10 - Case study: Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep, 1947

Summary

Glasgow Unity first performed Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep at the Athenaeum Theatre, Glasgow on 30 January 1947. After the company closed in 1951, the play fell into obscurity until John McGrath staged a rewritten version for 7:84 (Scotland)’s 1982 Clydebuilt Season. The long absence of this play from the public arena is remarkable considering that it provided a major theatrical landmark for the representation of Scottish, class and gender identities. This chapter takes the opportunity offered by these two texts, productions and their critical reception to make a transhistorical comparison of the relationship between theatre and its wider context. Taking the play’s central thematic framework of gender politics, poverty and notions of community, my argument explores how these two productions intersected with and revealed a great deal about their immediate social, political and economic landscapes. By highlighting Glasgow Unity’s and 7:84’s distinct use of staging, theatrical apparatus and acting techniques, I also aim to illuminate the responsiveness of performance to historical change.

Prior to writing her first play, Starched Aprons (1945), which deals with the trials and tribulations of everyday hospital life, Lamont Stewart was frustrated with the trivial and irrelevant representations she witnessed in post-war Scottish theatre: ‘I came home in a mood of red-hot revolt against cocktail time, glamorous gowns, and under-worked, about-to-be deceived husbands. I asked myself what I wanted to see on the stage, and the answer was “life”. Real life. Real People. Ordinary people.’.