potato industry, or Fair Rent, which was about RentTribunal procedures. According to Butt, the popularity of such films had begun in 1940,when the Ministry of Information formed the Non-Theatrical Film Scheme whichorganised ‘special shows of films of a social, as distinct from an educationalcharacter’.

17

Although Sadie was more fortunate than most theatre managers in having thebuilding rent-free and the principal wages paid by the Home Board, there was no grant


38

available to support her work. She recalled in an interview with Ian Wishart thatshowing films helped to finance drama at the Gateway in two ways. She said, ‘wealways had a week of film while they were rehearsing so that we would have anincome’

18and ‘when we were doing entertainment plays, if they were balanced by one

short documentary, we were exempted completely from tax’.19

The exemption shereferred to is the 1945 Budget measure of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir JohnAnderson, which exempted organisations ‘not established for profit’, and whose aimswere partly educational, from paying Entertainment Duty. However, there was work tobe done before any film could be shown and, in an interview with Christine Orr in1947, Sadie discussed some of the problems facing her, most of which were caused bythe ‘scarcity of material and manpower’.

20She recalled that ‘in those early days, you

had to apply for a permit for a yard of linoleum or a bar of soap’.21

Sadie believed that to be successful ‘a manager must have a good workingknowledge of every job in the theatre to the extent of being able to do it personally’.

22

Meta Gilmour remembers hearing Sadie explain the difficulties of teaching herself themanager’s job and how, in order to find out how much soap was needed, ‘she just gotdown on her knees and scrubbed the floor herself’.

23One of Sadie’s great skills,

however, was her ability to motivate people. Relatives, friends and stage-struckvolunteers, all keen to be associated with the Gateway, rolled up their sleeves to helpher and the Gateway opened on schedule with what she described as ‘fairly wellequipped premises’.

24Reg Laing and his mother were two of the team who tackled the

grime. He recalled that, while no-one was paid for their work, Mrs Laing later becamecafe manageress and, until he went into the army in 1948, Sadie found backstage workand a few walk-on parts for him. One of those parts was with ‘Howard and Wyndhamand the Lyceum Company and it paid two guineas a week’.

25While the building was

being equipped and spruced up, Sadie was involved with drawing up a programmepolicy and ‘booking films, negotiating for visits from professional theatre companiesand building a staff team to work to the ideal of providing programmes that willbroaden and uplift the human spirit’.

26

Sadie was keen to introduce professional theatre companies to the Gateway, inorder to determine a standard of presentation that she felt was lacking in Edinburgh.So, for the first seven years, 1946–53, in consultation with George Candlish, thedirector, she experimented with different ways of having a professional company inresidence for at least part of each year. Although Candlish had an interest in thetheatre, and appeared from time to time, Bill Inglis

27remembered in an interview that

he spent more time upstairs, where he was involved with the Boys’ Clubs, developingaudio-visual publicity material and making films for the Church. His forte, whendownstairs, was wielding a hammer and helping to build sets. He and Sadie met fordiscussions in the middle of the day, but Sadie was in charge and it was her job to bookfilms and plays. She began by inviting companies such as Perth Theatre, Dundee Rep,Glasgow Citizens’, the Scottish National Players and the Park Theatre Company, nowPitlochry Festival Theatre, to visit. McAra recounts that in ‘the first three seasons, sometwenty-seven plays were presented ranging from Ibsen and Shaw to new plays byRobert Kemp’.

28Sadie then introduced longer seasons when she employed producers

39

– Sadie Aitken: the ‘Caledonian Lilian Baylis’ –

such as Noel Ilith and, in addition, the Gateway had its own repertory company whichSadie described as ‘ad hoc productions with local players, producers selected,designers selected and cast invited to come along’.

29Bill Abbott, a semi-professional,

who was one of the local players employed by Sadie, recalled in a private letter that ‘Iwas in some seven shows over a couple of years, in particular the world premier [sic]of … Let Wives Tak Tent with Duncan Macrae’.

30Tom Fleming, by then a professional,

was also involved in these productions and describes31

how casts were assembled foreach play which would run for ten days to a fortnight.

When the Gateway was officially opened as a theatre in October 1946 by JosephWestwood, then Secretary of State for Scotland, the first performance was by PerthTheatre of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. The first production by the GatewayCompany was the 1946 Christmas play, When a Star Fell, written by Robert Kemp, whodescribed the players as ‘a very gifted amateur cast’.

32The set for When a Star Fell was

built on a shoestring budget by Stuart Harris who had to rig the stage, which had beenout of use for years, with the help of a volunteer crew who had never worked in such atheatre before. He described the situation as a ‘frantic business’,

33but Sadie saved his

sanity when she got two staff from the Lyceum Theatre, including the designer BillGarrard, to lend a hand for a few hours in the final stages on the show’s opening night,Christmas Eve 1946. They had just completed a major re-rig of the act curtain, only tenminutes before it had to go up for the show, when Sadie appeared in the promptcorner. She handed Harris the biggest tumblerful of whisky he had ever seen in his lifesaying ‘I think you need this’. Harris, also leader of the Elm Row youth club whichwas based in the club rooms above the theatre, was designer and technical director ofthe theatre from its opening until the professional company was formed in 1953. Heworked closely with Sadie and, according to Harris, she had to walk many a tightropein those early years, running the theatre on a shoestring and keeping it in line with theKirk’s policies.

There was no grant available then, so that it was essential to attract audiences. Sadieknew that it was important for some audiences to enjoy a pre-performance and intervaldrink, but there was no licensed bar in the Gateway. Douglas Muir is quite sure thatthe ingenious device rigged up by his grandfather George Muir, owner of the WindsorBuffet next door to the theatre, and the Goblins, Sadie’s stagehands, had noauthorisation from the Church. It allowed audiences to have a refreshment, yet be backin their seats in time for curtain up. A wire was stretched from the window of Sadie’soffice to the back window of the pub where it was attached to a buzzer that soundedbefore each performance.

The coffee bar within the theatre was also popular with patrons and wouldaccommodate upwards of one hundred customers on an ordinary night. AlthoughSadie did not interfere with the day-to-day running of it, she tried to ensure food wasavailable which corresponded with the theme of the play; for example shortbread oroatcakes and cheese would be on sale if a Scots play was being produced. On oneoccasion, in 1950, the play, The Man Who Ate the Popomack by W. J. Turner, was about afruit which turned people blue so that Sadie decided to sell ‘Popomack juice’ whichshe concocted from pineapple juice with purple food colouring. The ingredients were


40

both uncommon and expensive and she was unwilling to stock large amounts. Theidea proved to be a money spinner, however, and Kay Inglis ‘was forever gettingtuppence worth on the tram up to the posh grocer in George St. for another bottle ofjuice’.

34

A Gateway membership scheme,35

introduced by Sadie, proved so popular thatMembers’ Meetings were held over three nights according to membership cardnumbers and the voluntary work of some members helped Sadie overcome manyfinancial restrictions. One of them, Alistair Murray, at school, but interested in theatrepublicity, began his twenty-two year association with the Gateway in 1946 bydelivering posters, filling envelopes and selling programmes. In 1968, when theGateway closed for the time being as a theatre to become Scottish Television’sEdinburgh studio, he was still involved with the work of theatre and also President ofthe Gilbert and Sullivan Society which then had to find another venue.

Kay and Bill Inglis were backstage volunteers at the Gateway from the secondshow, When a Star Fell, ‘right through until, well we did the first show in theNetherbow [the Church of Scotland’s Art Centre]’

36in 1972. Sadie took great care of her

young volunteers and Bill, an apprentice electrician aged sixteen, and Kay, a stage-manager aged seventeen, often worked until two in the morning, when Sadie wouldsend them home by taxi. If working with a professional company, Sadie paid themexpenses of eight pounds for a show, three weeks work, but as Kay explained she wasa student, so she was ‘fair chuffed to be put through the books’.

37As Equity gained

ground in the fifties, Kay could no longer work with professional companies, but Bill’selectrical qualification allowed him to continue in the lighting department. As astudent, John Duncanson earned two pounds a week during the holidays working as ascene shifter and remembered that Sadie ‘allowed drama students free entry toWednesday matinees or other performances if there were empty seats. They would justturn up at the box office and ask for Sadie’.

38

Kay Inglis recalled that Jimmy Stenhouse who painted the scenery for The HighlandFair was in fact not a scenic painter, but an artist. Scene painters were often local artistswho were rewarded with an exhibition of their work in the Gateway café. Thepermanent stage crew of the Gateway comprised an electrician, a projectionist and thetwo ‘Goblins’ (stagehands). At night the Goblins worked in the Gateway, but by daythey worked on a dustcart in Leith, where they kept a lookout for props. During hisyears at the Gateway, Tom Fleming made good use of their services and recalled thathe had only to say he needed ‘a bed or an old fridge’

39and next day it was delivered.

Volunteers swelled the numbers backstage when necessary and even her Church Elder,Charles Rawcliffe, an amateur drama enthusiast, found himself labouring backstage fortwo weeks when he innocently replied ‘No’ to Sadie’s question ‘Are you busy nextweek, Reg?’

40

According to Kay Inglis, ‘Sadie was a stickler for detail’41

and on many occasionsKay was sent to borrow props from antique shops or the museum armed with nothingmore than the words ‘Miss Aitken says’. Lenders received free tickets for the show andhad their business advertised in the programme. The Colt 45, ‘not a Scottish weaponand therefore not valued as an exhibit’, borrowed from the Scottish Museum of

41


Antiquities in Queen Street is still in storage there, but Dr David Caldwell of theScottish Museum Service remarks

42that such an arrangement would no longer be

made. Sadie’s attention to detail covered all aspects of the Gateway, especially thewardrobe department, and, according to Kay Inglis, Sadie was very interested in andknowledgeable about costumes. The Gateway wardrobe was located in a long corridorfilled with ‘drawers and drawers of costume stuff’.

43According to Isobel Mackie, who

worked in the box office for many years, Sadie acquired ‘the most amazing stock ofsanitary towels, of the really thickest absorbency possible’

44and cupboards throughout

the theatre were filled with them. Any Elizabethan padding needed was made fromsanitary towels and even the snake in The Death of Adam, which coiled round the pillarsof St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, was made from them. Working on a shoestringbudget taught Sadie to become quite inventive as she recalled:

if we wanted to dress James Gibson as a tramp someone from wardrobe was deputedto go down to the Cowgate…and find a good second hand outfit of some kind which wasbrought back and fumigated.

45

Friends and family never knew what article they would see on stage when the curtainwent up on a new production. Elinor Sim, Sadie’s niece, recalled that items

would miraculously walk down to the Gateway on their own and be revealed in theirfull glory when the curtain went back. We eventually got them back, but anything shethought they needed to dress the set went.

46

In addition to films and drama productions, the Gilbert and Sullivan Society ofEdinburgh put on shows in the Gateway every March from 1947 to 1967. In addition,the Kirk Drama Federation held their festivals there in May or June each year andMarjorie Middleton’s ballet school and Ballet Rambert were frequent visitors. However,after seven years of experimentation Sadie recalled in an interview with Ian Wishartthat Candlish thought:

the time is passed now for ourselves to do engaging of producers and players and sothat is when the Edinburgh Gateway Company came into being and they had 12 seasonshere…[and also ]…when the Makars [an amateur company] came in and the idea wasthat they would do a large cast Holy Week Play for which they would go out-with [sic]their own membership and invite players to appear for them, which they did, and thatwent on for as long as the Edinburgh Gateway Company and a bit longer in fact.

47

The Edinburgh Gateway Company, ‘on average, hired the theatre for 30 out of 52weeks’,

48from autumn until late spring, and, although Sadie had no jurisdiction over

the programme, the professionals soon found it prudent to gain Sadie’s approval oftheir choice of plays. According to Michael Elder, Sadie had an

underground network of Kirk Guilds all over the surrounding district built up assidu-


42

ously over many years and if she approved of a play she would organise bus parties tocome in droves to see it. We soon learned that Company policy was largely dictated bySadie.

49

Tom Fleming remembered that,

if Sadie liked a play you could be sure that it would be packed out and the run beextended by a fortnight. If Sadie did not like a play you would always know because theaudience would dwindle slightly more quickly and you could be sure she’d said ‘Oh Ireally wouldn’t bother making the trip in this cold weather to see it’.

50

The furore caused by the advertisements for the 1960 Gateway production of Lysistratacould have been prevented, had discussions with Sadie taken place. It was advertisedas ‘A rollicking excursion into impropriety’ and the minutes of a special meeting of theGateway Company Ltd., held on 23 October 1960, record that it was

clear the Church had strong objections to the performance and would terminate thetenancy of the Theatre if it were intended to proceed.

51

Some 233 years earlier a similar situation had arisen and the Presbytery of Edinburgh,on 30 November 1727, published an Admonition and Exhortation concerning Stage-Plays, part of which related to their concern over a company of players who were

Swearing, [using] Obscenity, and Expressions of a double Meaning… And there beinggood Reason, from a printed Advertisment of theirs handed about the Town, to expect,that the Plays which they shall hereafter act will be of the like pernicious Tendency.

