Wildcat Stage Productions

Wildcat Stage Productions was an influential left-wing theatre and music production company based in Glasgow. Founded in 1978 as a spin-off from the 7:84 Company, it formed a key part of the Scottish touring theatre network for the next 20 years, creating more than 80 shows and giving many thousands of performances across Scotland, the UK and internationally. The company was named after the term for unofficial industrial action and excluded the word “theatre” from its name to avoid middle-class associations.

Wildcat launched the careers of a number of now familiar Scottish talent including Dave Anderson, Blythe Duff, Tony Roper and Elaine C.Smith and premiered The Steamie, one of the best loved pieces of popular entertainment in Scotland in the last half century. In 1997, as part of a wider review, the Scottish Arts Council withdrew its funding. Despite an energetic campaign to reverse the decision, the Company was not able to continue without regular funding and eventually closed its doors a year later.

History

The company was founded by David MacLennan and Dave Anderson. MacLennan grew up in Glasgow but was educated at Fettes College and the University of Edinburgh, before dropping out to become a roadie for 7:84. The founder of 7:84, the writer and director John McGrath, was married to MacLennan's sister Elizabeth MacLennan who played many of the leading roles in 7:84 productions. MacLennan appeared in the now legendary ceilidh play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil which toured Scotland in 1973/4.

Anderson also grew up in Glasgow in a family of accomplished (but not professional) musicians. He and Alex Norton, another member of the cast of The Cheviot, were friends from the folk music circuit. At Norton’s urging, Anderson broke into his honeymoon on the Isle of Skye to come and see the show and quickly became involved in the company. MacLennan and McGrath helped him develop his acting skills (later seen to good effect in films including Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero and the TV sitcom [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Lights_(1984_TV_series)] City Lights]). A shared love of rock and roll music and a fascination with pantomime and variety brought the two Daves, as they became known, together. In 1977, they collaborated on a show for 7:84 about the music industry called His Masters Voice, “a play in which rock music was core to the medium, rather than supporting scenes.” 

Following its success, Anderson and MacLennan decided that they wanted to do more work which emphasised the musical content. With McGrath’s blessing (and indeed with some left over 7:84 funding, transferred over when McGrath decided to take a sabbatical), the two of them left 7:84 to set up Wildcat along with Ferelith Lean, McLennan’s then wife, as administrator.

Operating out of a small office in Otago Street, Glasgow, the company's first production, in September 1978, was The Painted Bird which addressed the then far less fashionable subject of mental health. Co-written, as the majority of all the company’s shows were to be, by MacLennan and Anderson, it was warmly welcomed by critics and audiences alike. “Wildcat's debut on Thursday, on a ramshackle stage before a capacity house in the McLellan Galleries, was one of the most hopeful omens for Scotland's theatrical future” was the verdict of the Glasgow Herald. The company quickly won their own funding support from the Scottish Arts Council.

The company's scale and reputation rose steadily through the 1980s and early 1990s. The company's most successful show, The Steamie (see below) began life as a small-scale tour in 1987. By contrast, in 1988, when Celtic Football Club wanted a show to celebrate its centenary, it was to Wildcat that they turned. The Celtic Story filled the cavernous Pavilion Theatre in Glasgow for several weeks. Other large scale productions followed, including Border Warfare and John Brown’s Body which dealt, respectively, with the history of relations between England and Scotland and the industrial history of the River Clyde. These two shows represented a renewal of the connection with John McGrath who wrote and directed both. They were filmed for later transmission on Channel 4 television. Their success led the 1996 Edinburgh International Festival to commission a new work from McGrath and the company. Ane Satire of the Four Estates was loosely based on Sir David Lindsay's 16th century classic Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, adding the fourth estate, the media, to the objects of satirical derision. With its thinly veiled and none too subtle attacks on media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch, it infuriated as many people as it pleased.

Whether it led directly to the Scottish Arts Council's decision to remove funding from the company in 1997 remains a matter of speculation. The company and its many supporters in the Labour and Trade Union movement assumed ideological reasons lay behind the move. The SAC, however, strenuously denied this, saying that the company had simply run out of creative steam. “SAC recognises that Wildcat has produced some excellent work in the past and has a loyal core audience…It was considered that the quality of Wildcat's recent work and its declining audience figures did not justify such a long-term commitment at the expense of funding companies which submitted exciting and innovative proposals.”

It was a bitter blow for both MacLennan and Anderson. But their contribution to Scottish theatre did not end there. MacLennan went on to devise and then direct the hugely successful lunchtime theatre season, A Play a Pie and a Pint series at Glasgow’s Oran Mor venue until his death in 2014. Anderson continues to contribute music and lyrics across a wide range of outputs, not least the twice yearly pantomimes at Oran Mor.

Character and Style

The company’s style was direct, boisterous, often actively engaging directly with audiences and depended heavily on the songs. Some critics dismissed it as mere “agit-prop”. owed a lot to earlier forms of Scottish theatre, including variety shows and seasonal pantomime. Cast members were expected to be able to sing and play at least one musical instrument as well as act. Productions usually featured a live on-stage band, formed entirely of members of the cast.

Shows tended to deal with current affairs, covering a wide range of social and political issues ranging from the 1983/4 miners strike (Dead Liberty) to the role of the CIA in Nicaragua (Business in the Back Yard). The company deliberately took its work to working classes audiences across Scotland, playing in modest community and village halls, in working men’s clubs as well as, less often, in conventional theatres. But it also toured within the UK and internationally and produced large-scale projects. These included The Celtic Story which celebrated the centenary of one of Glasgow’s biggest football clubs, and two huge promenade style productions in the newly commissioned Tramway venue in Glasgow.

