Hector Macmillan
HECTOR Macmillan was a man of wide accomplishment, not only a major playwright, but a scientist, a writer of persuasive prose, a luthier of distinction and a campaigner for the arts. Above all, he understood the importance of providing a supportive context within which plays could be written – and produced.
He was key to modern Scottish theatre’s development, both as dramatist and one of the trio, alongside Ena Lamont Stewart and John Hall, who convened the meeting early in the autumn of 1973 at Edinburgh’s Netherbow Theatre which founded the Scottish Society of Playwrights. While Hector always asserted that this trio’s members were equals, no-one there doubted he was first among equals.
When that meeting constituted the SSP and, to my astonishment, elected me its first chair, Hector, as a council member, was a staunch colleague. He drafted with Stephen Macdonald, then artistic director of Dundee Rep, the Ssp/federation of Scottish Theatre contract which to this day remains standard – and much-admired south of the Border. Later, in the 1970s, he himself became a highly regarded SSP chair.
For its first decade the SSP was a development organisation whose work was uncannily like that of the modern Playwrights Studio Scotland. Hector supported this work but, for him, a key issue was the parallel role of the SSP as a union, as a forum for discussing and campaigning for playwrights’ rights as well as for Scottish theatre more generally. He could be forceful in pursuing encroachment on those rights: once, he reported, when royalty cheques from the Pool Lunchtime Theatre for his 1973 The Sash, dealing with wonderfully savage humour and irony with Protestant sectarianism, had several times bounced, he breached theatre protocol, walked in on rehearsal and refused to leave until the money due was paid, in cash.
Hector’s creative energy was undiminished by his advocacy. All this time he was producing powerful drama. Often one hears the current Scottish theatrical resurgence, especially in playwriting, ascribed to late-1970s productions, but its true beginning lies in the work of a generation of playwrights and directors around 1970 onwards. Among these, Hector was a leading figure.
Writing drama for all media, an important strand of his work was translation and adaptation of European classics including Holberg’s Jeppe of the Hill (1986) for BBC radio, directed by Stewart Conn, and, for theatre, Molière’s The Hypochondriak (1987) and Beaumarchais’s The Barber of Seville as The Barber Figaro (1991).
Truly a man of many talents, surely Hector Macmillan’s central importance in Scottish culture remains as a dramatist. Highly regarded by his peers, in 2006 he was elected by acclamation lifetime SSP honorary president, following in this post illustrious predecessors, Robert Mclellan and Ena Lamont Stewart, and in 2012 he was appointed an honorary fellow of the Association of Scottish Literary Studies, the highest international honour in the field.
Despite his eminence, Hector Macmillan was a private man, who, while having an impressive physical presence, was genial in company, engaging and enriching to be with. He could sometimes seem almost shy, but was a formidable negotiator and advocate for causes that mattered to him. It could not be more apt that latterly he produced an important study of Thomas Muir of Huntershill, Handful of Rogues (2005), demonstrating acute skills in documentary research as he explored issues, touched on in earlier plays, like government surveillance and abusive use of government powers. Like Muir, he used his great gifts to advocate people’s rights.