52

In 1960 it was not the Lysistrata ‘theme’ to which the Church objected; it was theparticular version chosen by the Gateway Company. Sadie issued a press statement tothat effect, which was never printed. In this, she revealed that in 1950, at the request ofMr. Candlish and Noel Ilith, she had written to Christopher Fry asking him ‘if hewould write for us a new modern dress, reasonably small cast play, Lysistrata theme’.

53

Certainly, Sadie’s colleagues with long professional experience in theatre deferred toher judgement of the market. Moultrie Kelsall observed that, had he consulted Sadiebefore producing The Man from Thermopylae as the final Festival production by theEdinburgh Gateway Company, he would have known that Edinburgh folk do not buytickets if they cannot pronounce the name of a play.

54

Sadie Aitken’s promotional activities at the Gateway were broader even than thosealready discussed. Before taking up her role at the Gateway she had been a key figurein both Church Drama and the Scottish Community Drama Association (SCDA). Shecontinued this work when she came to the Gateway Theatre. Almost as soon as shemoved to the Gateway and had access to accommodation her thoughts returned to theChurch Drama Clubs with which she had worked in the 1920s. David Baxter hadchallenged the Kirk in 1936 to organise ‘the various church clubs, directing their efforts

43


along higher and more educative levels…before this winter is ended’.55

However, noone responded until ten years later when Sadie decided that what ‘the Church clubsneeded was some guidance in speech and movement’

56and, after discussing her ideas

with Candlish, contacted Kay Morrison who ‘came along and took a class for us in thevery first winter’.

57Morrison was a speech therapist who had trained at the Central

School of Speech and Drama. According to Anderson, she taught in Miss SybillAttwell’s Edinburgh School of Speech and Drama Training — which began in rooms inQueensferry Street Lane in 1929, before moving to 9 Moray Place in 1933 — until itclosed due to the war. She then took charge of speech therapy in Miss Glover and MissTurner Robertson’s school, Edinburgh College of Speech and Drama, now QueenMargaret University College School of Drama. This began in George Street ‘then MissGlover bought a house in Eglinton Crescent which had a beautiful basement with atheatre’.

58

Morrison continued holding classes at the Gateway and, according to Sadie, itbecame apparent after a year or two that the Gateway ‘ought to be the headquarters ofsomething where one can seek out help’.

59The leaders of all the little Church drama

groups were called together and, in 1950, the Kirk Drama Federation (K.D.F.) wasformed. Membership was open to all committed Christians and the aims of theorganisation, as stated on a membership card, were:

To correlate the activities of the members and to provide means of mutual help.To assist members in the choice, production and presentation of plays.To organise Festivals for member groups, encourage the writing and presentation of

plays and to explore the uses of drama within the Church.To encourage interest in drama, religious and secular, among the Churches.

In K.D.F. Festivals there were no placings or trophies, but a post-festival forum wasintroduced at which all the teams could meet the adjudicator who would ‘go over anyof the more glaring faults with them’.

60Although the General Assembly report on the

Gateway, which followed the Lysistrata furore of 1960, ‘advocated positive editorialdiscrimination rather than restriction’,

61the same tolerant rules did not apply to the

K.D.F. Kay Inglis62

remembered one occasion when a minister insisted that a soldierwho had to appear drunk on stage be seen to drink only a cup of tea. Objections toswearing on stage had caused the K.D.F. such problems that Candlish was forced toraise the topic at the General Assembly

63where it was decided that if it were a

workman and the swear word was in context it could remain in the play.When the Gateway closed the K.D.F. held their Festivals in St. Serf’s Church Hall in

Ferry Road at Goldenacre until the Netherbow opened. By 1974, however, moreneeded to be done to increase membership and Kay Inglis, Secretary of the InterimCommittee of the K.D.F., issued a News Flash in which tuition was offered on the useof the ‘modern aids of stereophonic tape-recorders, microphones and transistoriseddimmerboards’.

64She also outlined proposals to expand the K.D.F. to become a much

wider body — The Churches Drama Association — ‘open to all Christians in the City


44

of Edinburgh and in the new Regional Districts of Lothians and Borders’.65

TheChurches Drama Association continued until the mid-1980s, when it became apparentthat they were duplicating the work of the Netherbow Arts Centre.

Sadie Aitken’s role as promoter and producer goes even further. Despite her wide-ranging commitments and other interests on joining the Gateway, she had continuedher earlier involvement with the S.C.D.A. and in 1947 was keen to use drama to linkpeople and countries. She proposed that ‘some aspect of International drama’

66should

be introduced at the Summer School and by 1949 was involved in negotiations with theBritish Council regarding financial aid to enable foreign teams to appear in Edinburghat S.C.D.A. Festivals. Negotiations were in progress with the French Consul-General inEdinburgh regarding a team from France and he was also inquiring about youth teamsor ‘Les Jeunes Compagnies’ which would be willing to establish links with youthdrama groups in Edinburgh. In 1950, the Edinburgh International Festival Committeearranged that, whenever the address of an amateur body was obtained, it would bepassed to Sadie in order for immediate contact to be made. By 1950, arrangementswere also made for teams from Canada, France and Wales to travel to Edinburgh, andthe S.C.D.A. Committee agreed that a team from a different country each year beinvited to attend the Festival, the second week being international week. Before thearrival of the teams, Sadie was busy organising hospitality and events that wouldenhance their visit to Scotland.

67She approached the Lord Provost’s Committee, which

‘resolved that appropriate hospitality be extended’;68

Festival tickets were to be madeavailable for foreign players and, after their week of performances, morning concertsand bus tours.

The S.C.D.A. sought suggestions on ways to celebrate their ‘Semi-Jubilee’ [sic] in1951.

69Sadie proposed that, instead of holding a number of drama schools, the

Association should combine these schools and charter a vessel for a fourteen-dayround-Britain cruise calling at London, for the Festival of Britain Theatres, Cork,Dublin, Liverpool and Edinburgh. In the event, the cruise did not take place. PerhapsSadie’s vision was ahead of her time, but it is interesting to note that Walk The Plank,the Manchester-based theatre company ‘who own the only theatre ship in U.K. …when moored at Burntisland in 1996 played to an audience of 5,000’.

70

Sadie’s theatrical vision and instincts extended to many areas and she influencedthe careers of many promising young actors. Alan Nicol, adjudicator, drama teacherand S.C.D.A. Administrator from 1985 to 1991, recalled that each Spring he received aseries of phone calls from Sadie which began:

Alan dear, I was at the Academy/Queen Margaret/Kirkcaldy and I saw a youngman/woman doing their final year show and really the talent that was shown wasstaggering. Now I’ve written to Kenneth Ireland [then director of Pitlochry FestivalTheatre] about the performance, and I know how much he listens to you, if you were tophone him to endorse my opinion maybe we could get them a job for the season.

71

45


According to Nicol she was responsible for many students getting a start not only inPitlochry, but in all the Scottish Reps and also in London, but, as he explained:

most of them never knew how they were approached by Managements, but Sadie wasa force that shaped the future of Scottish Theatre.

72

One actor who does know that Sadie had a hand in his career is Paul Young whoplayed ‘young Geordie’ in the film of that name. In January 1951, the S.C.D.A.magazine, Bulletin, carried an article about a film that was to be made from DavidWalker’s novel Geordie. Applicants were asked to contact Sadie at the Gateway and asshe knew Paul she recommended him for the part of the child. Robin Anderson, formerAdministrator of Scottish Ballet, is another who knows his debt: ‘I owe it to Sadie, shehelped me so much in the early days’.

73

Pressure of work during her twenty-two years at the Gateway prevented Sadie fromactively participating in the work of the S.C.D.A., but she always kept in contact andwas ‘ever conscious of the honour of honorary membership’.

74Similarly, over the years,

her role within the K.D.F. became less active. Her workload decreased slightly when, in1965, the Royal Lyceum became Edinburgh’s Civic Theatre and the Gateway TheatreCompany in effect moved home. The Gateway, however, remained in business until1968. When, in 1968, in an interview, Wishart asked Sadie if she was sad to be‘throwing out the papers and closing the theatre’

75after twenty-two years, Sadie’s reply

was ‘Well, no. I am sort of without emotion. The time had come for me to retire and Ireally feel the Gateway has done its job’.

76

Others too thought that the Gateway had fulfilled its task. As McAra wrote:

it had fostered the art of theatre in Scotland; entertained, amused and movedappreciative audiences; given scope and opportunity to Scottish actors and to native play-wrights. It could justifiably be proud of its record.

77

Sadie, however, carried on working, despite often suffering severe pain. Kay Inglisrecalled how she remembered Sadie was ‘in quite a great deal of pain for quite a lot ofthe time’.

78Isobel Mackie recalled that she had often to search the theatre for Sadie if

there was a problem in the front of house and a call into the auditorium of ‘Where areyou Miss Aitken?’ would usually bring the reply ‘I’m in row D’. Lying flat eased thepain and she was often to be found lying on the seats of the auditorium, but Sadierefused to contemplate lying in bed at home.

Many people have speculated on Sadie’s success as manager at the Gateway, whichwas not always an easy job, as Harris, who was ‘still around as a member of theGateway Council until the 60s’,

79recalled:

I can remember a few caustic remarks by disgruntled professionals. But her goodsense, efficiency and warmheartedness beat them all. The job fitted her like a glove andshe became nothing short of an institution.

80


46

Sadie had to contend with not only the prejudice of the theatre professionals. Manychurch professionals felt that any drama in a church theatre ought to be of a religiousnature, while, according to Horace Walker, there were those ‘in theatrical circles whowere very suspicious of the Church operating at all in this field and smelt Christianpropaganda everywhere’.

81

Jimmy Mearns, a Goblin, attributed Sadie’s success to what he believed was a sixthsense. She knew in an instant if anything had gone wrong in the theatre and would bedown from her office ‘like a shot’.

82Bill Inglis said it was almost as though she had the

theatre bugged. He remembered that there was a very strict rule that forbade anyone tobring fish and chips into front of house and, if anyone tried to come in with chips, shewas ‘down that stair like a shot’.

83Sometimes the person would have hidden the parcel

inside their coat ‘and she’d stand there talking to them while the chips wereburning’.

84May Henry, in charge of the Gateway box office for many years, attributed

Sadie’s success to sheer hard work and recalled that Sadie would often work from tenin the morning till eleven o’clock at night. Perhaps her success was due to all of thosefactors, but her personality must also have helped. Her niece described her as ‘a largerthan life character and she didn’t give a tuppenny damn for what people thought ofher. She was always right and nobody was going to say she was wrong’.

85Ronald Hill

described her as a ‘Caledonian Lilian Baylis’86

and certainly many of Raymond Birt’sdescriptions of Miss Baylis sound very similar to descriptions of Sadie heard in thecourse of this research:

A terror to work for, caring for nothing and nobody but her beloved theatre and theGod with whom she was on such intimate and business terms; a woman with but onethought in her mind, one life purpose.

87

Sadie’s retirement, after over forty years of service with the Church, including twenty-two years in the Gateway, was publicly recognised when she was thanked by theGeneral Assembly in 1968. According to the Netherbow Council minutes, however,Sadie had not finished with either the Church or its theatre. On 12 March 1974, due tothe unfortunate coincidence of George Candlish’s retiral and the sudden resignation ofMiss Gray, manager of the Centre, the Netherbow was left without senior managementand Sadie stepped into the breach becoming licence holder and Acting Manager until anew appointment was made.

Sadie was awarded an MBE, but was too ill to attend the investiture at Holyrood on11 June 1983. She later travelled to London where on 13 March 1984, in BuckinghamPalace, the Queen presented her with the honour for services to theatre in Scotland.She died on 5 January 1985 and an anonymous tribute in Scene described her funeral:

Warriston Crematorium was packed with mourners. In true theatrical style - the wayshe would have wanted it - it was a full house with standing room only and as Sadie tookher final curtain, each and everyone there, relatives and friends, professional actors andamateurs, said their goodbyes.

88

47


Sadie Aitken was a remarkable woman. In addition to being a dedicated career womanin the Church of Scotland Social Services department, and later manager of theGateway, she was also an enthusiastic volunteer in the field of amateur drama. She hada consuming love of drama which she shared widely across the community, from theslums of the Pleasance to leafy suburbs like Davidsons Mains and her name wasknown the length and breadth of Scotland wherever the S.C.D.A. or K.D.F. was inoperation. She also demonstrated, in her early years of drama involvement with boysin the socially deprived area of the Pleasance, her belief in the value of communitydrama in areas of urban disadvantage.

Despite her apparent lack of professional experience, Sadie Aitken was wellqualified to take control of the Gateway Theatre in 1946. Her early background andextensive experience in the field of amateur drama, both as participant andadministrator, equipped her to deal with most contingencies and she could call uponan extensive network of contacts for advice and assistance when necessary. She was adynamic force who put a great deal of energy into drama, especially in the Gateway,which gave such Scottish writers as Robert Kemp a dedicated stage. Lack of money inthe early years did not stand in the way of her vision of staging Scottish drama and shehad no compunction about using film, music or any other means at her disposal tohelp achieve her goal of staging good quality drama in her theatre. She had excellentmarketing and promotional skills, which she used to the benefit of everyone involvedwith the Gateway, as was demonstrated by the huge membership she built up afteronly two years as manager. She was a moving force in Scottish theatre.


