‘The bar is high for the writing and for acting’
Dave Anderson’s Opening Time is the latest in a long association with Oran Mor and A Play, A Pie and A Pint
Markfisher
We often see pubs in popular culture during the rowdy build-up to closing time. It is the Garrison in Peaky Blinders, where Tommy Shelby and his crew hatch their plans and dispatch their enemies. It is the Admiral Benbow in Treasure Island, where tax officers and smugglers converge. It is the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars, where intergalactic species rub shoulders.
Dave Anderson, by contrast, is interested in the other end of the day. His new lunchtime musical is set when the regulars call by for some company. Appropriately, it is called Opening Time.
“It’s about people you meet in the pub between 11 and 12 in the morning,” says Anderson. “They’re a different demographic from people who are still there at closing time when it’s loud and people are rushing to get out onto the street again. In the morning, it’s a different group who show up, some of them because they desperately need a drink and some just for the craic.”
It is not coincidental that the playwright and songwriter should be thinking about daytime pubs in 2022. In the Covid lockdowns of the last two years, social spaces were the hardest hit. When restrictions were at their tightest, having a quiet drink with a friend simply wasn’t allowed. As theatres closed and religious gatherings ended, we lost the opportunity to behave as the social creatures we are.
“The play is about people’s attitudes to restrictions,” he says. “It was hellish for those of us who like a pub. But there were people like Neil Oliver saying it was a restriction of our civil liberties. Get a grip! We should try and look after each other.”
For Anderson, the worst part of lockdown was being unable to see his family: “What I really missed was a weekly visit from my granddaughter; a ‘sleepover in the West End,’ as she used to call it. That’s kind of done now because she’s a teenage girl, so that’s a thing I really miss about the time before lockdown; bedtime stories and all that stuff.”
There can be no more appropriate venue for a play about daytime drinking than Oran Mor, where A Play, A Pie And A Pint furnishes the audience with a drink as part of the lunchtime ticket. Did Anderson’s play turn him into a pre-lunch boozer? “Not really,” he laughs. “I went to the pub early in the morning – this is my excuse and I’m sticking to it – to research the show.”
Drinker or not, Anderson is a familiar figure in the venue. He lists his number of shows there as “umpteen,” which seems as good an estimate as any of the Christmas shows, summer pantos and musical comedies he has masterminded since the venture started in 2004. He loves the way the company has remained light on its feet. “Most writers have to work like hell to get anywhere,” he says. “But here, you can sell the idea to the artistic director and see the thing done within a reasonable timeframe.”
That is all the more appropriate because Anderson was a longstanding associate of the late David Maclennan, the organisation’s founder. The two of them worked together in the early days of 7:84 Scotland, John Mcgrath’s company that toured The Cheviot, The Stag And The Black, Black Oil around the village halls of Scotland, raising political consciousness as it went.
“It was The Cheviot that got me interested in doing theatre,” he says. “I thought theatre was very middle class, folk dressed up in dickie bows, Anyone For Tennis and all that. But I realised you could actually say things if you wanted to; and you could say it directly to the audience, not just have actors pretend there’s no audience there.”
Carrying with them the same firebrand spirit – plus a love of rock’n’roll – Anderson and Maclennan formed Wildcat Stage Productions in 1978. Until the then Scottish Arts Council pulled the plug in 1997, the company specialised in single-issue dramas on pressing political issues, usually leavened by daft jokes and catchy tunes.
Topics included mental health, loan sharks and the miners’ strike, but also ranged to football (The Celtic Story) and Scottish literary classics (The Silver Darlings). Its biggest and most enduring hit was The Steamie, Tony Roper’s much-loved wash-house comedy, for which Anderson wrote the songs.
On their travels, they would hear about lunchtime theatres in Galway, Dublin, Edinburgh and Stockholm, where the Klara Soppteater translates as “soup theatre”. “First time I saw Druid in Galway in the 70s was when we were still working with 7:84,” says Anderson. "Druid had a theatre in the back of a pub. It was just great fun.”
The idea sunk in and, when circumstances dictated it was time to reinvent himself, Maclennan put the idea into practice on Byres Road. The new company shared with Wildcat a hatred of bureaucracy and a belief in giving audiences a good time.
“Quite often he would ask me to direct things," says Anderson of his “old comrade” who died in 2014. “He thought that nobody else would do it! So I’ve done a lot. And I have to say, the bar is high for the writing and for acting. It’s a social event and being lunchtime makes it casual. With a new play every week, it’s the variety of it. It’s been a fantastic thing."
“In the morning, it’s a different group, some of them because they desperately need a drink and some just for the craic”
Opening Time is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, from 18-23 April