If things had worked out differently, writer Ena Lamont Stewart would have lived long enough to bask in the overdue success of her 1947 play, Men Should Weep.

If things had worked out differently, writer Ena Lamont Stewart would have lived long enough to bask in the overdue success of her 1947 play, Men Should Weep. As it is, by the time her searing depiction of Glasgow tenement poverty during the Depression was rediscovered by John McGrath’s 7:84 company in 1982 as part of their Clydebuilt season of lost working-class masterpieces (which also included Joe Corrie’s In Time O’ Strife and Robert McLeish’s The Gorbals Story), Lamont Stewart was already 70 years old. Any drive for writing she may have harboured would soon be lost to Alzheimer’s disease and her death in 2006.

By that time, Men Should Weep had long been regarded as a modern classic, and had been named as one of the 100 most important plays of the 20th century in a list compiled by the National Theatre in London. If that company’s 2010 production went some way to prove Lamont Stewart’s play had a significance beyond its immediate locale, the National Theatre of Scotland’s touring production should give it even greater weight.

Why, though, has it taken so long for a play that falls somewhere between Sean O’Casey and Arthur Miller in its all-too-human portrait of social ills, to be recognised? Did it slip through the net following its initial success in its original production by the left-leaning Glasgow Unity company because of its warts-and-all portrayal of its subject? Was the play’s neglect a by-product of an ongoing rivalry between Glasgow Unity and the better-resourced Citizens Theatre? Or was it simply that the play’s writer was a woman? The truth is that all of these factors contributed to the silencing of a unique voice that was never fully allowed to flourish. But there were other, more fundamental reasons, too.

“At that time Scotland had a tendency to celebrate the new,” the writer and broadcaster Kenneth Roy points out. “Then something else comes along that’s new, so everything that went before gets spit out, and people tended to be forgotten quite quickly.”

Roy was a friend and long-time champion of Lamont Stewart, and wrote the programme notes for the last year’s London production of Men Should Weep.

“I met Ena in the early 1970s,” he recalls. “I was working at the BBC, and we were both living in Prestwick. I literally bumped into her one night, so I knew her as a friend before I ever read the play. At that point Ena was neglected as a playwright, which was a source of great pain to her. She hadn’t been recognised much since the Glasgow Unity years, and she struggled to make a living.”

Lamont Stewart augmented her salary working as a librarian by contributing features to the woman’s page of The Herald.

“She used to talk about two of her plays she was particularly fond of,” continues Roy. “One was Men Should Weep, and the other was an earlier play called Starched Aprons, which was really about nursing and hospitals, and came from a time when Ena worked in a hospital. She didn’t think Men Should Weep was a better play, but she did think Starched Aprons was as good. Of course, Starched Aprons is never done, and Men Should Weep is done all the time.”

Like Men Should Weep, Starched Aprons was born of compassion and anger at the world Lamont Stewart saw around her. Where, though, did that anger itself come from? And what caused her to be so infuriated by one rejection that she went home and tore up every copy of her play that she had?

 

The daughter of a Glasgow minister who served one of the city’s poorest districts, Lamont Stewart grew up in a musical household that may have influenced the discordant symphonies of criss-crossing speeches in her plays as much as her powerful first-hand observations. It was her work as a receptionist at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Glasgow that exposed her to the devastating effects of malnutrition, and which influenced Starched Aprons.

Ena Lamont married actor Jack Stewart, and became involved with Glasgow Unity Theatre, then a firebrand operation in direct opposition to the middle-class drawing-room dramas patronised by well-to-do society types. Lamont Stewart claimed the characters of her plays possessed her as she went about her domestic chores until she had no choice but to set their voices down on paper. After the success of Starched Aprons, in which Roddy McMillan was cast over Jack Stewart, Men Should Weep was written in what must have been a manic weekend. By this time, Lamont Stewart’s marriage was in freefall, and the prospect of being a single parent was looming.

Accidental or not, Men Should Weep’s themes of weak, emasculated men and strong matriarchs keeping body, soul and family together were as personal as they were universal. By the time of Giles Havergal’s 1982 production at a time of mass unemployment under Thatcherite rule, with women-run support groups for striking miners only two years away, Men Should Weep looked like prophecy.

“I think the play does have some sort of contemporary relevance,” Roy agrees. “It’s a very human play, and human plays tend to last, but I think it goes beyond any kind of documentary reading of things, and there’s an honesty in the way there is with Arthur Miller. But I think you could overplay certain parallels. The sort of poverty depicted in the play, for instance, is seemingly awful compared to poverty now, so the lengths you can make parallels are limited.”

Whatever comparisons that might be made between then and now, between the 1947 and 1982 productions, both Men Should Weep and its author were ignored. This was in part due to the collapse of Glasgow Unity, as a post Second World War socialist idealism drifted into financial mismanagement. The main obstacle to seeing Lamont Stewart’s work onstage, however, was Osborne Henry Mavor, aka playwright James Bridie.

Mavor had co-founded the Citizens Theatre in 1943, and one would have thought it the logical home for Lamont Stewart and the Glasgow Unity generation. Mavor told Lamont Stewart to her face, however, that under no circumstances would her work be seen on the Citizens stage.

“She couldn’t get her foot in the door,” says the playwright’s son, Bill Stewart. “She felt she was kept out of it because she was a girl, and she was an unattached girl.

“After that she wrote a lot of stuff that ended up on the cutting-room floor, as it were, and there were another couple of plays that made her feel better about herself, but by the time she was hailed a success she was far too gone with Alzheimer’s to bask in any glory. But she was someone who saw things as they were, and managed to put that on paper in a direct and witty way.”

Stewart was only three when his mother penned Men Should Weep, but over the years he has seen numerous productions. While he expresses reservations about former Citz director Giles Havergal’s expressionist 1998 revival of the play, Stewart hails the 2010 Lyttleton Theatre production as fantastic.

“I’d never seen such a well-filled theatre,” he says. “The actors were top drawer, and there was clearly no penny-pinching going on. As a play I think it’s still pertinent, and I only hope this new production stays true to its intentions.”

As Men Should Weep’s accidental unofficial guardian, Roy too is aware of preserving Lamont Stewart’s belated legacy.

“It was such a male chauvinist society then,” Roy bemoans, “and it was difficult for any women writers to make an impression. Ena kept on writing, and would send scripts off which wouldn’t even be acknowledged or returned. For any creative person it would be difficult to maintain confidence in your own ability after that, but she was a tremendous character.

“She was always thought of as a Communist, but she was actually just a great critic and observer. Some of her abilities were journalistic. She observed the society around her, and had this uncanny ability of scraping up language and turning it into these great works of art.”

Men Should Weep is at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, September 16-October 8, then tours (www.nationaltheatrescotland.com). Supported by Bank of Scotland.