48

Notes1 David Hutchison, The Modern Scottish Theatre (Glasgow: The Molendinar Press, 1977).2 War-Time Drama - A Monthly Bulletin (London: British Drama League, 1939-46)3 Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘Cradle on the Tree-Top: the Edinburgh Festival and ScottishTheatre’ in Randall Stevenson and Gavin Wallace (ed) Scottish Theatre Since the Seventies(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996) p. 47.4 Albert D Mackie, ‘Forty-One Elm Row’ in The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh GatewayCompany 1953-65 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 5.5 Robert Kemp, ‘The First Seven Years’ in The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh GatewayCompany 1953-1965 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 9.6 Moultrie Kelsall, ‘The Last Five’ in The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh GatewayCompany 1953-1965 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 36.7 Donald Campbell, Playing for Scotland (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1996) p. 140.8 For details of Sadie Aitken’s earlier career and work in theatre, see Kathleen Gilmour,‘Sarah (Sadie) Ross Aitken, M.B.E.: A Study of a Career in Theatre’, International Journalof Scottish Theatre, Vol. 1, No 2 (December 2000)http://arts.qmuc.ac.uk/ijost/Volume1_no2_gilmour_g.htm pp. 1-239 Church of Scotland Home Board, Kirk and Theatre: A Report of the Special Committee setup to Consider the Function of the Gateway (Edinburgh: 1961) p. 2.10 Ian Wishart, ‘An interview with Sadie Aitken’, transcript of B.B.C. radio interview,undated.11 ‘Portrait: Sadie Aitken’, B.B.C. Radio Scotland interview, 13 May 1980.12 ‘Portrait: Sadie Aitken’, B.B.C. Radio Scotland interview, 13 May 1980.13 J. R. Junor, Life and Work Magazine (Church of Scotland) Vol. 23, No. 6, June 1968, p. 914 Ian Wishart, ‘An interview with Sadie Aitken’, transcript of B.B.C. radio interview,undated.15 Charles McAra, The Netherbow is Open (Edinburgh: Home Board of The Church ofScotland, 1972) n.p.16 Gateway News, 13 January 1947.17 Richard Butt, History, Ethnography and the Nation: The Films of Scotland Documentaries(unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh, 1996) p. 87.18 Ian Wishart, ‘An Interview with Sadie Aitken’, transcript of B.B.C. radio interview,undated.19 Ian Wishart, ‘An Interview with Sadie Aitken’, transcript of B.B.C. radio interview,undated.20 Christine Orr, ‘Running a Theatre’, Woman’s Hour, transcript of B.B.C. Radio ScotlandProgramme, 194721 Christine Orr, ‘Running a Theatre’ ,Woman’s Hour, transcript of B.B.C. Radio ScotlandProgramme, 1947.22 Christine Orr, ‘Running a Theatre’, Woman’s Hour, transcript of B.B.C. Radio ScotlandProgramme, 1947.23 Meta Gilmour private letter to author.

49


24 Christine Orr, ‘Running a Theatre’, Woman’s Hour, transcript of B.B.C. Radio ScotlandProgramme, 1947.25 Interview with author: Reg Laing, 22 August 1997.26 Christine Orr, ‘Running a Theatre’, Woman’s Hour, transcript of B.B.C. Radio ScotlandProgramme, 1947.27 Interview with author: Bill and Kay Inglis, 15 November 1996.28 Charles McAra, The Netherbow is Open (Edinburgh: Home Board of The Church ofScotland, 1972) n.p.29 Charles McAra, The Netherbow is Open (Edinburgh: Home Board of The Church ofScotland, 1972) n.p.30 Bill Abbott, private letter to author.31 ‘Portrait: Sadie Aitken’, B.B.C. Radio Scotland interview, 13 May 1980.32 Robert Kemp, ‘The First Seven Years’ in [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of TheEdinburgh Gateway Company 1953-1965 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 8.33 Stuart Harris, private letter to author.34 Interview with author: Bill and Kay Inglis, 15 November 1996.35 Gateway News (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 13 January 1947).36 Interview with author: Bill and Kay Inglis, 15 November 1996.37 Interview with author: Bill and Kay Inglis, 15 November 1996.38 Telephone interview with John Duncanson, undated.39 ‘Portrait: Sadie Aitken’, B.B.C. Radio Scotland interview, 13 May 1980.40 Interview with author: Charles Rawcliffe, 1 October 199741 Interview with author: Bill and Kay Inglis, 15 November 1996.42 Telephone interview with author: Dr David Caldwell, 6 October 1997.43 Interview with author: Bill and Kay Inglis, 15 November 1996.44 Interview with author: Isobel Mackie, 8 October 1996.45 ‘Portrait: Sadie Aitken’, B.B.C. Radio Scotland interview, 13 May 1980.46 Interview with author: Elinor Sim, undated.47 Ian Wishart, ‘An interview with Sadie Aitken’, transcript of B.B.C. radio interview,undated.48 S.C.D.A. minute books, 1963.49 Michael Elder, private letter to author.50 ‘Portrait: Sadie Aitken’, B.B.C. Radio Scotland interview, 13 May 1980.51 The Gateway Board minutes, 23 October 1960.52 Presbytery of Edinburgh, Admonition and Exhortation Concerning Stage-Plays (Publisherunknown, 30 November 1727).53 Ian Wishart, ‘An Interview with Sadie Aitken’, transcript of B.B.C. radio interview,undated.54 Moultrie Kelsall, ‘Last Five’ in [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh GatewayCompany 1953-65 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 31.55 David Baxter, ‘The Scottish Church and Drama’ in The Scottish Amateur Theatre andPlaywright’s Journal, 3, 62 (Glasgow, 4 December 1936) p. 45.56 Ian Wishart, ‘An Interview with Sadie Aitken’, transcript of B.B.C. radio interview,undated.


50

57 Ian Wishart, ‘An Interview with Sadie Aitken’, transcript of B.B.C. radio interview,undated58 Interview with author: Ida Anderson, 2 October 1997.59 Ian Wishart, ‘An Interview with Sadie Aitken’, transcript of B.B.C. radio interview,undated.60 Ian Wishart, ‘An Interview with Sadie Aitken’, transcript of B.B.C. radio interview,undated.61 Church of Scotland Home Board, Kirk and Theatre: A Report of the Special Committee SetUp to Consider the Function of the Gateway (Edinburgh: 1961) p. 2.62 Interview with author: Bill and Kay Inglis, 15 November 199663 Church of Scotland Home Board, Kirk and Theatre: A Report of the Special Committee SetUp to Consider the Function of the Gateway (Edinburgh: 1961) p. 2.64 Kay Inglis, K.D.F. News Flash (Edinburgh: Churches Drama Association, 1974) n.p.65 Kay Inglis, K.D.F. News Flash (Edinburgh: Churches Drama Association, 1974) n.p.66 S.C.D.A. minutes, 194767 S.C.D.A. minutes, 17 April 194968 S.C.D.A. minutes, 10 May 195069 S.C.D.A. minutes, 17 April 1949.70 Boilerhouse Theatre Company Edinburgh, Secrets of The Sea (Proposal Document,unpublished, 1996).71 Alan Nicol, private letter to author.72 Alan Nicol, private letter to author.73 Telephone interview with author: Robin Anderson.74 Sarah Ross Aitken, ‘Sadie Looks Back… Almost But Not Quite, to the Beginning’ inS.C.D.A. Golden Jubilee 1926-1976 (Edinburgh: S.C.D.A., 1976) p. 11.75 Ian Wishart, ‘An Interview with Sadie Aitken’, transcript of B.B.C. radio interview,undated.76 Ian Wishart, ‘An Interview with Sadie Aitken’, transcript of B.B.C. radio interview,undated77 Charles McAra, The Netherbow Is Open (Edinburgh: Home Board of the Church ofScotland, 1972) n.p.78 Interview with author: Bill and Kay Inglis, 15 November 1996.79 Stuart Harris, private letter to author.80 Stuart Harris, private letter to author.81 Horace Walker, ‘Sadie Aitken of the Gateway’ in Life and Work Magazine (February1985) p. 39.82 ‘Portrait: Sadie Aitken’, B.B.C. Radio Scotland interview, 13 May 1980.83 Interview with author: Bill and Kay Inglis, 15 November 1996.84 Interview with author: Bill and Kay Inglis, 15 November 1996.85 Interview with Elinor Sim, undated.86 Ronald Hill, ‘The Dwindling Provinces 2’ in Theatre World, VII, 438 (July 1961) p. 29.87 Raymond Birt, ‘Of the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells: Lilian Baylis: a Brilliant Memoir’in The Scottish Amateur Theatre and Playwright’s Journal (Glasgow, 1938) p. 16.

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88 Anonymous tribute, ‘East’s Affection for Sadie’ in Scene, The Magazine of the ScottishCommunity Drama Association, (Edinburgh: S.C.D.A., 1985) p. 9.


52

The Gateway Theatre Company

Donald Smith

In its relatively short life the Gateway Theatre Company established the principle of aScottish repertory company in Edinburgh, paved the way for civic support of repertorytheatre in the city, and maintained a Scottish drama contribution to the EdinburghInternational Festival in its pioneering years. But each of these achievements must beseen in the context of theatre development in Scotland during the first half of thetwentieth century.

1

The impulse towards a national drama was re-ignited in Scotland by the work ofthe Glasgow Repertory Theatre (1909–14) which was strong on artistic ambition butweak on Scottish content. This led to the establishment after World War I of TheScottish National Players, which produced over sixty new Scottish plays between 1921and 1940 without ever achieving full professional status as a company. This sameperiod saw a huge growth in amateur theatre activity in Scotland and the emergence ofthe first repertory companies employing a significant proportion of Scottish actors. In1943 the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre was formed and quickly established a leading rolein the development of a distinctively Scottish acting profession and of Scottish drama.

While Glasgow provided the main arena for these developments, the situation inEdinburgh was complicated by the existence of a flourishing commercial repertorycompany led by Wilson Barrett. As well as commanding a loyal audience atEdinburgh's Lyceum Theatre, Barrett toured regularly to Glasgow and Aberdeen,presenting a mix of established classics and popular London successes. Barrett'scompany included Scottish actors, but the company’s raison d’être was to please arelatively conservative audience with committed performances, not to nourish adramatic repertoire. However, a new factor in Edinburgh was the establishmentthrough the active patronage of the Lord Provost Sir John Falconer of the EdinburghInternational Festival of Music and Drama in 1947.

The refurbishment of what became the Gateway Theatre by the Church of Scotlandin 1946 provided the opening that was needed to bring together theatre professionalsand the national drama movement, and to respond creatively to the existence of theFestival. The key personalities and motivations in this development are dealt with in'Kirk and Theatre' in this volume, so suffice it to say that after seven years ofgroundbreaking endeavour the Gateway Theatre Company was founded in 1953 topresent annual professional seasons at the new theatre, including a regular Scottishcontribution to the Edinburgh Festival. At this juncture the venture was supported bythe Scottish Committee of the fledgling Arts Council, but not the Town Council, whichhad no tradition of supporting theatre.

The composition of the first acting companies at the Gateway clearly reflects the

53

different streams of influence that flowed into the venture, and underlines itscontinuity with earlier developments. There were experienced performers such asJames Gibson, the company's first 'Director of Productions', and Nell Ballantyne, whomoved into the profession through the Scottish National Players, as well as giftedamateurs such as George Davies for whom the Gateway offered a first professionalopportunity. There were recruits with Glasgow Citizens' experience, such as LennoxMilne and James Stuart, as well as new graduates from the College of Drama whichhad been founded alongside the Academy of Music in Glasgow in 1950, andprofessional actors from further afield attracted by this new venture. The companymanager until 1960 was Kenneth Miles, who had been assistant manager at theCitizens'. As one of the moving spirits behind the new company, Tom Fleming, whohad made his first professional appearance at the Gateway in 1947, was an importantfigure within the acting and producing team from its inception. Lennox Milne, anothermember of the founding core, later summed up the sense of energy and purpose from1953:

The driving impetus behind us in the first three or four years was, I think, the belief,that apart from the joy of acting in itself and the inescapable love of theatre, we might bebuilding another pillar of the theatre in Scotland. The foundations had been laid longbefore by the Scottish National Players, so long before that the young members of ourcompany had scarcely heard of them . . . Our purpose was roughly the same as Bridie’shad been for the Citizens': to foster the talents and work of Scottish actors andplaywrights and to provide dramatic entertainment which the people of Edinburghwould be unlikely to see otherwise.

2

The last point acknowledges the Gateway Company’s place within Edinburgh's widertheatre scene of commercial repertory and touring productions from the south.

The first Gateway season of 1953–54 had an acting company twenty-eight strongrepresenting a wide range of age and experience. From the perspective of currenttheatre conditions it is often forgotten that such companies were schools of acting andthat skills and standards were transferred in the most practical context possible —playing one production and simultaneously rehearsing another on a fortnightly cycle.The early Gateway Company is remembered by its players as a particularly supportiveenvironment probably because there was a unity of cultural purpose. Was this reflectedin a particular acting style?

