TOM Gallacher was the youngest son in a Vale of Leven working-class family of five children. In his early years he trained and worked as a draughtsman in the Clydeside shipyards. It was during this time that his talents and his passion were caught and held indissolubly by Dumbarton People's Theatre, with which he was to have a lifetime association.
A gifted actor and an inventive and successful producer of plays, he yearned most of all to be a
writer. The dramatist Henrik Ibsen and the Danish writer Karen
Blixen, whom Tom had met, were
formative influences.
While living in Denmark in the 1960s Tom wrote a series of
evocative reflections for Dunbartonshire's County Reporter. In 1975, BBC radio producer the late Gordon Emslie utilised the material in Hunting Shadows, splendidly performed by Robert Trotter, also a former Dumbarton People's Theatre actor.
His first significant success came with a production of one of his earliest plays, Our Kindness to Five Persons, at the Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, in March 1969.
In March 1971, as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, the first full-length performance of Mr Joyce Is Leaving Paris received much critical acclaim and established beyond doubt that Tom Gallacher had matured into a playwright of international stature. In Revival, which advances the character of Solness from Ibsen's The Master Builder into the
twentieth century, Tom Fleming was to seize with aplomb the opportunities offered by the lead in a production at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh. The play was warmly received in Dublin and in London.
It was there, in the spring of 1973, that Schellenbrack was first performed, prompting Andrew Cruikshank to observe: ''Schellenbrack and Revival are Gallacher at his best, writing with a precision and delicate nuance that reverberate beyond the characters.''
Schellenbrack was part of the Pitlochry Festival Theatre programme in 1973 and the Scottish Arts Council selected it for an autumn tour extending from Kirkwall to Dumfries. Christopher Small, writing in The Glasgow Herald of the production, commented on Tom Gallacher's work: ''His plays are literary as well as literate, making a drama out of authorship, and especially the shifts and disguises it involves.''
Tom wrote intensively and productively. It was his habit to work late, sometimes through the night, with a passion and a single-
mindedness that incidentally nurtured his natural tendency towards isolation and more than once caused his health to suffer.
The Only Street, Bright Scene Fading, conceived in Canada, and Personal Effects contained enigmatic intellectual challenges posed by Tom's view of how best to understand our voyage through life and its spiritual significance.
He frequently reworked material so that What's Come Over You, which he wrote to be performed at the opening of the Denny Civic Theatre in Dumbarton in 1969, underwent successive metamorphoses. He derived great satisfaction in recasting his short story The Horseman,written in 1963, as a radio play, The Scar, in 1971. It was again reworked for Channel 4 in 1986. In the 1970s he wrote for the theatre, radio, and television, most notably Hunting Shadows, Adam Smith, The Trial of Thomas Muir (for BBC Schools,) If the Face Fits, for BBC2, and a radio play, Portrait of Isa Mulvenny.
A musical, Stage Door Canteen, and A Laughing Matter, Hallowe'en, The Sea Change, A Presbyterian Wooing, and The Evidence of Tiny Tim received professional productions in the Scottish theatre.
By 1980 Tom had settled in Garelochhead, where he was to remain until his death, and turned his attention to prose. The first collection of short stories was published under the title Apprentice. Journeyman and Survivor were published in 1984 and 1985. In 1985 a further collection, The Jewel Maker, appeared.
It was the theatre which always exercised a fascination for Tom, and in 2000 Pitlochry Festival Theatre staged a production of The Summer Time Has Come with Jimmy Logan in the principal role.
Tom Gallacher, playwright and writer; born February 16, 1932, died October 27, 2001.
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