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GEORGE GUNN is a Caithness man born and bred, and the county is never far from the heart of his writing, whether in his poetry or in his theatre work. He began writing as a child, completed his first play for the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, and launched Grey Coast Theatre Company in Thurso in 1992. This is part two of George’s interview with KENNY MATHIESON. |
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| ARTS JOURNAL: We spoke in the first part of this interview about the centrality of Caithness in your work – were you born in Thurso? GEORGE GUNN: Like almost everybody in the west end of Caithness, I was born in the Dunbar Hospital in Thurso, and now I overlook the hospital from my front window, so I’ve come full circle! I was brought up in Dunnet, which is the most northerly village on the mainland. When I was a bairn growing up there it was essentially a crofting township. Almost everyone that lived there had a croft – we were one of the exceptions because we lived in what were called the new houses, eight of them. AJ: What did your parents do? GG: My mother was a district nurse, and my father had a threshing machine, and would go round the farms. As a bairn I would be passed along to the neighbours when they were out at work, and that was common. It is as close as I can imagine to what it must have been like to live in a Viking long house – at New Year it would take a day and half to get round the eight houses. That has all changed, it’s really just a des res suburb of Thurso now. |
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| AJ: When did you start writing? GG: I’ve always written, really. My mother comes from a very literary family in Wick, the Mores. We always had books at home and I could read and write before I went to school, which was always annoying for the teacher, because I would always be reading ahead of the rest of the class to see what happened. AJ: What is your first memory of writing? GG: The first thing I remember writing was at primary school. I wrote a wee story about a huge monster coming along and eating the primary school – little did I know at the time that it was actually called the Highland Council! The village really took a nose-dive after they closed the school. AJ: Did you go to Thurso for high school? GG: Yes, and that was important, because I had an inspirational teacher there called Margaret Gunn, or as we used to call her, Granny Gunn. She came from Keiss originally, and her husband and some of her family were lost at sea in a herring drifter, I think less than a week after her marriage. The tragedy was also a liberation for her, though, because she then went off to Edinburgh University and studied Classics, but if the tragedy hadn’t happened, she would probably have spent her days in Keiss. She came back and taught at Thurso High School, and she was great one for local history and also things like The Iliad and The Odyssey. |
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...she is the only theatre director I ever had a conversation with about my play through a toilet door.AJ: That was your mother’s side of the family? GG: Yes. They were involved in fishing. My father’s parents were from Kildonan, and were Gaelic speakers, but they didn’t pass it on to my parents. I take issue with people in Caithness who say Gaelic has nothing to do with them. My uncle George encouraged me to keep writing poetry at a time when I was writing sub-Neil Young lyrics, thinking I could write lyrics for Led Zeppelin or something. He would read them, and we would talk for a bit, and he would disappear and come back with a can of McEwans Export and a book and say read that – the beer was the bribe to get me to read the book. Eventually I started to see what he was on about. |
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| AJ: You mentioned the Traverse – did he introduce you to theatre as well? GG: Because of him I started going to the Traverse, but never thinking I would write anything for the theatre. I was working offshore on the rigs – I did that for seven years, and you get less than that for burglary! I began to meet some of the actors from the Traverse, and a couple of them were in a play at the time that had bored them out of their minds – I won’t say what it was, but it was what Peter Brook calls dead theatre. One of them, Hugh Lauchlan, said to me I want you to write a play for us about being offshore. The next time I came back he said I’ve got a slot for October at the Traverse, and I have money to do it. Peter Lichtenfels was in charge of the Traverse at the time, and I think he was just glad to fill in what he saw as the back end of the season. AJ: An easy business this, you must have thought? GG: I couldn’t believe it, but I wrote the play in about a week – this was 1984, and it became my first play at the Traverse. That was ‘Roughneck’. Peter then commissioned me to write another one, and I thought well, this is better than working! AJ: Presumably you had no formal training in writing? GG: No, but I was also involved with the Edinburgh Playwright’s Workshop, and I must have done that for five years or so. I must have worked on 200 plays in that time with hundreds of actors – it was probably the best dramatic education a writer could have had. AJ: How did you gravitate back to Caithness? GG: From there things moved on – Cath Robins at Eden Court was doing a show about the Crofting Act in 1986, and she commissioned me to write ‘The Gold of Kildonan’. She was a remarkable woman – she is the only theatre director I ever had a conversation with about my play through a toilet door. The Arts Council at that time had a small scale touring budget, and that meant that a lot of the plays that came up here weren’t really appropriate to the Highlands, but to get the money they had to bring them here. Catherine put together a number of very successful tours, but in 1990 she put the proposition to the board that she wanted to base a touring company in Eden Court, starting with money that had come from an Arts & Business award for ‘The Gold of Kildonan’, but the board kicked it out. |
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AJ: Where did that leave you? Because you are dealing with public money in a situation like that you owe it to the taxpayer to get it right...AJ: Do you see a future for these companies? GG: I can foresee a time in the future when there will be no theatre companies in the Highlands. I can’t see how it is going to move forward under the present funding structures, but I suspect changes are coming whether you like them or not, with the Cultural Commission and so on, and I actually embrace them. What we need is money put into the culture and the artists that produce it rather than a series of half-thought-out phenomena and years of this or that. I think the funders like to have us all competing with each other, and I think that reluctance to support a seriously funded production company in the north of Scotland is still there. AJ: Tell me a bit about your method of working – do you do a lot of revising of your work? |
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| GG: I do. As I get older the process gets more distilled, I think, but with a poem there is usually the initial scribble, then there is a draft of it, then there is what I call a black ink draft, which goes into a book. The next stage is a typed draft onto the computer, so it has four drafts before anyone sees it. Then I show it to my partner, Christine, because she is my best audience, then it goes off to Joy Hendry at Chapman. The main changes are generally made in the first three stages of that process, and anything after that is usually honing. |
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AJ: What is the process for your theatre work? LinkAssociated page |
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