Clearly a company finding its feet could not boast a finished house style, but it wasdrawing on a growing sense of a distinctively, but not exclusively, Scottish approach totheatre performance. There was an emphasis on emotional sincerity and physicalityrather than intellectual analysis, and a desire to identify with the audience rather thanhold it at an aesthetic distance. In all of this, comedy was a strong suit, but not to theexclusion of pathos and deeper emotions. Physical skills drawn from Scotland’s longtradition of variety comedy and pantomime were also brought into play, as they hadbeen in the triumphant revival of Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis at the 1948 festival. The


54

playwright Robert Kemp, who was Chairman of the Gateway Company from 1953 to1960, is explicit about this aspect of the company’s work:

We were anxious to find a native idiom in acting, and, looking back, I feel that whenthe company was at its best, we often struck upon it and produced something authenticand inimitable.

3

Kemp makes this comment in a retrospective essay of 1965 in the context of adiscussion about repertoire and the desire to concentrate on 'plays that seemed close toour audience'. One of the fascinating questions about the Gateway Company is thecomposition of its audiences. The likely answer is that, outwith the Festival, they wereprimarily Edinburgh middle-class people with an interest in Scottish culture, andperhaps a connection with the amateur theatre, if only as attenders. Due to the effortsof the Church of Scotland’s theatre manager Sadie Aitken, as noted by KathleenGilmour in the previous chapter, a wide range of church and community groups fromforth of Edinburgh were also attracted to swell audiences. Despite the best intentionsof both the Church and the company, little impact was made on the core working-classaudience for popular variety, but there was a crossover with the commercial repertoryproductions at the Lyceum and touring shows to the King's and Lyceum. Across theseaudience overlaps there was a common predilection towards comedy and a devotionto leading performers. No-one in the fifties would have considered analysing the socio-economic composition of the audience as opposed to the box office returns, butwithout such a combination of audience interests the Gateway Company, with itsrelatively small subsidies, would not have been sustainable. The loyalty of thisaudience, however, could not be presumed, and its expectations were sometimes tolimit, as well as sustain, the company’s work. Balancing this, the Edinburgh Festivalgave the Gateway Company a particular audience opportunity which in most years itseized by giving visitors to the city a distinctively Scottish theatre experience: GatewayFestival runs were often sell-outs.

Acting style and audience relationship are of course closely tied to repertoire and itis from this angle that the development of the Gateway Company can be mostproductively viewed, bearing in mind that theatre texts are not literary artefacts alonebut performance vehicles. The opening production of the Gateway Company’s firstseason was The Forrigan Reel by James Bridie,

4who had died a few months before. This

was a sound choice since the play had a successful track record and was associatedwith notable performances by Duncan Macrae in the Citizens’ production of 1944 andby Alastair Sim and Macrae at Sadler’s Wells in London. The Gateway production wasalso directed by James Gibson, who had a leading role in the Citizens' première, andshowed off company members such as George Davies, Lennox Milne, and TomFleming who were already known in Edinburgh to good effect. On an obvious level theReel was a successful Scottish comedy by the country’s most established playwright,which made an artistic statement and gave audience security.

There are, however, other interesting artistic aspects to this play. Described byBridie as a 'Ballad Opera', The Forrigan Reel is a fantastic and exuberant work which

55

– The Gateway Theatre Company –

underlines Bridie’s originality and distinctiveness. In 1952 the Edinburgh Festival hadfeatured The Highland Fair, a Ballad Opera adapted from the eighteenth-century CoventGarden work of Joseph Mitchell by Robert Kemp and directed by Tyrone Guthrie, butThe Forrigan Reel is more dramatic than musical and closer in genre to Bridie’s otherfantastic comedy Gog and Magog, which had proved a perfect vehicle for the talents ofDuncan Macrae in its Citizens' production of 1949

5. The Forrigan Reel anticipates the use

of Scottish folk music and dance in theatre, which was to multiply from the 1970s andis clearly designed to exploit the physical strengths of Scottish acting in its comic orgoliard mode. Although the play consciously deploys stereotypes of Highland,Lowland and English cultural character, there is an underlying seriousness in its themeof psychic healing and health. It clearly meets the Scottish Renaissance challenge thatScottish theatre should create its own forms and not simply wrap English dramaticstyles in a kilt. Audiences came out knowing they had attended live theatre and mayhave experienced the cathartic release of tension and constraint to which comedy in itsmore exuberant modes attains. The Forrigan Reel endured in the fifties repertoire andwas revived by the Gateway Company with Duncan Macrae in 1959.

Overall, the first season set a pattern which was maintained with some variationsuntil 1960, coinciding with the period of Robert Kemp’s chairmanship of the Board.Kemp was a team player and the Gateway Company was not beset by the tensions andconflicts that characterised the Glasgow Citizens' during the fifties. Nonetheless, Kempas both chairman and effectively playwright in residence was a guiding influenceworking closely with the senior company members. Lennox Milne acted as Director ofProductions from 1955 to 1960 while the producers of individual shows were normallymembers of the acting company, including James Gibson, Brian Carey, RoddieMcMillan and Tom Fleming. This interchange of skills was highly beneficial to thequality of the company’s work and prevented artificial divides between acting,direction, management and writing. Clearly effective theatre can only be achievedthrough an alliance of talents and this was facilitated by the Gateway Company'sworking methods.

In the difficult post-Christmas period at the start of 1954 the company produced abox office hit with the popular comedy Bunty Pulls the Strings by Graham Moffat, andin succeeding years they returned to Moffat's work with Susie Tangles the Strings in1956 and A Scrape of the Pen in 1957. These 'nostalgic old pieces' as Kemp describesthem were life-saving income earners, but also tell us something very interesting aboutaudience continuity in Scottish theatre, despite the chronic instability of theatrecompanies. Moffat was a highly successful commercial producer, writer and actor whohad experienced in his Glasgow childhood the later phases of the nineteenth-centuryNational Drama founded principally on adaptations from Scott's novels. In 1907,inspired by a visit from the Abbey Theatre, Moffat started to write new Scottish plays,but after a fall-out with Alfred Wareing the manager of the Glasgow Repertory Theatre,Moffat took his skills and his as yet unproduced satire on Scots narrowness andSabbatarianism, Causay Saints, to London, where in 1911, rechristened as Bunty Pulls theStrings, it broke box office records and then toured all over the English speaking world.Moffat never looked back, but his work provides an interesting bridge between the


56

Victorian heyday of the National Drama and the Scottish repertory movement.6

Buntyis cleverly structured and a more serious comedy than its commercial title suggests. Itstheme is that, despite the then social conventions, things are run by women, but theplay indulges rather than challenges convention and its backward looking perceptionsof Scotland. The Moffat tradition was sustained in the fifties by another commercialplaywright, T. M. Watson, whose Beneath the Wee Red Lums, Bachelors are Bold andJohnnie Jouk the Gibbet provided staple box office for the Gateway Company in 1955 and1956 after Duncan Macrae’s Scottishows tours had established them as popular hits.

The Gateway Company, however, supported a much wider range of writing duringthe fifties than the Moffat school through premières and revivals, becoming theprincipal centre of a school of Scottish playwriting at a time when the Citizens' supportfor Scottish writing had waned. Kemp's 1965 comment on this still has familiarreverberations,

You will often hear theatre people with axes to grind saying that you won’t get anaudience for a new Scots play. We proved that to be a downright lie.

7

Among these playwrights were Moray McLaren whose skilful One Traveller Returns(featured in the opening season following a 1946 Citizens' première) anticipates TomStoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in footnoting Shakespeare whilehaving some fun with psychiatry’s approach to literature. His Muckle Ado, a comedyabout stealing the Stone of Destiny, was a success in the 1956–57 season, while a laterplay The Non-Resident was produced in 1957–58. Albert Mackie had three playspremièred by the Company, though perhaps unfortunately his finely tunedcontemporary naturalism was not more widely taken up. Roddy McMillan's All inGood Faith which reflected a similar naturalistic vein aroused controversy and praise atits Glasgow première in 1954 and was presented at the Gateway in 1958. R. J. B. Sellarproduced a series of successful adaptations of Scottish literary classics for theCompany and some original comedies. Barrie, Bridie, Robert McLellan and AlexanderReid provided a stable of already established plays of literary merit, but the Companywas creative in its relationship to these writers, making McLellan's The Flouers oEdinburgh in 1954 and 1957 and Bridie's The Anatomist in 1956 keynote productions.They also premièred Reid's contemporary piece, The Wax Doll, in 1957 and McLellan’sYoung Auchinleck in 1962. Until 1960 a remarkable 70% of the repertoire was Scottishwork, neatly complemented by some commercial repertory successes, Irish plays andan occasional Scandinavian foray.

Interwoven through this pattern was the sustaining commitment of Robert Kempand his founding partners, but Kemp’s own services as dramaturg, adapter andplaywright were crucial to delivering the policy. In the earlier chapter, 'Kirk andTheatre', Kemp's strategic vision for a national Scottish theatre is described,

8but as the

fifties progressed the Gateway Company became the practical focus for his work as aplaywright. Between 1953 and 1964 Robert Kemp had ten plays produced by theGateway Company, several of which featured in more than one season. With acute

57


theatrical intelligence, Kemp gave the Gateway work which helped establish itsidentity as a truly Edinburgh theatre.

9The Other Dear Charmer, Kemp's sophisticated

take on the Robert Burns-Nancie Maclehose affair, was first produced by the GlasgowCitizens' in 1951, but its dynamic is rooted in Edinburgh's social and cultural divisionsand it served the Gateway well as both a Season (1953) and Festival (1954) mainliner.The Laird of Grippy, which was premièred by the Company in 1955, sustains theachievement of Kemp's first adaptation of Molière into Scots, Let Wives Tak Tent, whichwas revived as a Gateway Festival production in 1961. With historical comedies suchas A Nest of Singing Birds (1956) Kemp maintained the good humour and sharp socialobservation of his earlier A Trump for Jericho (1947) and Henrietta M.D. (1952), while hisexcellent Gateway Rob Roy (1960) continued the nineteenth-century stage tradition ofadapting Scott's novels.

10

Robert Kemp also wrote a series of contemporary pieces for the company, buildingon his earlier work for the Citizens' and Dundee Repertory Theatre, but the pressuretowards producing comedic successes is apparent. Conspirators (1955) is a serious pieceabout totalitarianism which never quite takes wing. The Penny Wedding by contrast is acomic romp through conservative social attitudes and national cultural ambitionswhich premièred in the 1957 season and toured nationally to packed houses in 1958.Festival Fever, a shrewd and hilarious comedy about the incongruities and paradoxes ofmixing festival internationalism, Edinburgh's bourgeois pretensions, and the realities ofScots culture in one package, had similar success in the Henry Sherek commercialseason at Edinburgh's Lyceum and Glasgow's King’s Theatre in 1956. The Man Amongthe Roses (1956), another Kemp comedy, is a deflating treatment of contemporary versedrama but threatens to become a one-joke play. Perhaps the promise of Kemp's 1947Polonaise, a haunting piece about Polish soldiers in a Fife village in wartime, was nevercompletely fulfilled, because Kemp the dramaturg was always the servant of his actorsand audiences – a truly company man. One notable example of this is his one-womanplay The Heart is Highland which was written for Lennox Milne, first produced by theGateway Company in 1954, and regularly revived. Adapted from his own novel TheHighlander, Kemp's monologue anticipates all the techniques of the modern one-person, multi-character solo show, and proved a consistent winner with the Edinburghpublic.

Before considering the later development of the company, it is worth underliningthe importance of its annual Festival productions. As well as providing a goodprologue in audience terms to each season, there was an enhanced budget and theprestige and associated publicity of representing Scottish theatre in an internationalsetting. From 1954, the first Festival after the formation of the company, until 1965when it was wound up, the Gateway Company participated every year, with the soleexception of 1959 when company members were committed to a revival of Ane Satyreof The Thrie Estaitis. The productions included The Other Dear Charmer by Robert Kemp(1954), his Conspirators (1955), Bridie’s The Anatomist (1956), The Flouers o Edinburgh byRobert McLellan (1957), Mary Stuart of Scotland by Björn Björnson (1960), Let Wives TakTent by Kemp adapted from Molière (1961), McLellan’s Young Auchinleck (1962), All inGood Faith by Roddie McMillan (1963), The Golden Legend of Shults by James Bridie


58

(1964), The Heart is Highland by Robert Kemp (1964), and The Man from Thermopylae byAda F. Kay (1965). This list exemplifies the commitment to contemporary Scottishwriting, including translations, and effectively flagshipped the company's identity. Inaddition the principle of including Scottish theatre in the Edinburgh Festival was aculturally significant one during this period, though in practical terms it depended onthe existence of a city-based producing company controlling its own venue.

