Tony Roper never expected to spend his later years directing one of Scotland’s best-loved plays. At 85, the Glasgow actor and writer is preparing to bring his his final production of The Steamie to a close at the King’s Theatre, almost 40 years after he wrote the hit show.
He knows the play is what he will be remembered for: “I’m a happy bunny. I thought I would be deid long before now. As a young man, I figured I would be a nightwatchman in my later years. See out my days. I really had no idea about my career. I never planned a career. Ever.”
Roper knows that his name will always be associated with The Steamie and Jamesie Cotter, the character he played in Rab C Nesbitt.
“I know The Steamie is part of my legacy,” he said.
“I did a very successful show, I was playing Rikki Fulton with Gerard Kelly playing Jack Milroy, as Francie and Josie. That was really successful, we got three tours out of that. I’ve done a lot of other really good things.
But, The Steamie and Jamesie Cotter, that will be the two things that people remember me for. I would have been glad just to have one thing, never mind two.”
For a man whose career has included television, theatre, writing and directing, the continuing success of The Steamie is particularly satisfying.
First performed in 1987, the play follows four women spending Hogmanay in a Glasgow washhouse in the 1950s. Their conversations about husbands, families, money and their hopes for the future have entertained generations of Scottish audiences.
Roper grew up in Anderston and tells me that he had no need to invent the personalities who inhabit The Steamie. He had known them all his life.
“The characters I wrote, they’re not in my head. They are the characters I grew up with. The lot of them. I just wrote about people I knew and fortunately for me it worked out.
“I don’t remember coming up with a plan. I wrote from my experience and tried to make it entertaining as well.
Although the play is set in the years after the Second World War, Roper says he was interested in the everyday lives of ordinary people rather than writing a historical account of the period.
“The Steamie is really about an era. There’s no mention of the Second World War but that would have been looming over everybody and we were all just trying to get ourselves out of that state. I don’t bring up any of that because I didn’t want it to be tied to that, but it is all about people in the 1950s.”
That time and version of Scotland becomes more distant with every revival of the show. Roper recognises that some of the smallest details now provoke particular reactions.
“A lot of the audience would be old enough to remember things like the way that we used to put a phone down on the cradle, things like that when it’s acted out gets a round of applause or a laugh. Younger people wouldn’t remember these things.
“I love just watching these moments, people get carried away, swept away with the show. The audience are there with the actors, they are sucked into the show, that’s what I always wanted to do as a playwright. Do it well enough so that people believe what they are watching.”
Roper said STV wanted him to write a sitcom after the television version of The Steamie became a sensation. He said no.
“I think if you strike a chord with a play you just leave it alone. Don’t try to follow up on it.
“I just thought I’d done the best writing I’ve probably ever done.”
The latest production, featuring Louise McCarthy, Ali Cleland, Eden Barrie, Lesley Mackie and Paul J Corrigan, marks Roper’s final time directing The Steamie.
He is full of praise for the actors who have taken on characters that Scottish audiences already know so well.
“This is one of the best casts I have ever worked with. They are wonderful. It’s been an absolute unqualified success. We’ve sold more tickets than we’ve ever done.
“It’s a beautiful adaptation. They can all go on and convince an audience that they are in fact living in the 1950s, and your getting to see how everyone gets on. It’s a miracle for me. That they all manage to do that in every performance. It’s the magic of theatre.”
After touring Scotland since August, The Steamie concludes its run at the King’s Theatre on Saturday 14 November.
For Roper, the venue brings back memories: “We’re finishing at The King’s Theatre in Glasgow and it’s wonderful. There are people who still work there, particularly at the stage’s door, I’ve known them for the entirety of my career. So it’s lovely.”
It is a fitting place to end his time directing a play that has occupied such a significant part of his life.
“It’s a very gratifying thing to get to the end of something like this. Any play. This one just seems to have struck a chord. I know that.”
The Steamie is at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, until Saturday 14 November.