Opening Night

By Joe Mcdonagh

Price:

£3.00

Item attributes

ISBN:

978-0-85174-425-4

Acts:

1

Females:

2

Males:

3

Item details

Scottish Play: No. 19

From Wikipedia, Joe Corrie (13 May 1894 – 13 November 1968) was a Scottish miner, poet and playwright best known for his radical, working-class plays.

He was born in Slamannan, Stirlingshire in 1894. His family moved to Cardenden in the Fife coalfield when Corrie was still an infant and he started work at the pits in 1908. He died in Edinburgh in 1968.

Shortly after the First World War, Corrie started writing. His articles, sketches, short stories and poems were published in prominent socialist newspapers and journals, including Forward and The Miner.

Corrie's volumes of poetry include The Image O' God and Other Poems (1927), Rebel Poems (1932) and Scottish Pride and Other Poems (1955). T. S. Eliot wrote "Not since Burns has the voice of Scotland spoken with such authentic lyric note".  He turned to writing plays during the General Strike in 1926.

More information can be found on his Wikipedia page; Joe Corrie.

 

After a lengthy absence from the stage, Scots actress Susan Henderson is making her come-back in the title role of a touring production of Hedda Gabler. The play has been favourably received in provincial theatres but the crucial test will come when it opens in Glasgow. The players are having a rehearsal before the Glasgow opening when Susan is confronted by Tom Martin, the cynical, disillusioned drama critic with whom she had had a love affair five years earlier and a man upon whose verdict much of the play's future will depend.

One is not certain until the final moments just how the critic's professional integrity will fare against his own resentment at failure to renew the affair.

In his first stage play, Joe McDonagh examines the two professions he knows best - journalism and the theatre. His five characters offer wide scope for individual interpretation in a contemporary drama that is taut in both plot and characterisation.

The play is set during a rehearsal of Hedda Gabler so period set and costumes are not required.