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Stanley Baxter starred in Irish play in Glasgow, 1956

“HOW maddening are the Irish!”, our drama critic observed in May, 1956. “The native Scottish drama has lately been, we will not say floundering, but certainly not very steady on its feet; from the day before yesterday, from the archives of the Abbey [Theatre, Dublin], the revivalist can pick out an ordinary, unpretentious, 40-yearold comedy, and teach us all how they ought to be done.”

At the very least, however, Lennox Robinson’s The Whiteheaded Boy was being staged here by a Scottish company, which was embarking a week-long run at the King’s in Glasgow, the sixth piece in a repertoire put on by the prominent theatrical manager, Henry Sherek.

Rarely could the comedy, our critic continued, have had a more spirited production outside Irish ground, or that movable part of it that Irish players commonly carry with them.

“It is perhaps Stanley Baxter’s face that does the trick; the notable pliability of his physiognomy has never showed more strikingly than in the appearance of this George Geoghegan, as pure-bred an

Irish shopkeeper as ever weighed a short pound of sugar, counted carefully through the small change, or cursed the fecklessness of his squandering younger brother.

“Mr Baxter’s make-up is a considerable work of art; and his acting, as the overburdened support of the family, revolting at last against the imposition of carrying the Whiteheaded Boy on his back, worried, exasperated, driven to desperation by his own shifts, is a match for it.”

Also in the cast were Mairhi Russell (seen above with Baxter), Marillyn Gray, Susan Fuller, Ian Bannen, Louise Maclaren, Jean Taylor-smith, Norman Fraser (in the title role), Mary Helen Donald and Michael

O’halloran.

The Whiteheaded Boy impressed our critic. George Bernard Shaw, he said, “had hard things to say about ‘stage Irish’, but what would we do without them?”