The Citizens Theatre is located in the Gorbals, a historically poor and relatively abandoned area of Glasgow, south of the River Clyde. I arrived there on a gray day in the first half of August, after walking by the water through misty rain, alongside skimming seagulls. Tall merchant houses alternated with blinkered pieces of modernism. Boxy flower bouquets put up by the city council looked a bit like faces. I walked by the recently re-opened Clutha Vaults, a pub famously crashed into by a helicopter, in 2013. A tree grows through its roof.
I was in the city to see a rehearsal of “Lanark,” an adaptation, by the playwright David Greig and the director Graham Eatough, of the novel by Alasdair Gray, which débuted at the Edinburgh International Festival, on August 23rd, in celebration of Gray’s eightieth year. When I arrived, the cast and crew had just run through a scene in which a woman’s skin becomes covered in mouths. Then they had stopped for lunch. A member of the tech crew announced that, in order to test the sound, he would read out an entire year’s worth of winning lottery numbers. Later, I watched a woman in a leopard-print dress with a pink plume in her hair chastise Lanark, the play’s protagonist, for not having his arm, which has become covered in dragon hide, looked at by a doctor.
Gray was born in Glasgow in 1934. He “played a central role during the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties in reimagining literary Glasgow, and largely bypassing all those tired clichés of gangs, hard men, and knife violence,” Gavin Miller, who wrote a book called “Alasdair Gray: The Fiction of Communion,” told me. “He did this while also resisting some of the very anodyne narratives that emerged as Glasgow ‘regenerated’ under neoliberalism.” In the Glasgow that Gray helped to imagine—in books like “1982, Janine,” “Poor Things,” and, especially, “Lanark”—“adolescents and artists flourish who are over-sensitive, and in their masculinity insecure,” Gerard Carruthers, of the University of Glasgow, said.
Gray’s presence in Glasgow is persistent and mercurial: you never quite know where he’ll crop up next. You see his murals at subway stops—he is also an accomplished painter—and on the wall of a restaurant and bar called The Ubiquitous Chip, and on the ceiling of the Òran Mór cultural center. These paintings suggest both William Blake and Walt Disney; some are somber, serious things, but many convey a kind of muffled laughter. The one at Hillhead station includes, among many other things, the image of a young Alasdair Gray writing while staring at his own head, which appears to have been decapitated from a second body, which lies on the table in front of him. There have been retrospectives of Gray’s work at the Kelvingrove museum, the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, the Talbot Rice Gallery at the University of Edinburgh, and elsewhere. And if you stayed in Glasgow long enough in the last thirty years, you might have seen Gray himself amble down the street.
“Most people I know have an Alasdair Gray story,” Beatrice Colin, a writer and professor at the University of Strathclyde, told me recently, “most of them unprintable. To give you an example, I once heard that he threw a party in his flat. When it was late and he wanted everyone to leave, rather than ask them politely, he took all his clothes off and stood at the door naked until people got the message.”
“Lanark” is Gray’s best-known book. It was also his first. Published in 1981, it took twenty-five years to write and is broken up into four parts. The book presents two parallel realities, one taking place in Glasgow, and the other in a surreal version of the city, presented as a kind of hell—and sometimes simply referred to as hell—called Unthank. In Glasgow, the protagonist is a man named Duncan Thaw; in Unthank, he is named Lanark. Unthank has a calendar “based on sunlight, but only administrators use it. The majority have forgotten the sun.”
Graham Eatough described the story of “Lanark” as a “painful, human, very human narrative, which is kind of to do with ‘finding your place in the world,’ I suppose.” He also noted its prescience with regard to how humans have treated the environment and to the state of politics in Europe, likening one exchange from the book to what’s currently happening in Greece. “Industrially speaking, you see, Unthank is no longer profitable, so it is going to be scrapped and swallowed,” a member of the unctuous ruling body called “the council,” says to Lanark. “In a piecemeal way we’ve been doing that for years, but now we can take it en bloc and I don’t mind telling you we’re rather excited.”
At one point in the book, Thaw talks with a fellow-student at the university named McAlpin about why people don’t appreciate Glasgow:
“In a large sense, ‘Lanark’ performed that job with Glasgow,” Greig told me. He quickly added the caveat that while films and novels can do that job well, it’s harder to engage with a city in the same way from the stage—you can, for instance, show shot after shot of locations across an entire city in a few minutes of montage in a film. As if to emphasize the point, the exchange between Thaw and McAlpin isn’t in the play. “It probably fell foul of a fairly brutal structuring process,” Eatough told me. “On a stage,” Greig said, “you notice people who do things, not say things.”
Earlier this year, Gray described the Glasgow he first encountered to students at the city’s eponymous school of art. “It had a smoke canopy over it,” he told them, “a kind of great pall over the city—almost like a physical roof.” In June, Gray was seriously injured in a fall. In an interview with the Guardian, Eatough described the accident as “a shadow hanging over the whole process.” On the day we spoke, he was quietly optimistic. “He’s doing better, actually,” Eatogh told me. But Gray is still in the hospital, and his health remains a serious concern.
Walking up Buchanan Street back to the train, I wondered about the connection between “Lanark” the book, “Lanark” the play, and Glasgow itself. Then I stopped in front of a building that appeared to be covered from roof to base in leaves dipped in black oil. What on earth was it? And why did I feel the way I did?
“As a journalist I was asked by my editor to write a piece on writers and style,” Beatrice Colin had written to me in an e-mail. “I called him up,” she said, referring to Gray, “and asked him what he thought about style. He laughed uproariously and then hung up.”
