Gagarin Waycaptured a moment of political and economic uncertainty and became a runaway success for Gregory Burke. But his new play is even better, writes Peter Crawley
It is rare enough, in the usually sensitive arena of arts interviews, to have to defend a play from its own writer. But Gregory Burke, the Scottish playwright whose now stratospheric career began with Gagarin Wayin 2001, leaves us little choice.
Here he is talking up his debut play, now given its Irish premiere by Island Theatre Company: "It's too showy," he begins. "It's too show-offy. There's too much crammed in." It's certainly true that there are times when it feels just a tad over-written, but there's plenty to compensate for such occasional indulgences. "And there's a bit in it that's too long," he adds.
"I should have got to the action quicker." Well, maybe, but that's all quite forgivable. "Or maybe even two bits actually," Burke continues, in his lightly tripping Dunfermline accent, now on a roll of self-criticism. "And also it's just too showy verbally." OK now, steady on; it's not that bad. But just as one begins to suspect that Gregory Burke himself would have curtly rejected the unsolicited script he sent to Edinburgh's famed new-writing theatre the Traverse in 1997, the amiable and disarmingly candid 38-year-old finds something positive to say.
"I only notice the faults now. I feel as a writer now I'm much further down the road in understanding what I'm up to. But at the same time, I'm really proud of the play. I love it and I'm so glad that was the play I wrote for my first play." There is something wry, modest and almost always deflective in Burke's conversation. A gregarious and amusing speaker who will bound from modernist literature to pop culture in a single breath (his six-month-old daughter is named Anna Livia, he tells me, after Joyce's character in Finnegans Wakeand Tony Soprano's mother), his self-effacement seems to grow with his stature.
His first published biographical note simply ran: "Gregory Burke was born in Dunfermline in 1968. After school and having dropped out of Stirling University he fulfilled a variety of vital roles in the minimum-wage economy." In his original programme note for Gagarin Wayhe confessed: "I didn't expect it to be a comedy, but when you consider the themes which emerged while I wrote it - Marxist and Hegelian theories of history, anarchism, psychopathology, existentialism, mental illness, political terrorism, nihilism, globalisation and the crisis in masculinity - then it couldn't really be anything else." Indeed, a play set in a factory, in which two ideologically confused drones of the minimum-wage economy plot to abduct and kill a visiting middle manager as a macabre form of anti-globalisation protest, it opens, naturally, with a profane East Scots dissertation on Sartre.
"I'll give the c**t his due," says Eddie. "He came up with some snappy titles for his books. Being and Nothingnessis a good f**king title for a book ken." Think Death and the Maidenrewritten by Irvine Welsh and Quentin Tarantino, with script supervision by Naomi Klein and Tom Stoppard, and you're halfway there.
Burke wrote the play in 1997, having abandoned an economics course, partly from boredom and partly from the discomfort of belonging to the first generation of a working-class family to attend university. "It just wasn't me," he says. He knew he was a witty correspondent - his letters to a friend in an Israeli kibbutz were widely circulated - and when his grandfather bequeathed him £3,000, he stopped heckling the television set and began to write a screenplay.
"But it didn't move out of the room," he recalls. "I thought, 'Well that's a play then. It's not going to get on BBC2 because there's too many "c**ts" in it.'" He left it in a drawer for a year, before sending it to the Traverse - "the nearest theatre to my house" - where it came to the attention of John Tiffany, then the theatre's literary director. After a rigorous process of workshops, rehearsed readings and three significant redrafts, Gagarin Way, named after the communist stronghold of West Fife, opened during the 2001 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. One of the amazingly few unsolicited scripts to ever make it to the Traverse's stage, it became a runaway success and made Burke's name. His agent told him it would never happen again.
IF THE PLAY BECAME a phenomenon, it is because it spoke directly to a moment of political and economic uncertainty. "The reason I wrote it," he says, "was because I worked in these factories with guys who'd been in the pits, in the docks - pure, dyed-in-the-wool trade unionists. But they'd been through the miners' strike, they'd been through 20-odd years of Conservative rule and seen it was useless. Some of them thought that us younger guys should be organising ourselves, but nobody could be bothered with all that hassle." Burke's family, a long line of miners and dockworkers had always been politically active. "I wanted to understand why I wasn't like that," he says. "I thought these didn't apply to the modern world any more, because of the nature of capitalism, I guess, the globalised nature of it." Coinciding with the slump in Scotland's technology industry, where "Silicon Glen", like the mines before it, was gradually exhausted, Burke arrived as a salient, cynically amusing dramatist for the age of globalisation.