The company’s biggest single success was Tony Roper’s play The Steamie, premiered in 1987. It was filmed by STV the following year and, in a poll in 2009, came second in a list of the station’s most popular shows ever.

Politics

Wildcat was an unashamedly left-wing organisation. It took great delight in tweaking the noses of the landed, monied and governing classes, often much to the delight of its audiences who recognised the stereotypes with which they were being presented. It had close relationships with the Scottish Trade Union movement and the Scottish Labour party. Local councillors, trade union officials and members of parliament all served on the company’s board of directors at various times (?names?) and they received additional funding from a number of Labour controlled local authorities. The whole company was feted at an official reception at Glasgow’s Labour controlled City Chambers in ???? , Its subjects ranged widely across the contemporary spectrum.

For almost all Wildcat’s history, from 1979-1997, the UK was under the control of a Conservative government, lead first by Margaret Thatcher and later by John Major. Thatcher was notoriously unpopular in Scotland (when she came to power in 1979 there were 22 Conservative MPs at Westminster; at the 1997 election, when the Conservatives finally lost power, not a single Conservative MP was elected in Scotland). Most Scottish MPs were Labour and Wildcat often provided a lightning rod for raucous, extra-parliamentary demonstrations and were frequently represented at rallies, sometimes even providing the entertainment. The company was instrumental in developing the Scottish TUC’s one day Mayday rally into Mayfest, a three week long arts and politics festival in Glasgow which ran from 1983-1997. Ferelith Lean was the festival’s first administrator.

The politics of the company was largely mainstream Labour with some radical edges. Anderson recalls that he and MacLennan did not set out to be overtly political. Anderson was never a member of any political party although MacLennan was for some years a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. But they saw the world in a very similar ways. The two gradually diverged over the nationalist question in Scotland, Anderson eventually becoming a supporter of Independence for Scotland while MacLennan argued against it, although he died shortly before the 2014 Referendum.

Notable Productions/Critical responses

• Dead Liberty
• The Celtic Story
• The Steamie
• Peachum's Poorhouse
• Border Warfare
• The Four Estates

Some notable Wildcats

Juliet Cadzow, perhaps best known as Edie Mcredie in the BBC Scotland children’s show “Balamory”, first appeared for Wildcat in “Border Warfare”, and then in three other shows including “An Actress Prepares”. Cadzow later married David MacLennan who wrote the solo show “An Actress Prepares”, one of Wildcat’s last shows, specifically for her.

Blythe Duff appeared in three Wildcat productions before she was “discovered” by the producers of STV’s long running Glasgow police series “Taggart” where she went onto become the series’ longest running character, Jackie Reid. She was last seen on the London stage in Harry Potter and the Cursed Cchild playing Professor McGonagall before Covid-19 closed the show.

Vivien Heilbron appeared in the 1995 show Bedfellows. She originally rose to fame as the star of BBC’s adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song in which she played Chris Guthrie.

Jimmy Logan played x in The Celtic Story. Logan was a doyen of Scottish theatre and variety. It says a lot about the status of Wildcat (and Celtic) that he agreed to appear in this show. In fact MacLennan had known Logan since he (MacLennan) was a child; the Logans and the MacLennans lived in the same street in the Dowanhill area of Glasgow.

Phill McCall appeared in the 1992 show Eight to the Bar. He was a familiar figure on stage and television, notably in series such as Monarch of the Glen and Dr Finlay’s Casebook, and was one of a number of senior actors who worked for Wildcat in their later years

Peter Mullan appeared with Wildcat four times in the 1980s in The Magic Snowball, The Importance of Being Honest, The Celtic Story and Harmony Row (which he co-wrote) he has since becoming an internationally celebrated film actor and director, appearing recently in the Netflix series Ozark. He is the only person to win top prizes both for acting (Cannes best actor award for My Name is Joe) and for the best film (Venice Golden lion for The Magdalene Sisters) at major European film festivals.

Alex Norton directed the first production of The Steamie. An accomplished director, actor and musician, and life long friend of Dave Anderson, he is best known as DCI Matt Burke in “Taggart”, STV’s long running Glasgow police drama. Norton first introduced Anderson to MacLennan after a performance of The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil on the Isle of Skye.

Elaine C. Smith was a regular with the company in its, and her, early days. After appearing with Dave Anderson in the tv sitcom City Lights she has gone on become one of Scotland’s best loved stage and screen personalities, notably as Mary Doll, the wife of Rab C Nesbitt. portraying X-Factor sensation Susan Boyle, and more recently for her role in the sitcom Two Doors Down which also features Alex Norton.

Tony Roper wrote Wildcat’s biggest popular success, The Steamie, a piece of New Year’s eve nostalgia set in one of Glasgow’s communal washhouses. Roper had been a regular foil to Rikki Fulton in the long running comedy series Scotch and Wry and also appeared as Jamesie Cotter, best pal of Rab C. Nesbitt.

Liz Lochhead, the poet and playwright, co-wrote Bunch of Fives in 1983. She who went on to become Scotland’s Makar (roughly equivalent to England’s Poet Laureate) and was appointed life president of the Scottish Society of Playwrights in 2019