Alasdair Gray: Still Game star to star in readings of Alasdair Gray plays at Oran Mor

Presented in association with Alasdair Gray’s Estate and directed by Outwith It founder Fraser Scott, The Gray Plays will present four of Alsadair Gray’s rarely performed short plays; Goodbye Jimmy; Loss of the Golden Silence; Quiet People; and The Man Who Knew About Electricity. Director, writer and performer Cora Bissett (What Girls are Made Of, Raw Material) will compere the evening, along with readings and commentary from the Gray Play Book.

The Gray Plays will be presented under the Celestial Heaven’s mural painted by Gray himself in Òran Mór’s auditorium on Sunday, 4 May 2025.

The Gray Plays will be performed by a talented cast of Scottish talent including Still Game’s Isa Drennan Jane McCarry, Scottish actor and game show host James McKenzie (Raven), actor and singer Naomi Stirrat (The Snow Queen, Royal Lyceum Theatre) and Sam Stopford, recently seen in Vanishing Point’s Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey. Music for the evening will be performed by international composer and multi-media artist Sonia Killman.

We caught up with director Fraser Scott to hear about his take on Alasdair Gray’s short plays.

Glasgow World: So the Alasdair Gray Plays, it's quite an interesting concept what you're doing with it at Oran Mor. What can people kind of expect from it?

Fraser Scott: I think they can expect sort of Alasdair's signature wit. And the plays are all really funny and have, and have this sort of brilliant, analytical edge to them. I think what was really exciting to me is that the oldest play that we’re reading is from the 60s, and the latest play is from 2003. So they really span 40-50 years of Alasdair's life, and also just politically and socially, it’s a really long time.

But so much of what the plays are discussing, feel super relevant. So actually, like loads of the plays, and loads of the stuff in the plays feel really contemporary, and they're also, they're also really funny, and it's really great to see Alasdair's characters and Alasdair's writing sort of come to life in a theater context.

GW: Were there any challenges in bringing the shows together, in terms of bringing them into the modern world?

FS: The plays themselves are obviously set in the time that they're written, but they do feel quite contemporary, and their topics and the characters all feel quite contemporary. We're also hoping to present a slightly contemporary version, a little bit with the music that we're going to have, and, and and the actors that we've got.

He'd written quite a few short plays, with the hope early on in his career of becoming a playwright. That didn't really take off for Alasdair, but he continued to write plays for a lot of his life. So there are loads of short plays that he's written, but I sort of wanted to pick four that felt, firstly that they would chart different points in his career as a writer, and also four plays that had different things thematically and different tones as well.

A couple more lean more into dramas, and a couple lead more into comedies. It was just about finding a balance as well, and then also about finding four plays that we could do with a cast of five that could rotate.

GW: Why do you think Alasdair Gray's work still resonates?

FS: I think Poor Things probably did do quite a lot in terms of bringing his name into the mainstream, which is really exciting. And I think there has been a little bit of a focus and resurgence of Alasdair Gray’s work in the last few years, which is really exciting. And there's an archive in Glasgow, they do really good work and preserve lots of documents from Alasdair's. I think the thing that's so exciting about Alasdair's writing is that it feels incredibly unique. His voice is so distinct.

And he's an illustrious illustrator as well, and his art is all over Glasgow and that feels so distinct as well. So he feels like an artist that is really tied to the city and really loves the city. And it feels like his, his voice in Glasgow's voice feels really sort of semiotic in a way, and it feels, it just always feels really exciting to revisit those novels and sort of dive into these really wildly imaginative worlds that that are also like such compelling stories and such brilliant writing.

GW: What were some of your kind of first interactions with Alasdair Gray's work?

FS: The first novel I read was Poor Things, actually. This was before the film, a friend of mine had recommended Poor Things, maybe like five years ago, and I read it, and I completely loved it. What I loved about Poor Things was the form of the novel, and how it plays with you as a reader and the meta aspect of it.

And then I read 1982, Janine, and I also loved that book. That book was incredible. And did the same thing where it really plays with your expectations. So I sort of went around the deep dive of Alasdair's work and found this playbook, which is a compilation of a whole lot of his writing that never made it to publication, really, or, like, drafts of things that became other things.

What's great about the playbook is that it spans so much of his life and has loads of notes from Alasdair about the context of what he was writing.

GW: Was there anything you were able to learn from the archive?

FS: I think the thing that I was slightly comforted to hear, was the rejection that was there for him.I think he's someone that, certainly in Scotland, we considered to be a really successful writer. And I think what's great about the book is that he really candidly spoke about his lack of success, especially around the plays. And speaking to his son, Andrew, who looks after the estate, he's really excited, because Alasdair always wanted the plays to have more life. I think, as a director and someone who works with playwrights all the time, that the struggle to get plays on stage is not a new thing, and it's always been a difficult challenge. And so he's really excited to take these works that almost made it or made it a little bit.