Jacobite battle to be remembered
Two exhibitions are to open in East Lothian this summer marking a major Jacobite battle that took place in Prestonpans in 1745. The first opens this weekend.
Bill Paterson is one of the truly great Scottish actors of the last 50 years, a writer and performer whose career began in the Citizens’ Youth Theatre in the 1970s, and who today ranks as one of the most acclaimed names in British film and television.
Born in Glasgow in 1946, Paterson was destined at first for a career as a quantity surveyor, before he rebelled and enrolled at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Soon after he graduated, while he was working at the Citizens’, he became closely involved with the brilliant generation of theatre-makers – including Billy Connolly, John by rne and john mcgrath – who would go on to create the Great Northern Welly Boot Show of 1972, and to found the legendary radical touring company 7:84 Scotland.
In 1973 he created the unforgettable role of wide-boy property developer Mcchuckemup, in 7:84’s The Cheviot, The Stag, And The Black, Black Oil. Then, in 1977, he starred in John Byrne’s first play, Writer’s Cramp, as the improbable hero, Paisley poet Francis Seneca Mcdade.
A fter the play transferred to
London, he quickly developed a successful stage and screen career there, and won roles in films ranging from Bill Forsyth’s Comfort And Joy to The Killing Fields and Truly Madly Deeply.
He has appeared in countless television series and radio plays over the years, and in 2015, he made a triumphant return to the Scottish stage when he appeared with Brian Cox in the Lyceum’s superb 50th anniversary production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot.
Here he reflects on the life and work of another Scotsman whom he met soon after he moved to London; the inimitable absurdist poet, performer and raconteur Ivor Cutler, who died in 2006. Paterson remembers the way in which memories of a Glasgow childhood shaped each of them, despite the miles that separated them from their native city.