"Economics decides the fate of people, not their politicians," he wrote in a less jocose moment. But he sees himself less as a political playwright than a writer engaged in the search for belonging.
Political activists, football supporters and, lately, the military have all provided the institutions that inhabit his plays; eroding, threatened and tarnished groups that offer a sense of identity to the directionless. You might include Burke in that group. "It's the reason I'm a writer," he says of his peripatetic upbringing, having spent his formative years in Gibraltar when his father, a docker by trade, served with the RAF. "Coming back you don't feel any sense of identity with the place where you're living," he says. That detachment gave him a shrewd eye for observation and a keen ear for idioms and voices. "I think so," Burke says, "just a sense of being removed by one step from people. And I've always kind of had that in my life. Until very recently. Probably until I had my daughter, I think.
"You do feel that kind of 'easy come, easy go' attitude . . . But everything I write is about identity." This is the theme that led him towards the play that is now being hailed as his masterpiece. First staged last year, Black Watch is again a play both local and global in aspect, dealing with the long-standing Scottish regiment in Iraq just as it was being subsumed into the new Royal Regiment of Scotland. If Burke's debut was too showy verbally, the dialogue of Black Watch, rooted in verbatim interviews and later dramatised by the playwright, is so sharp it could cut granite.
"The Black Watch is as much a working-class institution as the pits," says Burke. "A lot of the outcry, when it was being amalgamated, and the bitterness that it brought, was about having your identity taken away. That regiment represents something massive to the people of Fife." Burke even noticed the cast of John Tiffany's production falling in love with an ex-regimental sergeant major, employed to drill them during rehearsals. One young actor, for whom Black Watch was his first job, even told Burke he was considering joining the Armed Forces.
"What the army does is it takes these young guys who are a bit adrift and it gives them this feeling of really strong identity, and it makes them proud of themselves. They swagger and wear a hat just a wee bit to the side and swing the kilt when they walk. It makes them puff their chests. And it turns them, in a weird way, into decent, self-reliant human beings. At the same time," he adds, "they might go and murder some Iraqis."
If Burke is self-deprecating about Gagarin Way, he simply detaches himself from the phenomenon of Black Watch. The play has won several awards, was recently heralded by the Scotsman as the third-most-important theatre event in Scottish history, and, with a little less restraint, described by the Guardian'sMark Fisher as "the Best Play In This Or Any Other Universe For All Time Ever".
"People f**king come out and fling themselves at your f**cking feet," says Burke, managing to sound both content and uncomfortable with the play's reception. "And they tell you things. Mums whose sons have died saying 'you've just told my family story'. What do you say to that? You just stand there. Soldiers whose stories we portray in floods of tears telling the actors what happened to them. It's this huge outpouring of emotion. It's been seen by 15,000 people on the tour. I've been keeping away from it, because that turns a man's head, like." He laughs. "I learned that from Gagarin Way, from being in the bar every night. You'd have to go into rehab by the end of it." Now distracted by the onset of fatherhood, a DVD box-set of The Wire, a number of play commissions, and a TV film for Channel 4 based on The Odysseyand set in a south London hospital, Burke's identity seems secure enough to escape the intoxication of Black Watch. He is still disappointed, however, that the play will not be performed in London now that the National Theatre of Scotland, which commissioned and produced the play, turned down the National Theatre as a venue for the originally site-specific piece. "It could have worked in the Olivier," Burke says. "But as a writer you don't really get a say in these things. I had to read about it in the Guardian."
Even so, Burke has been identified as one of the dramatists enjoying a "golden age" of Scottish writing, counting David Greig, Liz Lochhead, David Harrower and many others among its luminaries. Burke is characteristically keen to downplay the idea. "It's not like that," he says. "We're all very different people and writers. I think, though, that when you don't feel you're represented, you feel you have to represent yourself." This seems like a standpoint that both the writer and trade unionist can share, making Burke's ongoing search for identity both artistic and political. Even if Black Watch is clearly un-toppable.
"I think so," Burke agrees. "But then Gagarin Waywas un-toppable as well."
Island Theatre Company's production of Gagarin Way, directed by Karl Shiels, premiered in Limerick last month. It transfers to Andrew's Lane Studio from May 21-26