Despite the company's clear policy and focused approach to audience development,however, from 1958 Gateway audiences began to decline in line with a general socialshift away from live theatre. In 1955, Wilson Barrett had announced his retirement andin the same year Duncan Macrae wound up his successful Scottishows tours. Changesin social attitude were also underway while the theatregoing public had an older andgenerally more conservative profile than the population in general. The seasonsbetween 1958 and 1961, in parallel with most Scottish theatre of the period, failed toadapt in a comprehensive or phased way to the new climate and ended up alienatingexisting, albeit reduced, audiences without attracting alternative consumers. Nowhereis this crisis more vividly described than in Moultrie Kelsall’s recollection of his firstweeks as the company’s new chairman:

In Autumn 1960 the prospect for the Edinburgh Gateway Company Limited wasbleak indeed. Our expenditure was far in excess of our income: creditors were pressing:we were living from hand to mouth on an overdraft. Then came a week when the bank,understandably, said we could borrow no more, and members of our Council had to puttheir hands in their pockets in order to make up company salaries. The Festivalproduction of Björnson's Mary Stuart in Scotland had not made the financial surpluswhich, in previous years, had helped to meet autumn deficits. The Taming of the Shrew hadbeen well received but costly to produce, and Robert Kemp’s Master John Knox thoughpartly subsidised by the Church of Scotland (for whose Quatercentenary it was written)proved costly too – it had a very large cast, and we kept it on for three weeks. In previousseasons our experience had been that a fortnight was the economic length for most of ourproductions, but our new policy would be to extend that to three weeks (excellent in sofar as it allowed more time for rehearsals) and to introduce Edinburgh audiences to thesort of plays that London theatre-goers could see at the Royal Court or the Arts. Boldlywe stepped out on three weeks of an Ionesco double bill The Lesson and The New Tenant.Our accustomed audience deserted us en bloc (we’d braced ourselves for that) but the newyoung one, which we'd hopefully believed would rush in to fill the vacuum from theUniversity and other cultural enclaves, failed to materialise. We were left with thevacuum. A sprinkling of people, few of whom had paid for their seats, greeted thehilarities of Ionesco with stony silence. As the very new Chairman I sat among them morethan once during the first week: throughout the longueurs of The Lesson I waited ontenterhooks for the loud yawn that would be the ultimate embarrassment, but mercifullyall I heard was the occasional bump of a seat going up. Since there was no advancebooking we cancelled the third week and would have done the same with the second,had there been anything ready to put on. As a compromise we thankfully clutched at Tom

59


Fleming’s offer to do A Lecture by Mr William McGonagall, Poet in place of The Lesson.Fleming’s many admirers in Edinburgh helped our houses in the second week.

11

In the Gateway Company’s case, however, there was a further complication — theLysistrata affair. Early in 1960, in recognition of the challenge of change, Robert Kemphad stepped down as Chairman (while remaining on the Board) to be succeeded by arecent addition, John Rankin. Among the plays proposed for the autumn was anAmerican adaptation of the Lysistrata of Aristophanes. The adaptation was read andrecommended for production by Kemp as part of 'the new policy which we hopedwould attract a younger and more sophisticated audience'. The theme might haveraised some Edinburgh eyebrows without creating an issue about what is a very moralplay, but pre-show publicity generated by the go-ahead Rankin advertised the play as'a rollicking excursion into impropriety'. Edinburgh, including the Gateway audience,was not ready in 1960 for this kind of hype, and the Church of Scotland which hadalways maintained a proper distance from artistic policy was forced to intervene astheatre proprietor in response to public complaints. Lysistrata was cancelled andRankin resigned, but the imputation of censorship remained, posing a major problemfor the Church. This fascinating episode is dealt with elsewhere in this volume, but itsmain significance in the longer term was to highlight a widening gap between 1950sconsensus and the cultural agenda of a new, more radical, decade.

The crisis season of 1960–61 staggered on, beset by difficulties. Even ThorntonWilder's The Skin of Our Teeth played to almost empty houses, and a promisingpremière of Maurice Fleming's The Comic was weakened by inadequate pre-productionscript development – something that the company through its close association withplaywrights had always previously done well. Nonetheless, some good did come outof this annus horribilis. Led by Moultrie Kelsall, the Company put its financial plightbefore the Town Council and for the first time civic support was forthcoming. The ArtsCouncil was also sympathetic, and Edinburgh University came up with a temporaryscenery store to enable sale of the existing property. The arguments put to Lord ProvostDunbar for support are interesting in the light of later substantial civic support fortheatre in Edinburgh:

We told him the plain truth, that the Gateway was on the rocks, and that withoutfinancial help we couldn’t start another season. We suggested that it would be a sadreflection on Edinburgh, home of the International Festival, if its only professionalrepertory company had to go out of business: we reminded him, tactfully, that GlasgowCorporation made a substantial grant to the Citizens' Theatre. He gave us a mostsympathetic hearing and sent us away hopeful.

12

The faith of the existing and new funders was not misplaced since, under MoultrieKelsall's experienced hand, the company’s work was stabilised and renewed. Theacting company was strengthened and enlarged with a mix of the early veterans suchas James Gibson, Nell Ballantyne and George Davies; experienced but youngercompany members such as Michael Elder, Marillyn Grey, Alex McCrindle and Bryden


60

Murdoch; and talented newcomers including Victor Carin, Janet Michael, Phil McCall,Morag Forsyth, Alex McAvoy and John Cairney. The principle of companydevelopment was sustained with the use of actor-producers (apart from 1962–63), andin particular Victor Carin emerged from the acting company as a talented Director ofProductions.

There was no change of company policy as regards repertoire during this periodbut there was a steady drift away from Scottish writing towards a mix of classics,contemporary theatre work from elsewhere, and a continuing representation of theNational Drama movement. This was a progressive change, though the disastrousseason of 1960–61 was a definite jolt, and in the 1962–63 season, outwith the Festivalproduction of Young Auchinleck (1962), there was only one contemporary Scottish work,again by Kemp, The Perfect Gent, and one established play, by J. M. Barrie, The LittleMinister. This was the season when a producer/director with English repertoryexperience, Kenneth Parrott, was engaged from outwith the company circle. Hesuccessfully applied an eclectic range of Sheridan, Shakespeare, Pinter and Beckett,bringing the Gateway Company into line with what was happening elsewhere inScotland and in the UK as a whole.

Audiences remained the continual challenge since overall loyalty to the Companyhad diminished in favour of a more fickle approach to individual productions. Someartistic successes, such as Ada F. Kay's The Man from Thermopylae (1961) did badly at thebox office, while in 1964 a smash-hit run of Charley's Aunt was a major boost. But thesuccesses included Pygmalion (1962), Bridie's Tobias and the Angel (1963), Jean Anouilh'sBeckett (1965) and Shakespeare, so that the Company's stability was based on acreditable artistic balance. Like other repertory theatres in the sixties, however, thisdepended on increased subsidies from both the Arts Council and, in the Gateway’scase, Edinburgh Town Council. When the decision came in 1965 to disband in favour ofthe new Edinburgh Civic Theatre at the Lyceum, the Gateway Company, despite itsdifficulties in the early sixties, was in sound artistic and economic shape. It ended lifeas it had begun – a remarkably successful and satisfying theatre enterprise.

Without the work of the Gateway, the establishment of a subsidised repertorycompany at the Lyceum would have been inconceivable. Tom Fleming became the firstArtistic Director of the new theatre and Robert Kemp was appointed to the Board.Although change and turbulence were once again just round the corner, the EdinburghCivic Theatre also assumed the Gateway’s role in providing a major Scottishproduction for the 1966 Festival in the shape of The Burdies, Douglas Young’sadaptation of Aristophanes. But these continuities conceal a waning of the NationalDrama movement which was one of the Gateway’s main raisons d’être. Rapid socialchange and a shift of creative initiative to more politically radical and often working-class playwrights overtook Scottish theatre's capacity for change. This, however, wasnot a purely theatrical problem. After the hungry thirties and post-war renewal,Scottish society had stagnated as fifties prosperity gradually developed. The vigorousHome Rule movement of the forties had gone off the boil; history it seemed hadbypassed Scotland. It is surely no coincidence that the seventies were to bring politicalfireworks and an explosive revival of distinctively Scottish theatre. Perhaps the

61


vividness of these later developments has obscured our capacity to understand thework of earlier Scottish dramatists in their own context and on their own merits. Thosewho sustain live theatre over the longer term will recognise much in, and learn morefrom, the achievements of the Gateway Company.


62

Notes1 For the best general account of this period, see David Hutchison, ‘1900 to 1950’ in BillFindlay (ed), A History of Scottish Theatre (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998) pp. 250-2.2 [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh Gateway Company 1953-65 (Edinburgh:The St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 16.3 [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh Gateway Company 1953-65 (Edinburgh:The St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 11.4 See ‘The Forrigan Reel’ in James Bridie, John Knox and Other Plays (London: Constable& Co, 1949).5 Bridie’s Gog and Magog has never been published.6 The best account of Moffat’s career is in Donald Campbell, Playing for Scotland – AHistory of the Scottish Stage 1715–1965 (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1996) pp. 91-8.7 [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh Gateway Company 1953-65 (Edinburgh:The St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 13.8 See also Bill Findlay, Motivation and Method in Scots Translations, Versions andAdaptations of Plays from the Historic Repertoire of Continental European Drama(unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh, 2000) pp.52–91.9 It is useful to remember that the Company’s formal title was The Edinburgh GatewayCompany.10 Many of Robert Kemp’s plays remain in print published by Brown, Son & FergusonLtd, 4–10 Darnby Street, Glasgow G41 2SD, who produce a catalogue of Scottish dramapublications.11 [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh Gateway Company 1953-65 (Edinburgh:The St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 31.12 [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh Gateway Company 1953-65 (Edinburgh:The St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 33.

63


The Founding of a Modern Tradition:

Robert Kemp's Scots Translations of

Molière at the Gateway

Bill Findlay

Robert Kemp (1908–1967) was born in Orkney, where his father was a Church ofScotland minister. At the start of the First World War his family moved, first to Buchan,then to near Aboyne in Aberdeenshire. Kemp attended school and university inAberdeen, then in 1929 joined The Manchester Guardian as a journalist. He moved to theBBC in London in 1937, working in the Features and Drama Department. From therehe achieved his ambition to return to Scotland, and from 1942 to 1948 he worked forthe BBC in Edinburgh producing arts programmes. Thereafter he followed a freelancecareer as a journalist, critic, dramatist and novelist, writing for newspapers, the stage,radio and television. His output was prolific, and by the time of his death he hadwritten more than thirty plays, five novels and numerous scripts for radio andtelevision. In addition to his work for the stage as a playwright, translator and adapter(famously of Sir David Lindsay‘s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis), Kemp made asignificant contribution to the advancement of Scottish theatre through his longassociation with the Edinburgh Gateway Company, which he co-founded and chaired.

1

Kemp pioneered Scots translation of Molière's work with Let Wives Tak Tent (1948),his 'free translation into Scots'

2of L'École des femmes. The great success it enjoyed –

premièring at the Gateway in Edinburgh and then playing the Citizens’ Theatre inGlasgow in 1948 and the Embassy Theatre in London in 1949 — seems to have inspiredin close succession three translations into Scots of other Molière plays, but for theamateur stage, by Gordon Croll in 1950 (Tartuffe) and 1951 (The Willy Nilly Leech), andby James Scotland in 1954 (A Surgeon for Lucinda).

3Kemp followed up on the success of

Let Wives Tak Tent with, in 1955, The Laird o' Grippy, his 'adaptation into Scots'4

ofMolière's L'Avare. (He also translated from French Knock, or The Triumph of Medicine, byJules Romains, presented at the Gateway Theatre in season 1948–49, and broadcast onBBC Television in 1954; however, although the setting is relocated to Scotland andsome of the characters speak Scots, for the most part the dialogue is in standardEnglish.

5)

With those two translations, Let Wives Tak Tent and The Laird o’ Grippy, doneexpressly for the Gateway, Kemp, it can be claimed, founded not only what hasbecome a modern tradition of translating Molière into Scots — as evidenced by the

65

work of subsequent translators such as Victor Carin, Hector MacMillan, and LizLochhead, and by productions discussed in Noël Peacock’s Molière in Scotland 1945-1990

6— but thereby a tradition, more generally, of translating foreign drama into Scots

for the stage. To put this in perspective, before Kemp, it would seem that the onlyprevious translation into Scots of a play is John Burel’s, from Latin, of Pamphilusspeakand of Lufe, made in the late sixteenth century.

7It can therefore be said with

confidence that the translation into Scots of classic and contemporary plays, which wehave come to accept as an established feature of contemporary Scottish theatre,

8is a

development with its genesis in Kemp’s groundbreaking example with Molière at theGateway in 1948 and 1955 — an example that directly influenced, for example, anothersignificant Gateway figure, Victor Carin, when he translated into Scots Molière's TheHypochondriack for the Gateway in 1963 (going on to translate into Scots, for othertheatres, Goldoni’s The Servant o' Twa Maisters — the début production in October 1965by the Edinburgh Civic Theatre Company, based at the Royal Lyceum, to which theGateway handed over the provision of professional repertory in the capital — andHeinrich von Kleist's The Chippit Chantie).

