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Feature [published January 1999]
Irvine Welsh: You’ll Have Had Your Theatre
Dr Willy Maley applauds the theatrical assault of Irvine Welsh’s stage play
You’ll Have Had Your Hole
Brecht once remarked that he’d like to see the kind
of people who attended football matches at his plays.
Scotland has not had a particularly distinguished record
in the field of football, but in recent years, blessed with
writers who can play in any position, it has begun to
enjoy success on another stage. The country has gone
from Celtic fringe to cultish frontier. Where it hitherto
proved fertile ground for English and European theatre,
Scotland is now growing its own, and exporting it too.
One of the advantages of being a colonized culture is
that you can break more easily with established forms
and norms.
In Scotland the traditional divide between two kinds
of theatre, high brow and low-brow, was crossed by
7:84 (Scotland) and a new theatre of commitment. This
shift was reflected in the founding of Mayfest in the
early 1980s, a Glasgow arts festival backed by the trade
unions whose mission was to ‘celebrate not only May
Day but also Scottish working class theatre and popular
political theatre from other countries’. A key player in
successive Mayfests and in touring community venues
was Wildcat Theatre Company. Today, with Mayfest
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
on ice and Wildcat’s claws pared by cuts in funding,
polemical theatre has reached an impasse. On one level
this can be read alongside the failure of traditional institutions
such as political parties and trade unions to
effect change. With subsidised theatre on its uppers and
old-style political theatre on a downer, the time was
ripe for the kind of high jinks among low lives offered
by Irvine Welsh and others.
Between the formal experimentation of the Citizens’
and the radical commitment of 7:84, something was
lost. If the working classes were absent from one then
they were straightened out and made presentable in
the other. Neither avant-garde theatre nor agitprop
were sufficient in themselves to do justice to those
excluded from official culture, an exclusion that was
literally obscene. Established theatres were slow to
respond to the dynamism of popular culture, and to the
explosion in fiction and poetry that was transforming
the Scottish literary map. With Glasgow experiencing
a crisis of identity as the workers city was repackaged
as City of Culture, the East Coast stirred. If Glasgow’s
tea was out, then Edinburgh’s was in the making. The
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