Interview: Jackie Kay, poet, playwright and novelist - Scotsman.com News

Interview: Jackie Kay, poet, playwright and novelist - Scotsman.com News


Interview: Jackie Kay, poet, playwright and novelist
Published Date: 27 October 2009
By Susan Mansfield
IF YOU had to pick a character from Scottish fiction, a woman with spirit who could bring a sage outlook to our troubled times, a female protagonist ready for a journey of self-discovery, would you find your heroine in… Maw Broon?

Jackie Kay believes the matriarch of the much-loved cartoon family, forever cleaning the tenement stairs with mop and bucket, is more than capable of an adventure which takes in meeting the Prime Minister ("Nae relation!"), a reality talent show, Tolstoy, climate change and colonic irrigation. She is set to prove it when The Maw Broon Monologues premieres at Glasgow's Tron next week.

"She's crying out for a feminist revision," says Kay, an award-winning poet, playwright and novelist. "The idea of thinking Maw Broon into different situations and reinventing her for the 21st century has always tickled me. She has gravitas, she's serious, she's political, she's funny. There's a lot of ground to explore."Kay wrote her first Maw Broon poem in the late 1990s for her collection Off Colour, themed around health and disease. "I felt the poems were very serious and wanted to take them somewhere else. Then I had this idea, what if Maw Broon visits a psychiatrist? There's such a lot of reverence for the world of therapy and I thought she'd be the perfect person to puncture that. It seemed to me instantly funny, so then I made up my mind that I'd put a Maw Broon poem in every collection after that."

Kay, who is a wonderful performer of her own work, found audiences were delighted. "I was doing a reading in Paris, and at the end this beautiful young Parisian woman came up and said: 'Oh, I'm so delighted to hear Maw Broon, I missed her since my days in Dundee'."The way Kay emerges smiling from rehearsals suggests she's having fun; unsurprising given the combined energies of Kay, director Maggie Kinloch and actresses Terry Neason (Maw Broon) and Suzanne Bonnar (Maw Broon's doppelganger). Tom Urie's score has Maw doing a Susan Boyle with big musical numbers.But it's not all about laughs. At the same time as writing the Monologues, Kay has been writing a memoir about tracing her birth father, who is Nigerian. "I have this sense of having two lives, a life that I lived and a life that I didn't live. The idea of the double fits into that. I feel like I'm exploring what it is to be black and Scottish through Maw Broon, which has been easier and more fun than writing the memoir. It's been nice to have her as a companion."

Kay also dedicates the show to her adoptive mother, who was taught to draw cartoons as a child by Dudley D Watkins, who drew The Broons, Oor Wullie and Desperate Dan.Like many Scots, Kay grew up with Broons annuals every second Christmas. The characters, launched on 8March, 1936, have changed little in 70 years. "Each of them has a whole personality that's as thought through as any character in a novel. They're way ahead of their time in cartoon terms. It would be nice if someone did a comparative study between The Broons and The Simpsons."Kay had no problem recreating Maw Broon as a 21st-century woman on a quest for fulfilment. She says she has enough ideas to write a second show, and is considering doing one every second Christmas. Maw Broon, is well placed to comment on the times."

It's like the way pantos do up-to-the-minute jokes. I grew up watching theatre companies like 7:84 and Wildcat, political theatre with music, and seeing the potential theatre has for affecting a society in a given moment because it captures something."In 'Maw Broon Meet Gordon Broon', she is saying the Tory party is rubbish, the Labour party's let us down, let Maw Broon stand for Prime Minister ('the first ever woman cos ye cannae count Thatcher'). I know that's a humorous idea because her second name's the same as Gordon Brown's, but there's a serious side. There needs to be a complete change, a fresh way of looking at ourselves."What they should have had facing (BNP leader] Nick Griffin on Question Time was Maw Broon. She'd do a good job with him."

The Maw Broon Monologues is at the Tron, Glasgow, 3-8 November, as part of Glasgay! www.glasgay.co.uk

First published in Scotland on Sunday on 25 October 2009