9The thrust of this essay will be to offer an

exploration of factors influencing how it came about that Kemp, in (unwittingly)founding a tradition, was drawn to render Molière into Scots for the GatewayCompany.

The immediate inspiration for him was the visit of French theatre companies toEdinburgh with productions of plays by Molière. In 1945, for the first time in theirhistory, the Comédie-Française performed in Scotland, bringing productions ofMolière's Tartuffe and L'Impromptu de Versailles (as well as Phèdre and Le Barbier deSeville). These were performed in Edinburgh and Glasgow to enthusiastic reception.Two years later, in 1947, the celebrated Compagnie Jouvet du Théâtre de l'Athénée,from Paris, appeared at the first Edinburgh International Festival; and of the two playspresented, one was Molière's L'École des femmes. As Cordelia Oliver notes, 'Kemp wasthere in the audience, ripe for reception of the seeds of an idea which came to fruitionin [...] Let Wives Tak Tent'.

10Indeed, so inspired was Kemp that it is reported he

translated the play 'into Scots in less than a fortnight'.11

That the French production wasstaged in Edinburgh in September 1947 and Let Wives Tak Tent was premièred at theGateway Theatre in February 1948 confirms both how quickly Kemp worked and howeager he was to follow up on the Festival success of the French language production.On learning how his company's visit had inspired a Scots Molière, Louis Jouvet sent asupportive letter to Kemp on 23 January 1948:

Notre visite à Edimbourg provoque indirectement cette naissance de Let Wives Tak Tentau Gateway Theatre. Ainsi Molière une fois encore, gagne le coeur d'un public sensibledont nous nous souvenons avec une profonde gratitude.

[Our visit to Edinburgh has (indirectly) induced the birth of Let Wives Tak Tent at theGateway Theatre. In this way Molière once again is reaching the hearts of an appreciativeaudience which we remember with deep gratitude.]

12

And just as a French company visiting Scotland with L'École des femmes inspired Let


66

Wives Tak Tent, another that brought L'Avare 'induced the birth of' The Laird o' Grippy:Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire, which presented L'Avare at the EdinburghInternational Festival in 1953.

There seems to be significance in the frequency with which prestigious Frenchtheatre companies — the above as well as others — performed in Edinburgh in theimmediate post-war period: 1945 (Comédie-Française), 1947 (Jouvet's company), 1948(Jean-Louis Barrault's company), 1951 (Le Théâtre de L'Atelier), 1953 (Théâtre NationalPopulaire), and 1954 (Comédie-Française).

13The number of visits suggests a special

receptivity to French theatre and drama on the part of Edinburgh audiences that placesKemp's response as a translator in a larger context. In an article in The Scots Review inAugust 1947 Kemp discusses how awareness of the 'Auld Alliance is much lessprevalent in France than in Scotland' because the Scottish nation has 'descended into asort of oblivion', yet he sees reason to 'take heart' from contemporary developments:

To-day for the first time in centuries the name of Scotland is beginning to meansomething in certain pockets of France. That was one of the discoveries I made during ashort tour which I undertook on behalf of the B.B.C. to French towns now bound by asisterly tie to certain of our own burghs.

The reason for this 'sisterly tie' was the substantial aid-in-kind that Scots offered toFrance during and after the war:

When the war swept through western France in the summer of 1944, leaving a trail ofdevastated cities behind it, there was a wave of sympathy with the civilian victims of theattack on Germany. Scottish towns came forward and did what they could to relievedistress. Edinburgh sent cases of clothing to Caen and of books to the devastateduniversity there; Glasgow worked in Brest through mobile canteens and received Brestchildren whose starved bodies needed a healthy regime; other towns made similargestures. The work of numerous committees [...] mounted up and at last became a tributeof friendship, warm-hearted, spontaneous, prompt, which has left a deep impression.

14

It is perhaps a reflection of this that, as Noël Peacock notes, the Comédie-Française'sfirst visit to Edinburgh in 1945 was 'arranged at the express wish of the actors'.

15It is

relevant to mention, too, that, in 1947, an anonymous French writer contributed anEdinburgh Festival preview article to The Scotsman on the prominent French theatricaland musical input to that year's programme, and remarked:

The Auld Alliance, which with the numerous bonds now uniting the main Scottishcities with French towns, is more alive than ever before, is given due pre-eminence andrecognition by the fact that L'Orchestre Colonne will have the honour of inaugurating theFestival. There could not be a more fitting gesture.

16

This gesture, and the privileged place given orchestral and theatre companies from

– The Founding of a Modern Tradition –

67

France, led to Radio Diffusion de Paris giving no fewer than eleven broadcasts on thesubject of the Edinburgh Festival that year.

17

The mood of reciprocity engendered by the war, and its rekindling of the AuldAlliance between Scotland and France, can be seen in the welcome given to a numberof visiting French companies as indicated; it can also be viewed as a background factorshaping Kemp's decision to give Molière a Scots voice. It should be said, too, thatKemp's keen interest in Scotland's history and culture — as well as his ‘francophilia’(as attested by his late son, Arnold)

18— meant that he had an informed knowledge of

his country's historic links with France; links which his Scots Review article shows heactively wished to see reforged. Indeed, Noël Peacock suggests that the Frenchinfluence on Scotland's 'political, intellectual and linguistic heritage provided a verypropitious climate for the reception of Molière in the postwar renaissance of theScottish theatre' in which Kemp played an instrumental role;

19and J. T. Low asserts that

the Scots translation medium fashioned by Kemp for his Molière translations had theobject and effect of 'vividly illustrating the links between French and the Lowlandtongue'.

20

Kemp made a number of visits to France before and after the war, often for the BBC.One such visit related to the Comédie-Française's performance of Molière's Le Bourgeoisgentilhomme at the Edinburgh International Festival in 1954, about which he wrote anenthusiastic advance notice in the Edinburgh Evening News:

In July the BBC sent me to Paris to see this very production, and I make bold topromise that you will love it. If you don't know French, I think it would still be possibleto get enjoyment from the performance by reading a translation first. If you do knowFrench but are, like me, in a lamentable state of rustiness, still read the translation or,better still, the original French. This is what I did before my visit to Paris, and so wonder-ful is the speaking of this company that I was able to understand almost every word. Youwill enjoy the larger-than-life playing of Louis Seigner as M. Jourdain.

21

Of particular interest in these comments is Kemp's reference to the lead actor's 'larger-than-life' acting style, since this was an important factor at work in his decision torender Molière into Scots. Added confirmation of this is provided by Arnold Kemp,who casts light on the circumstances surrounding the composition of his father'sMolière translations, as reported in paraphrase by Noël Peacock:

During visits to Paris before and after the war ... [Kemp] was struck by similarities,particularly in the use of mime and in the flowing body language, between the Frenchstyle and that of certain Scottish comedians and actors, in particular Macrae. He wasstruck again by this at the first Edinburgh Festival in 1947 by the acting of Jouvet.

22

Arnold Kemp’s own words further confirm this, and offer some additional insights intohis father’s views:

[H]e had become convinced that it would be possible to evolve a Scottish dramatic


68

style. […] His particular theory was that the theatre in Scotland had not been destroyed inthe dark night of the Reformation; rather, it had gone underground into the ‘low theatre’or music hall. And he detected in the art of the Scottish comedians something distinctive,more physical than the brittle artificial naturalism of the English stage, more reminiscentof French theatre with its mime and flowing movements. He saw his theory personifiedin the figure of the late Duncan Macrae, for whom his translations of Molière into Scotswere written (although Macrae, lured by the rich pickings in pantomime, only performedin the first).

23

In preparing his Scots adaptations of Molière, then, Kemp had specifically in mind thatthe lead roles of Oliphant in Let Wives Tak Tent (Arnolphe in the original) and theeponymous Laird o' Grippy (Harpagon) would be played by Duncan Macrae. Macraedid play Oliphant in the first production in 1948, and enjoyed such success with it thathe performed the role in subsequent productions till 1961; however, financialconsiderations, as alluded to by Arnold Kemp above, forced him to turn down Kemp'soffer to create the role of the Laird in 1955. (The part was played by John Laurie, who,like subsequent lead actors in Molière-into-Scots, such as Walter Carr, Andrew Keir,Fulton Mackay, and Rikki Fulton, drew on the same Scots comic acting tradition asMacrae, with its pantomime and popular theatre influences.)

24

It is significant that the French productions of L'École des femmes and L'Avare thatcame to Edinburgh in 1947 and 1954, respectively, had been acclaimed in France for thenew emphasis that they gave to the plays' comic potential, and that the performancesby Jouvet and Vilar were singled out for particular praise.

25The nature of those

performances, with their commedia dell'arte influences, resembled the 'larger-than-lifeplaying' of Louis Seigner in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme which Kemp remarked on, and asis confirmed by reviews of the Edinburgh visits. For example, those of L'Avare makereference to Vilar's performance being 'elaborately grotesque', displaying 'comichistrionics', and borrowing from 'music hall', 'clowning', 'farce' and so on.

26Noël

Peacock, drawing on the Edinburgh reviews, notes Jouvet's 'often pantomimicalternation of triumph and despair'.

27The Scotsman reviewer wrote:

Louis Jouvet's company [...] played Molière's comedy with such verve, grace andhumour that it might be wondered why British actors have neglected Molière. The timewhen he was an important influence upon our stage and adaptations of his were made inEnglish has long since passed, but to play him now, in all his comic plenitude, would beonly to reciprocate the homage which France has rendered to Shakespeare.

28

This new way of seeing Molière, through releasing his 'comic plenitude', provided aspecial opportunity for the Scottish stage, as Kemp saw, to draw on the comicresources of Scots and a native acting style that was both closely allied to the languageand, serendipitously, resembled French practice as exemplified by Jouvet and Vilar(and later, Seigner).

In truth, Kemp's choice of Macrae in 1948 may have been partly influenced by boxoffice considerations, since by that time he 'had attained something like superstar


69

status in his native country'.29

The Gateway Company then comprised professional andamateur performers and was struggling to become established. Kemp later wrotegratefully of the first night of Let Wives Tak Tent as 'a never-to-be-forgotten occasion'because of Macrae's performance and presence in the cast: 'The theatre was full and wehad a feeling that although the Gateway was "off the beaten track", as many told us,something could be achieved there'.

30But more significant in Kemp's preference for

Macrae was the French affinity that many critics saw in his acting. As Priscilla Barlownotes in her biography of Macrae, in that period 'comparison with [Jean-Louis]Barrault, the doyen of mimes, became a feature of many appraisals of his acting'.

31

Kemp, as we have seen, was aware, too, of the similarities between French acting style,with its use of mime and 'flowing body language', and that of certain Scottish actors,Macrae quintessentially. Barlow offers further confirmation of this: 'Robert Kempexplained the apparent flowering of a truly Scottish acting style as an inborn affinitywith the French traditions of stylized mime and identified Macrae as a masterexponent of the form'.

32An impression of Macrae's French-like technique, and of its

deviation from more conventional stage training, may be gleaned from the recollectionof a fellow Scottish actor, Fulton Mackay:

[Macrae played] Molière with gesture and movements that were all wrong forseventeenth-century drama by RADA standards, but obviously more right and thrillingthan orthodoxy could ever imagine. One arm would be outstretched in defiance only tobe turned up by a twist of the wrist and a repositioning of the other hand, fingers apart,on his breast to sycophantic suppliance; or again, fingers curled before the face turnedprofile in almost feminine pretence of distaste, and bows that were not conventionallygracious, but were perilous swoops to the earth in mock subservience.

33

It is illustrative of the link between language and acting style that the 1955 productionof The Laird o' Grippy, in which John Laurie took the part intended for Macrae, provedoverall less satisfactory than Let Wives Tak Tent. John Laurie received praise but therewas a comparative deficiency, for a reason diagnosed by the reviewer in The GlasgowHerald:

It may be that Richard Matthews, who produced, is, as he himself acknowledged in acurtain speech, a Sassenach, with uncertain notions about the Scottish language, andconsequent hesitancy about controlling its pace and the freedom of movement that couldand should go with it. It may again be that some members of the cast, themselves notquite at home with the language, were wooden and restrained where they should haveflashed from glorious capering to bemused stillness.

34

A contemporary review of Let Wives Tak Tent noted that Macrae was 'perfectly cast asMr Oliphant' and gave a 'lesson [...] on how to speak Scots';

35a verbal ease which

allowed the release of a repertoire of flowing facial and bodily gestures deriving fromobservation of the characteristic behaviour of native speakers of Scots. Macrae's facility


70

with Scots had a larger dimension to it, being a reflection of his lifelong commitment toan independent Scottish theatre as 'an authentic Scottish voice for Scottish culture'.

36

His fellow actor Andrew Cruickshank recorded that Macrae, in common with himselfand other contemporaries such as Fulton Mackay and Roddy McMillan, was ‘acutelyconscious of language, as between English, Scots, Lallans. And ultimately the roots ofidentity'.

37Macrae thus saw the Scots language as a key element in forging a national

theatre identity, in part because it served to facilitate an indigenous acting style, asembodied by his own practice. Moreover, as Priscilla Barlow observes, 'his constantlyreiterated belief [was] that the spoken word from the stage was the most effective wayof keeping the Scots language vigorously alive'.

