When a woman called Coralie turned up at Dundee Rep's box office to say the next production was about her, the company sat up and took notice.
The late Tom McGrath's play, Kora, is set in a Dundee housing estate where a community fight against the local authority's attempts to decamp residents out of their homes and are led by a powerful matriarchal figure whose home is bursting at the seams with her offspring.
Nicholas Bone, director of the Magnetic North company that is co-producing Kora with the Rep, and actress Emily Winter, who plays the title role in a play first seen at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1986 before being revived a year later in Dundee, met Coralie. The result was what Bone describes as "a slightly surreal hour, spending time with this woman Tom met almost 30 years ago, and based this whole play on.
"She said she has friends who didn't know anything about the play, and obviously her life has moved since then. There were a couple of big changes Tom made, but she seemed very open to that, and I can imagine her and Tom getting on very well."
Given its themes and the period it was set, it is all too fitting the first day of rehearsals was when former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's death was announced.
"That was a bit weird," Bone admits, "because the play is set over a two-year period between 1982 and 1984, and there's no mention of Thatcher or anything else that was happening in the rest of the country.
"There's a political edge to it though. It's about people trying to take control of their circumstances and lives and change things, not succeeding in what they set out to do but discovering things about themselves. That's something that doesn't change.
"There are always people trying to change things, and 30 years on, in another recession, it feels like a lot of the same stuff is going on. The bizarre thing for me, being a person of a certain age, was discovering the 1980s is now a period. What was a contemporary play when it was first done is now a period piece."
McGrath wrote Kora after being commissioned to make a BBC TV documentary about women in adversity. McGrath was put on to Coralie and a group of people attempting to execute change in their community. By the time he decided he wanted to make the film about her, however, it had been cancelled, and Kora was re-born as a stage play.
McGrath died in 2009 following a mercurial and polymathic career as a poet, playwright, pianist and founding director of two of Glasgow's great arts spaces, the Third Eye Centre, which morphed into the CCA, and Glasgow Theatre Club, which became the Tron.
While McGrath's role as an artistic catalyst has quite rightly been celebrated via the setting up of the Tom McGrath Trust, which gives small amounts of funding to projects which may not sit easily in other funding strands, his importance as a writer is something Bone stresses.
"It's partly the work he did with other playwrights," he says, "but I think it's to do with form. Tom experimented with all these different styles, and I think it's something to do with that experimentation. He brought his influences in music and his background in jazz and poetry really infects his writing. I think it's that freedom to experiment in form that has had an effect on lots of people who worked with him or saw his work."
Bone and Magnetic North seem as natural a fit for Kora as the play being presented in Dundee. When McGrath was still alive, Bone's company ended up producing three new plays by him, The Dream Train, Safe Delivery and the quasi-autobiographical My Old Man. Following Kora and a revival of The Hardman a couple of years ago, Bone would like to see further McGrath gems revisited.
While McGrath's science-fiction play, The Android Circuit, and his semi-autobiographical account of the 1960s counter-culture, The Innocent, both spring to mind, Bone would like to see a restaging of McGrath's 1979 epic, Animal. It is set in a jungle and with a large cast playing a community of apes, with all the grunts, squeaks and squawks that entails.
"It would be an extraordinary play to do," says Bone. "Even now it seems pertinent about humans and animals, and society, but it would have to be on such a huge scale, with people being monkeys. It's such an extraordinary conception."
With such a sprawling back-catalogue, Kora sounds like an uncharacteristically documentary piece for McGrath, a writer who, aside from his enabling role as Scotland's literary director, managed to fuse a love of popular music hall with a 1960s counter-cultural aesthetic.
"Tom laid this other story on top of it," Bone reveals. "The last line of the play is a very unusual way to end if you read it as a piece of documentary theatre. On first reading it almost seemed like a verbatim piece, which is very different to the music hall theatricality in Tom's other plays.
"There was something about the ending, and I did some research and the penny finally dropped. There was a character from Greek mythology who was goddess of the cornfield and was an image of fertility. So on one level it is a straightforward kitchen-sink play about a woman living in a council flat on a scheme in Dundee, but on another it's this thing about hope, and that life has to carry on."
Kora, Dundee Rep, May 21-June 7. Visit dundeereptheatre.co.uk.
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