ScottishNews.com

Set in a Glasgow washhouse in the 1950s, Roper’s comedy about Magrit, Dolly, Doreen and Mrs Culfeathers has become one of the most recognisable Scottish plays of the modern era, with music written by Dave Anderson.

Generations have grown up with its characters, its songs and its language. The television adaptation became a fixture of Scottish popular culture after it was first broadcast on Hogmanay 1988, while repeated stage revivals have introduced the story to audiences who were not even born when it was written.

Roper remains bewildered and delighted by its longevity.

Here, in his own words, he reflects on seeing the television version for the first time, why he once feared it would end the stage play, the Glasgow that inspired the story and why audiences continue to recognise themselves in the characters from a world that has largely disappeared.

I still can’t believe they’re doing it

It is quite strange for me because The Steamie had already been a very successful stage play before the television version happened. When they made it for television, I deliberately stayed away.

I wrote the television play, but that was really all I did. I kept away from the rehearsals and everything else and just let them get on with it.

Then I watched it that night. And I didn’t like it. I remember thinking: “Oh God, I shouldn’t have done that.”

It had nothing to do with the actors or anybody involved in making it. I wrote it, so I’m certainly not blaming anybody. For some reason, it just didn’t gel for me. Maybe I knew it too well.

Then the next day people were stopping me in the street saying: “I watched it last night. I’d never seen it before. It was wonderful. It was tremendous.”

And I’m standing there thinking: “I didn’t like it.” That was a very strange experience.

Of course, what I thought about it made absolutely no difference to its popularity. People loved it.

And all these years later, I still find myself thinking: I can’t believe they’re still doing it. I really can’t.

I thought television might end the stage play

The funny thing is that I didn’t particularly want to make the television version in the first place. STV offered me a lot of money, which certainly helped convince me.

My worry was what television would do to the stage production.

At that time people could record something off the television and keep it, so I thought: they’ll have The Steamie sitting on a tape somewhere. They’ll have watched it 100 times. Why would they then pay to go and see it in a theatre?

I thought people might become sick and tired of it. Exactly the opposite happened.

It taught me something about the difference between television and theatre.

Over the years I’ve met people who have watched the television version countless times and then seen it on stage, and they’ll tell me there is no comparison.

I agree with them. Theatre is a different thing.

You are in the room with these characters. You are sharing it with an audience. When something works and a whole theatre responds to it together, you cannot reproduce that by watching a recording at home.

I never wanted to tell people exactly where it was

People quite often connect The Steamie with a particular part of Glasgow. They’ll say: “That’s the steamie there,” or decide exactly which washhouse the play must have been set in. 

I never actually specify it. I deliberately left the location blank.

That means people can put their own place into it.

It is set in Glasgow, obviously, but in another sense it could be anywhere, depending on the people who inhabit it.

I think that is one of the reasons it has lasted. People recognise somebody from their own lives.

They might not recognise every word the characters are saying because the language belongs to another era, but they recognise what they are talking about.

They recognise the relationships. They recognise the misunderstandings.

They recognise the daft situations people get themselves into.

The circumstances might be different now. The technology is certainly different. The Glasgow around them has changed enormously.

The people have not changed all that much.

The language has overtaken the play

I always knew eventually the language would overtake it. And it has.

There are words and expressions in The Steamie that younger audiences simply will not know now.

That creates a problem, because I could change those words and make everything immediately understandable to a modern audience.

But then it would no longer represent the 1950s. You have to keep enough of that language for the world to be truthful.

What matters is whether people understand the situation.

Mrs Culfeathers, for example, can talk about something using terminology which has disappeared from everyday Glasgow speech. A younger member of the audience might have no idea what one particular word means.

It doesn’t necessarily matter.

If the actor tells the story properly, you understand what has happened to this wee woman. You understand the ridiculous situation she has found herself in.

And you laugh. That happens throughout The Steamie.

The characters find themselves in strange situations. There are misunderstandings, frustrations and things going wrong.

That is human. It does not belong to one decade.

You don’t have to understand every word

I think sometimes we worry too much about whether an audience understands absolutely every word.

Think about Shakespeare. I acted in Shakespeare and there were times when I didn’t know what I was saying myself.

You could go away afterwards and look up what a particular expression meant, but the audience sitting in the theatre doesn’t have a book explaining it to them.

A really good actor can make you understand it. They can paint the scene with the words, even when the words themselves are unfamiliar.

That is the craft. If somebody really gets inside a character, you know what they mean.

Comedy makes that especially difficult because you have to get the laugh.

With drama or tragedy, an audience might miss something and you do not necessarily know they have missed it.

With comedy, you know. If they don’t laugh, you’re stuck.

That means you have to work incredibly hard to communicate what is happening without simply changing the language.

That is what we have to do with The Steamie. You cannot constantly rewrite it to make every word contemporary, because eventually it would cease to be the thing it is supposed to represent.

You trust the actors and you trust the audience.

People recognise themselves in it

I don’t think The Steamie survives because audiences are nostalgically reconnecting with some vanished version of Glasgow.

I think it survives because the people aren’t really that different. They are the same people in different circumstances.

An audience can look at something happening between those women in a 1950s steamie and recognise something happening between people today.

That’s what holds it together. The clothes change. The language changes. The city changes. The way people live changes.

The emotions don’t change very much.

People still worry about their families. They still gossip. They still have ambitions and disappointments. They still make each other laugh.

You can set a story in America, London, Glasgow or anywhere else and there will be things that are completely specific to that place.

You might not understand every expression. If the humanity is there, you get swept up in it.

You absorb the things you understand and almost forget about the things you don’t. And if you’ve had a good night in the theatre, that’s what you remember.

You remember the bits that made you laugh. You remember the people.

Perhaps that is what has happened with The Steamie. Nearly four decades later, audiences are still walking into that washhouse and recognising somebody they know.

I couldn’t possibly have expected that when we started.