38

In addition to his special talents as a performer, Macrae's beliefs would haveappealed to Kemp. One reason for translating L'École des femmes into Scots, Kemp said,was 'to give Scottish actors a classical piece to exercise themselves on'.

39His adaptation

for the Edinburgh International Festival of older Scots drama such as Sir DavidLindsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1948 and 1949)

40— in which Duncan Macrae

triumphantly acted — and Alan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd (1949),41

were also partlyconceived out of the need to give 'valuable training' to actors in speaking classicalScots.

42Given the limited number of such texts in the Scottish dramatic tradition, which

Kemp noted,43

the deficiency could be made up through translations and the writing oforiginal stage plays in Scots (of which he wrote a number, commencing with WhuppityStoorie in 1944). Let Wives Tak Tent and The Laird o' Grippy should therefore also be seenagainst this larger context of Kemp's wish to provide Scots language playtexts thatwould, in common with Macrae's goal, contribute both to advancing indigenoustheatre and to 'keeping the Scots language vigorously alive'. Of relevance here is that afeature on Macrae in Glasgow Unity's periodical, Scots Theatre (May 1947), stated:

There is no doubt that Macrae stands at the head of a number of Scots actors who arecreating a native tradition in the art, and it would be a pity if the new playwrights whoare now showing so much promise, failed to keep up supplies of worthwhile work so thatthese artists can remain in Scotland and feel that they are contributing to the developmentof Scotland's theatre. Too often it happens that they are attracted south to London andkept there.

44

Assessments of Kemp's work emphasise this aspect of his achievement in contributingto providing 'supplies' of Scots playtexts by way of original plays, adaptations andtranslations. For example, one writer concludes, 'his importance in Scottish theatricalhistory lies in the crucial part he played in reviving popular interest in a Scottishtheatre played in the Scottish language';

45and another writes:

His contribution [to Scottish theatre] must be measured not only in terms of his owncommitment to the movement but also in terms of the plays and translations that hewrote, which proved that Scots could be a valid literary language for the stage.

46

Noteworthy in this context is that Kemp praised other writers who similarly added to


71

the Scots-language repertoire for the stage. For example, writing to Douglas Youngregarding The Puddocks, Young's translation, in 1958, of Aristophanes' The Frogs, Kempenthused: 'Many congratulations on a considerable piece of work, which has added to thecanon of writing in Scots' [author’s emphasis].

47

Complementary to Kemp's work as a Scots-language writer were his efforts toestablish a permanent theatre in Edinburgh committed to Scottish work. After TheSatire of the Three Estates, his acclaimed adaptation of Sir David Lindsay's Ane Satyre ofthe Thrie Estaitis, had been performed at the 1948 Edinburgh Festival, he wrote in theintroduction to the published text:

For the performance of the Satire a body officially known as ‘The Scottish Theatre’ hadbeen brought into existence. It was an apt name for there were in fact gathered together init many whose energies have been devoted to a native development of the drama.

48

One such was Kemp himself, who could not but be conscious of standing in a directline of twentieth-century efforts to secure a Scottish theatre (efforts invariably part-inspired, as in Kemp’s case, by the achievements of Irish theatre

49). The director of The

Satire of the Three Estates, Tyrone Guthrie, for example, had been a producer in the 1920swith the Scottish National Players, one of whose founding objectives was '[t]o developScottish national drama through [...] productions [...] of plays of Scottish life andcharacter'.

50Also, a number of the actors in The Three Estates had started their careers

with the Scottish National Players, and Kemp noted with feeling: 'To know that amongthe actors and actresses there were many old friends, with whom I had often discussedsome such occasion without really dreaming that we should live to see it come true —that was a reward which comes to few'.

51The 'occasion' he meant was less The Three

Estates per se than what it represented in bringing into existence 'a body officiallyknown as "The Scottish Theatre"'.

The realisation of this coincided with other efforts in the same direction but with theaim of establishing a building-based company. In Kemp's words: 'In the yearsimmediately following the Second World War several people were intent uponfounding a Scottish theatre in Edinburgh'.

52This goal was achieved through the launch

of the Gateway Company in 1953 as Edinburgh’s professional repertory theatre, which,as noted earlier, it remained till 1965 when the Edinburgh Civic Theatre Companybased at the Royal Lyceum took over that role.

53Kemp, who had had an earlier

involvement with the Gateway in the 1940s when it presented a mixed programme ofamateur and professional work, co-founded the Gateway Company and had asustained association with it throughout its lifespan as its chairman and as acontributing playwright (as has been said, both of his Molière translations werepremièred there; though the first was staged before the company had become fullyprofessional). Lennox Milne, an actress who became closely identified with theGateway and its Scottish policy, recalled:

The driving impetus behind us in the first three or four years was, I think, the beliefthat [...] we might be building another pillar of the theatre in Scotland. The foundations


72

had been laid long before by the Scottish National Players [...] But the foundations hadremained deserted for years until James Bridie founded Glasgow Citizens' Theatre [in1943] and Scotland had a theatre indeed. Our purpose was roughly the same as Bridie'shad been for the Citizens': to foster the talents and work of Scottish actors andplaywrights.

54

Moultrie Kelsall, another actor closely associated with the Gateway, who also sat on thetheatre board and served as Chairman (1960–65), similarly recalled:

our missionary zeal for providing a stage on which native drama could grow. In thataim we were the lineal successors of the Scottish National Players, who pursued it withsingle-minded zeal in the years between the two world wars.

55

These statements offer further confirmation of that sense of continuity informingactivists' efforts in the post-war period to secure an indigenous theatre; a movement inwhich Robert Kemp was one of the most prominent and instrumental figures, as seenmost markedly in his co-founding of the Gateway Company as a more permanentembodiment of 'The Scottish Theatre' name and ideal attached to the EdinburghFestival production of his Three Estates.

Accompanying the Gateway's promotion of native drama was development of anindigenous acting style, as Kemp stated: 'We were anxious to find a native idiom inacting, and, looking back, I feel that when the company was at its best, we often struckupon something authentic and inimitable'.

56This returns us to the link that was seen

between the Scots language and performers such as Duncan Macrae, and helps toexplain why drama in Scots — by writers such as Kemp, Robert McLellan andAlexander Reid — played such a prominent role in Gateway programming; that is, thegoal of nurturing a drama and a performance style that was distinctively Scottish hadto entail, too, encouraging writing in Scots. As Moultrie Kelsall records:

When we started in 1953 our policy was very definitely to include a large proportionof Scots plays. We produced far more than any of the other repertory companies inScotland: in our first season nine out of eleven plays were Scottish: in our second, twelveout of fifteen.

57

Of Scottish plays programmed over the company‘s lifetime, a substantial number wasin Scots, and included important work such as Robert McLellan's The Flouers oEdinburgh and Young Auchinleck, and Alexander Reid's The Lass Wi' the Muckle Mou andThe Warld‘s Wonder.

58

In sum, Kemp's decision to translate Molière into Scots should therefore also be setwithin this broader context of his support during the same post-war period for aScottish theatre, in subject, word and acting, as realised through establishment of theGateway Company, which premièred his two Molière translations; for the Gateway, itwas claimed, 'undoubtedly owes more to him than to any other single person'.

59This in

turn can be seen as part of a matrix of motivational factors as suggested above: renewal

73


of the Auld Alliance; the visit of French theatre companies to Edinburgh; Frenchproductions of Molière that released his 'comic plenitude' through an acting style thathad a parallel with Scottish practice; the intimate link between that actorly practice andthe Scots language; and the need to provide playtexts in Scots both as 'exercise' foractors in speaking Classical Scots and as a contribution to building up the repertoire ofScots-medium plays, since the historic repertoire — with which Kemp was veryfamiliar, witness his adaptations of Lindsay and Ramsay — was decidedly meagre.

Arnold Kemp wrote that his father ‘believed passionately that the distinctivetraditions of Scotland should be celebrated, sustained and, if possible, renewed’.

60What

his father could not have known was that, with his Scots Molières for the GatewayTheatre, he was not only celebrating and sustaining the Scots language, and dramawritten in it, but laying the foundations for a tradition of Scots stage translation thatwould make a notable contribution to that renewal of indigenous theatre advocatedand enacted by the Gateway Company and brought to fuller fruition by subsequentcompanies and individuals in the four decades since the Company’s voluntary demisein 1965.


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Notes1 These biographical details have been drawn from, and more are provided in: a profileof Kemp by David Douglas, ‘Festival Profile: Adding Scottish Flavour to InternationalBrew’, in The Glasgow Herald of 26 August 1961; the biographical note prefaced to SirDavid Lyndsay, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaites, ‘Acting Text by Robert Kemp’(Edinburgh: Polygon, 1985) n.p.; Trevor Royle, The Mainstream Companion to ScottishLiterature (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1993) pp. 168-69; and Arnold Kemp, ‘The BourgeoisBohemian‘, The Scottish Review, 23 (Autumn 2000) pp. 33-9 [reprinted as a posthumoustribute to Arnold Kemp, retitled ‘A Premature Death’, in The Scottish Review, 2:6(Autumn 2002) pp. 38-43].2 From the title-page to Robert Kemp, Let Wives Tak Tent: A Free Translation into Scots(Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1983). The Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre programmefor the 1948 production has it described on the cover as ‘An Adaptation’, whereas theinside title-page gives it as ‘A free translation into Scots’ (Scottish Theatre Archive,Glasgow University Library, STA E.x.5).3 Regarding the translations by Croll and Scotland, for further details see: NoëlPeacock, Molière in Scotland 1945-1990 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French &German Publications, 1993) pp. 12, 29-30, 67-9, 183-84, 239, 241. Croll’s Tartuffe and TheWilly Nilly Leech (Le Médecin malgré lui) were performed at the Gateway in 1950 and1951, respectively, but in non-professional productions. Scotland’s A Surgeon for Lucinda(L’Amour médecin) 1954, in addition to its popularity on the amateur circuit, wasperformed professionally in 1957 for broadcast on Radio Scotland, and starred DuncanMacrae (ibid., p. 184). For details of productions of Kemp’s Molières, see ibid., pp. 44-60 for Let Wives Tak Tent, and pp. 165-72 for The Laird o’ Grippy.4 From the title-page to Robert Kemp, The Laird o’ Grippy: An Adaptation into Scots ofL’Avare by Molière (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1987).5 Typescripts of Kemp’s translation of Knock are held in the Scottish Theatre Archive,University of Glasgow Library (STA H.o.Box6/8) and The Mitchell Library, Glasgow(884599/SD f 822.914 Rom 3/KNO). Knock is listed in season 1948/49 in ‘PlaysPresented at the Gateway from 1946 to 1957’, in Alexander Reid, Kirk and Drama(Edinburgh: Gateway Theatre, [?1958]) p. 15. For information about the televisionbroadcast of Dr Knock (the title he gives) I am indebted to Michael Elder’s typescriptmemoirs of his years as an actor at the Gateway, What Do You Do During the Day?: AReminiscence Mainly About the Edinburgh Gateway Company, now published (Edinburgh:Eldon Productions, 2003). He performed in that production.6 Noël Peacock, Molière in Scotland 1945-1990 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French& German Publications, 1993). For other discussion of Molière into Scots, see: BillFindlay, ‘Talking in Tongues: Scottish Translations 1970-1995’, in Randall Stevenson andGavin Wallace (ed), Scottish Theatre Since the Seventies, (Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press, 1996) p. 191 and passim; Randall Stevenson, ‘Re-enterHoughmagandie: Language as Performance in Liz Lochhead’s Tartuffe’, in RobertCrawford and Anne Varty (ed), Liz Lochhead’s Voices, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress, 1993) pp. 109-23; Randall Stevenson, ‘Triumphant Tartuffification: Liz

