Scottish Authors > Robert McLellan Playwright, Poet & Short story writer 1907-1985

Robert McLellan was born at Kirkfieldbank, Lanarkshire in 1907. His childhood, spent on his grandparents' farm, inspired the Linmill stories (collected 1977) which are told from the perspective of a child and written in Scots. From 1938 until his death in 1985 McLellan lived on Arran, which provided the setting for the long dramatic poem Sweet Largie Bay (1956), and Arran Burn (1965) written for a BBC television programme about the island.

It is as a playwright that McLellan is best known. Influenced by Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish Literary Renaissance movement, McLellan always wrote in the Scots tongue about Scottish subjects and characters. The use of Scots is one of the most notable features of McLellan's writing. He emphasized that he used a living spoken language not an anachronistic actifact. In performance the lively theatricality of the dialogue communicates with an audience but a glossary is often helpful to a reader. One play, The Flouers o' Edinburgh (1948), focuses on a debate between eighteenth century Edinburgh gentlemen about the conversational use of Scots or English. From his treatment of one character who abandons his "barbarous" native tongue it is clear that McLellan favours the use of Scots.

Although nearly all of his plays have an historical setting McLellan's view of history avoids sentimentality and, even though many of them are comedies, focuses on a harsh believable world. It is the individual, both historical and fictional, who interests McLellan as a way of exploring Scottishness. In his best known play, Jamie the Saxt (1937), James VI is shown to be a statesman who, in spite of the threats to the crown, his own life and the stability of the state, manages to triumph through an unheroic combination of luck, folly, tenacity and cunning. At the end of the play James looks forward to the Union:

Aa that I hae wished for is promised at last! ... the dream o my life come true! It gars my pulse quicken! It gars my hairt loup! It gars my een fill wi' tears! To think hou the twa pair countries hae focht and struggled ... And then to think, as ae day it sall come to pass, that I Jamie Stewart, will ride to Londan, and the twa countries sall become ane.

In a later play, The Hypocrite (1967), by placing the action in eighteenth century Edinburgh and therefore beyond libel action, McLellan is able to ridicule the outraged reaction of some people to a "happening" at the 1963 Edinburgh Festival where a naked girl was fleetingly glimpsed above the speakers' platform at a conference. The play also suggests that such reactions are not always as innocent as they seem.

Robert McLellan's plays are about Scotland and the Scots character but they are never simply parochial. He explores Scottish themes in the tradition of the medieval makars like Henryson and Dunbar and, using a mixture of farce and history, he deals with major issues like religion, the divine right of kings and the rights of ordinary citizens.

Chris Ravenhall

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