Please Praise Gray's Plays...

Alasdair Gray is known as a novelist and artist, but he’s also written a fair number of plays too. There’s some good work amongst these that isn’t as widely known as it could be, and so The Skinny is proudly sponsoring two events launching a new collected edition of Mr Gray’s plays. A Gray Play Book will be launched at the Glasgow Film Theatre on 17 November and at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre on 8 December. The book contains not only a number of plays written for the stage or radio, but also personal notes and, intriguingly, storyboards for an unmade film of Lanark, and a film script of Poor Things. (Trivial note: Gray’s favoured actor for the part of Baxter was Robbie Coltrane).

The plays themselves stretch from The Cave of Polyphemus, a story from the Odyssey about the blinding of the Cyclops written by Gray for school, when he was a nine year old, to 2008’s Voices In The Dark. Amongst the plays are various works that later surfaced in other formats, whether that be novels (The Fall of Kelvin Walker) or short stories (Mavis Belfrage, McGrotty and Ludmilla). The events will feature Gray performing in extracts from these very plays – he’s been performing in this way at a few events lately, notably (at Aye Write, for example) as the Devil, or more correctly ‘Auld Nick’ in scenes from his retelling of Faust, Fleck.

A Gray Play Book retails at £25 in paperback, but to sweeten up this event for the young and academical amongst you, a free copy of the uncorrected pre-publication edition of the book will be given to every student attending this event on production of a valid student card. The events will cost £6.50 or £5 concession. [Nat Smith]