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Lochhead’s Translation of Molière’s Tartuffe’, in Bill Findlay (ed), Frae Ither Tongues:Essays on Modern Translations into Scots, (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, forthcoming2004); Ronald Alexander, ‘Molière: Translated by Hector MacMillan’, Edinburgh Review,105 (2000) pp. 55-63; Bill Findlay, ‘Motivation and Mode in Victor Carin’s stagetranslations into Scots’, in Margaret Rose and Emanuela Rossini (ed), Italian ScottishIdentities and Connections, (Edinburgh: Italian Cultural Institute, [2001]) pp. 121-39. Themodern tradition of translating Molière into Scots shows no sign of abating: a thirdMolière translation by Liz Lochhead, of Le Misanthrope, was staged by Edinburgh’sRoyal Lyceum Theatre in 2002 with the title Miseryguts; see Liz Lochhead, Miseryguts &Tartuffe: Two plays by Molière (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002).7 See Bill Findlay, ‘Beginnings to 1700’, in Bill Findlay (ed), A History of Scottish Theatre,(Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998) pp. 47-50. A reference exists to what may have been anearlier translation, performed in 1574: Patrick Authinleck’s Comedy of the Forlorn Son (aplay found in different languages in a number of European countries). See ibid., p. 16.8 See Bill Findlay, ‘Talking in Tongues: Scottish Translations 1970-1995’, in RandallStevenson and Gavin Wallace (ed), Scottish Theatre Since the Seventies, (Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press, 1996) pp. 186-97.9 See Bill Findlay, ‘Motivation and Mode in Victor Carin’s stage translations into Scots’,in Margaret Rose and Emanuela Rossini (ed), Italian Scottish Identities and Connections,(Edinburgh: Italian Cultural Institute, [2001]) pp. 121-39.10 Cordelia Oliver, Magic in the Gorbals ([?Ellon]: Northern Books, 1999) p. 10. Ananonymous programme note in the Citizens’ Theatre programme for the 1948production of Let Wives Tak Tent (see note 2 above) states: ‘Its [L’École des femmes’]performance by the great French actor, M. Louis Jouvet and his company at last year’sEdinburgh Festival prompted Robert Kemp to undertake this present adaptation’.11 From David Douglas’s profile of Kemp in The Glasgow Herald, 26 August 1961. Seenote 1 above.12 The quotation and translation are from Noël Peacock, ‘Robert Kemp’s Translations ofMolière‘, in Bill Findlay (ed), Frae Ither Tongues: Essays on Modern Translations into Scots,(Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, forthcoming 2004). He has informed me that the letterwas held by Kemp’s late son, Arnold.13 See the list of productions in Noël Peacock, Molière in Scotland 1945-1990 (Glasgow:University of Glasgow French & German Publications, 1993) pp. 238-41. Informationabout most of those French productions can also be found in: Donald Campbell, ABrighter Sunshine: A Hundred Years of the Edinburgh Royal Lyceum Theatre (Edinburgh:Polygon, 1983) pp. 128-33.14 ‘Robert Kemp tells of his discovery of a “new Alliance”’, The Scots Review, 8:4(August 1947) p. 56.15 Noël Peacock, Molière in Scotland 1945-1990 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French& German Publications, 1993) p. 5.16 ‘Festival Pre-View: France’s Contribution — Reflections by a Frenchman’, TheScotsman, 16 August 1947, p. 4. The anonymous author may have been Joseph Chiari,who contributed occasional pieces on French-Scottish topics to The Scotsman in thisperiod.

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17 ‘Festival Notes’, The Scotsman, 23 August 1947, p. 4.18 Arnold Kemp, ‘The Bourgeois Bohemian‘, The Scottish Review, 23 (Autumn 2000) p.38.19 Noël Peacock, Molière in Scotland 1945-1990 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French& German Publications, 1993) p. 8.20 John Thomas Low, ‘Mid Twentieth Century Drama in Lowland Scots’, in J. DerrickMcClure and A. J. Aitken (ed), Scotland and the Lowland Tongue, (Aberdeen: AberdeenUniversity Press, 1983) p. 185.21 Robert Kemp, ‘From Burns to Bagpipes: Scotland Takes the Stage AmongDistinguished Company’, Edinburgh Evening News, 20 August 1954.22 Reported by Noël Peacock in Molière in Scotland 1945-1990 (Glasgow: University ofGlasgow French & German Publications, 1993) p. 11.23 Arnold Kemp, ‘The Bourgeois Bohemian‘, The Scottish Review, 23 (Autumn 2000) p.35.24 Noël Peacock, Molière in Scotland 1945-1990 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French& German Publications, 1993) pp. 11, 168; Priscilla Barlow, Wise Enough to Play the Fool:A Biography of Duncan Macrae (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1995) passim; Tom Fleming, ’ATheatre is People‘, in [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh Gateway Company1953-1965 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 25.25 See Noël Peacock, Molière in Scotland 1945-1990 (Glasgow: University of GlasgowFrench & German Publications, 1993) pp. 40-3, 156-59.26 From extracts of reviews reprinted in Noël Peacock, Molière in Scotland 1945-1990(Glasgow: University of Glasgow French & German Publications, 1993) pp. 156-5927 Noël Peacock, Molière in Scotland 1945-1990 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French& German Publications, 1993) p. 41.28 The Scotsman, 9 September 1947; quoted in ibid., p. 42.29 Cordelia Oliver, Magic in the Gorbals ([?Ellon]: Northern Books, 1999) p. 10.30 Robert Kemp, ‘The First Seven Years’, in [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of theEdinburgh Gateway Company 1953-1965 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 8.31 Priscilla Barlow, Wise Enough to Play the Fool: A Biography of Duncan Macrae(Edinburgh: John Donald, 1995) p. 72.32 Priscilla Barlow, Wise Enough to Play the Fool: A Biography of Duncan Macrae(Edinburgh: John Donald, 1995) p. 89.33 The Scotsman, 9 May 1977; quoted in Noël Peacock, Molière in Scotland 1945-1990(Glasgow: University of Glasgow French & German Publications, 1993) p. 8.34 The Glasgow Herald, 10 May 1955; quoted in Noël Peacock, Molière in Scotland 1945-1990 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French & German Publications, 1993) p. 170.35 The Daily Record, 1 June 1948; quoted in Noël Peacock, Molière in Scotland 1945-1990(Glasgow: University of Glasgow French & German Publications, 1993) p. 52.36 Priscilla Barlow, Wise Enough to Play the Fool: A Biography of Duncan Macrae(Edinburgh: John Donald, 1995) p. 129.37 Andrew Cruickshank, Andrew Cruickshank: An Autobiography (London: Weidenfeldand Nicolson, 1988) p. 105.

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38 Priscilla Barlow, Wise Enough to Play the Fool: A Biography of Duncan Macrae(Edinburgh: John Donald, 1995) p. 132.39 Reported in the profile of Kemp by David Douglas in The Glasgow Herald, 26 August1961. See note 1 above.40 Sir David Lindsay, The Satire of The Three Estates, ‘The Acting Text prepared by RobertKemp for Tyrone Guthrie’s production at the Edinburgh Festival 1949’ (Edinburgh: TheScots Review, 1949). For the unadapted text see: Sir David Lindsay, Ane Satyre of TheThrie Estaitis, ed. by Roderick Lyall (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1989).41 Allan Ramsay, The Gentle Shepherd, adapted by Robert Kemp, typescript held in theScottish Theatre Archive, Glasgow University Library, STA 2Hl 79-81. For theunadapted text see The Works of Allan Ramsay, Vol. II, ed. by Burns Martin and John W.Oliver, The Scottish Text Society (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons,1953) pp. 205-77.42 Robert Kemp, ‘The Gentle Shepherd’, The Scots Review, 10:6 (September 1949) p. 101.43 Robert Kemp, ‘The Gentle Shepherd’, The Scots Review, 10:6 (September 1949) p. 101.44 ‘Just Plain Terrific’, [anon.], Scots Theatre, 6 (May 1947) p. 8.45 Biographical note to Ane Satyre of The Thrie Estaites (see note 1 above).46 Trevor Royle, The Mainstream Companion to Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Mainstream,1993) pp. 168-69.47 Kemp’s comment is published in Douglas Young, The Puddocks: A verse play in Scotsfrom the Greek of Aristophanes, 2nd edn (Tayport: published by the author, 1958) p. 50.48 Sir David Lindsay, The Satire of The Three Estates, ‘The Acting Text prepared by RobertKemp for Tyrone Guthrie’s production at the Edinburgh Festival 1949’ (Edinburgh: TheScots Review, 1949) p. i. [Kemp’s introduction, from which this quotation is taken, isdated 1948 because it was written for the first, 1948, production.]49 Arnold Kemp, ‘The Bourgeois Bohemian‘, The Scottish Review, 23 (Autumn 2000) p.35.50 Quoted in Bill Findlay (ed), A History of Scottish Theatre, (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998)p. 221.51 As note 48 above, p. vii.52 Robert Kemp, ‘The First Seven Years’, in [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of theEdinburgh Gateway Company 1953-1965 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 7.53 Arnold Kemp records his father‘s disapproving response to what he saw as thedifferent direction taken by the Lyceum: ‘My father detested the idea that theatre wassome sort of cerebral or psychiatric laboratory and was dismayed by what he saw asthe intellectual pretensions of the Edinburgh civic theatre at the Lyceum, under thedirectorship of his old friend Tom Fleming, into which the Gateway had mutated’.Arnold Kemp, ‘The Bourgeois Bohemian‘, The Scottish Review, 23 (Autumn 2000) p. 36.54 Lennox Milne, ‘Mainly About the Early Years’, in [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of theEdinburgh Gateway Company 1953-1965 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 16.55 Moultrie R. Kelsall, ‘The Last Five’, in [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the EdinburghGateway Company 1953-1965 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 41.56 Robert Kemp, ‘The First Seven Years’, in [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of theEdinburgh Gateway Company 1953-1965 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 11.

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57 Moultrie R. Kelsall, ‘The Last Five’, in [no editor], The Twelve Seasons of the EdinburghGateway Company 1953-1965 (Edinburgh: St. Giles Press, 1965) p. 41.58 A full list of plays produced at the Gateway Theatre from 1953 to 1965 is given in [noeditor], The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh Gateway Company 1953-1965 (Edinburgh: St.Giles Press, 1965) pp. 43-56.59 David Douglas in his profile of Kemp in The Glasgow Herald, 26 August 1961. See note1 above.60 Arnold Kemp, ‘The Bourgeois Bohemian‘, The Scottish Review, 23 (Autumn 2000) p.37.

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Notes on Contributors

IAN BROWN is an independent scholar, playwright and poet. Until 2002 he wasProfessor of Drama, Dean of Arts and Director of the Scottish Centre for CulturalManagement and Policy at Queen Margaret University College. He has publishedwidely on aspects of theatre and cultural policy with a particular focus on the use ofhistory and Scots language in theatrical contexts. He has written more than twentyplays, seeing them presented by a number of leading Scottish and UK theatres and ontour. He is founder Editor of the International Journal of Scottish Theatre and GeneralEditor of the forthcoming Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature.

BILL FINDLAY is Research Fellow in the School of Drama and Creative Industries,Queen Margaret University College. Books he has edited include A History of ScottishTheatre (Polygon, 1998), Scots Plays of the Seventies (Scottish Cultural Press, 2001) andFrae Ither Tongues: Essays on Modern Translations into Scots (Multilingual Matters, 2003).With Martin Bowman, he has translated eight plays by Michel Tremblay fromQuébécois into Scots and his solo work includes Scots versions of plays by GerhartHauptmann, Pavel Kohout, Teresa Lubkiewicz and Raymond Cousse’s Bairns’ Bothers.

KATHLEEN GILMOUR is an independent scholar, a graduate of Queen MargaretUniversity College, who has made a study of the life and work of Sadie Aitken and ofthe Gateway Theatre Company.

KSENIJA HORVAT is a Lecturer in Drama and Subject Leader for Dramaturgy in theSchool of Drama and Creative Industries, Queen Margaret University College. She isAssistant Editor of the International Journal of Scottish Theatre and of the forthcomingEdinburgh History of Scottish Literature. She reviews theatre for EdinburghGuide.com,has published a range of articles on contemporary women playwrights and hastranslated literary criticism, historical books and plays. She is herself a playwright withwork produced in both her native Croatia and Scotland.

DONALD SMITH has been Director of The Netherbow Arts Centre since 1982, andfounded the George Mackay Brown Scottish Storytelling Centre there in 1997. He haspublished widely on Scottish culture, including Storytelling Scotland: A Nation inNarrative (Polygon, 2001), Celtic Travellers (Stationery Office, 1997) and ‘1950-95’ in AHistory of Scottish Theatre (Polygon, 1997). As a theatre director, he has adapted andwritten a series of stage plays including The Bothy, The Blue Blanket, and Memory Hill(diehard drama, 2002). He is currently Chair of the National Theatre of ScotlandSteering Group and of the Literature Forum for Scotland.

81

JOURNEY’S BEGINNING THE GATEWAYTHEATREBUILDING AND COMPANY,1884-1965

THEATRE&PERFORMANCEintellect

Edited by Ian Brown

Ian Brow

nJO

UR

NEY’S B

EGIN

NIN

G

The Gateway Theatre Company was from 1953 until1965 a major force in developing modern Scottishtheatre. Yet, until now, no scholarly text hasexplored the history of the Gateway Theatrebuilding – in turn veterinary college, roller skatingrink, cinema and theatre – while only memoirs offormer Gateway Company members exist as arecord of this highly influential company.

This book fills a gap in knowledge aboutEdinburgh’s historic Gateway Theatre, offering:

• new information on the nature of the Gateway • Theatre and Company,• re-evaluation of their significance in modern • theatre,• fresh understanding of key twentieth-century • figures.

This book is a must for those interested in theatrein general, Scottish cultural history and culturalaffairs. It will be particularly valued by theatrescholars and an essential text for Universitylibraries and Drama departments.

intellectPO Box 862 Bristol BS99 1DE United Kingdomwww.intellectbooks.com

9 781841 501062

ISBN 1-84150-106-9

PPrrooffeessssoorr IIaann BBrroowwnn isfounding editor of theInternational Journal ofScottish Theatre andGeneral Editor of theforthcoming EdinburghHistory of ScottishLiterature.

intellect

9 781841 501086

ISBN 1-84150-108-5

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Journey's Beginning: The Gateway Theatre Building and Company, 1884-1965

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