The dark side of Maw Broon - Times Online

The dark side of Maw Broon - Times Online

From The Sunday Times
October 25, 2009
The dark side of Maw Broon
Jackie Kay is taking Scotland’s best loved cartoon mother from page to stage with a modern twist
by Anna Burnside

Maw Broon and her rambunctious multigenerational family occupy a unique place in the Scottish psyche. We read about their exploits in the Sunday Post, or in an annual, as if they were distant relations, the Auchenshoogle branch of every Scottish clan. But they are not. They are two-dimensional black-and-white period pieces. Dudley Watkins inked his first cartoon strip in 1936 and glamourpuss Maggie and bunnet-wearing Paw have not changed since.

“If you read a 19th-century novel, or one set in the 1930s, you are aware that you are reading something historical,” says Jackie Kay, a writer and long-time Broons fan. “But with the Broons you are not. Somehow, we manage to keep them contemporary.”

This is meat and drink — or should that be mince and tatties? — to a playful writer such as Kay. She has been throwing Maw, complete with pinny and iron-grey bun, into the present day for over 10 years now. Her first poem featuring the matriarch of Glebe Street — Maw Broon visits the therapist — was published in 1998.

After several more appearances in Kay’s poetry collections, Maw Broon is now the star of her own full-length show, with 10 monologues and seven songs, at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre. For Kay, this was a logical extension of her one-off poems.

When Maw Broon met Gordon at No 10

“I’ve always liked the Broons. I grew up with the annuals; I loved the family. They were so detailed, they were all so different: clever Horace, pretty Maggie. Maw was always so down to earth, so dowdy, in her pinny. I wanted to have her doing things she would never do in the cartoon. It instantly forces you to look at her with a fresh eye.”

This opens the door to all kinds of comic juxtapositions, as well as allowing Kay to make some serious points about a generation of women who have hung up their pinnies and forgotten how to pot their own hough. “People identify her as a type, as if she did exist. They see her as part of their family and take her for granted.” So when Maw Broon contemplates global warming, or the plumbing arrangements beneath her stout woollen drawers — both monologue subjects — it is impossible not to listen.

They may be called monologues but there are two Maws on the stage: the real Maw Broon and her black alter ego. Kay knew from the start that they would not be monologues; these women are one and the same, Maw and “her psyche, her subconscious, her alter ego, whatever you want to call her”.

This allows Kay, a black woman who was adopted and grew up in Bishopbriggs with her white parents, to “play with being black and Scottish in a lighthearted way. For a start, it takes for granted that there are black people in Scotland, which of course there are. But all the traditional images, from shortbread tins to Maw Broon herself, are white. I wanted to reflect a change in our national self image. The one we have is out of date”.

So these are jokes that jag. Maw, on her odyssey of self-discovery, appears on a reality TV show, Scotland’s Got Talent. She also has to come face to face with her own reality, when her alter ego tells her that she is, in fact, a cartoon. Glebe Street, the butt’n’ben, the ironing board are all just black lines on a white sheet of paper.

This is devastating for Maw, but a great opportunity for Kay. “I had to shatter her illusions,” she says. “I wanted to explore how obsessed society is with reality TV and celebrity culture, the way her fiction becomes a kind of reality. Everything is the wrong way round and I thought that was rich ground for a cartoon to explore.”

Nothing is off-limits. Kay has her heroine back on the psychiatrist’s couch, suffering the indignity of colonic irrigation, singing the blues, contemplating the Greens. She even, when faced with Paw’s apparent infidelity, wonders if she has been batting for the wrong team all these years. (The show is, after all, part of the Glasgay festival.) When she meets her namesake in 10 Downing Street, the bold Maw even considers applying for his job.

“I thought it was a good political opportunity,” says Kay. “We are all so lost at the moment. These are dark times to live through. Our beliefs have taken a knocking; there is so much political apathy and horrible things happening, like the BNP on Question Time. If Maw Broon stood for prime minister, how refreshing would that be? We would have a different Britain altogether.”

The Maw Broon Monologues,Tron Theatre, Glasgow, November 3-8, www.tron.co.uk