Lood Red Roses Donald В Oo

Scan page 7

AIMS AND ACTION CONFERENCE Saturday 11 April from 11 am. to Delegates from labour movement bod John McGrath's latest production, "Blood Red Roses" has just completed a short season at the Citizen's Theatre in Glasgow.

It is, like all of the presentations of the 7:84 Company, an avowedly political work, attempting, as the programme notes say, "to present the realities of working class life and history directly to working class audiences." (The title "7:84' derives from the fact that 7% of the Scottish population owns 84% of the country's wealth).

The play, in a series of short scenes, Presents the life of Bessie McGuigan, a Clydeside militant.

We see her from her early days in the Highlands, the daughter of a soldier wounded in Korea, growing up to become a convenor of a large factory in East Kilbride.

There are her battles against the power of a multinational corporation, her successes and her eventual defeat with the closure of the company.

The story follows her victimisation when she tries to get a job at an engineering factory in Glasgow and ends with a reaffirmation of her determination to press on with the struggle against the class enemy.

Anyone familiar with the history of trade unionism in the West of Scotland will catch echoes of industrial battles and skirmishes over the last two decades-particularly the strikes and eventual shutdown of the BSR factory in East Kilbride and the fairly recent victimisation of a female militant who tried unsuccessfully to hold on to her job at Rolls Royce in Hillington.

Woven in with this story of Bessie's industrial battles is her personal life: her marriage to Alex MoGuigan, the shop steward at the East Kilbride factory who draws her into the Communist Party; his decision to take up the position of a fulltime union official; their drawing apart and separation.

The final irony is that when Bessie turns to the union for help against victimisation it is her erstwhile husband who is called in to rationalise the refusal of the predominantly male workforce to back her reinstatement.

Didactic

Of her two daughters, one is determined not be become involved in working class politics and the other joins the SWP, denouncing the Stalinist betrayals of the movement to which her mother belongs.

The play is thoroughly didactic, arguing out some of the essential contradictions in the British trade union and labour movement.

Above all it shows the dichotomy between the enormous capacity of the working class to struggle to defend their jobs, wages and conditions and, on the other hand, the failure to realise this potential in political terms, in the construction of a movement capable of mounting a serious challenge to the capitalist system.

Because of this strongly polemical approach, the play lacks that element of entertainment which enlivened earlier works of McGrath such as "The Games A Bogey" which was based on the writings of John McLean.

There, the political message was presented in a lively manner, using the techniques of the music hall revue. Perhaps McGrath felt that times are too serious to merit a similar approach. Whether or not a more naturalistic approach to political issues is the more effective medium is a debatable proposition.

Not that the play is without humour. There are some gloriously funny scenes as when the local clergyman gives young Bessie and her fellow pupils a long lecture on the beauties of married life and the subordinate status of woman, delivered with the usual string of boring Christian homilies, to be brought to an abrupt conclusion by Bessie's apt remark, "Shite".

It is more pessimistic than McGrath's earlier works. In the notes to the play McGrath even bemoans that:

"The struggles of the working class to protect the advances made in their standards of life go on. But they have suffered, are suffering serious setbacks. And militancy in those struggles -particularly industrial militancy -is now out of fashion.

All this sounds rather curious in the immediate aftermath of the bloody nose which the miners have just delivered to the Tory government. But it is at a deeper level that McGrath is pessimistic.

difference Throughout the play, between each scene, a narrator appears who announces the year in which the scene is taking place and which government is currently in office, making it plain that there is little discernible difierence between successive Labour and Tory administrations.

At the same time the struggles of Bessie and her fellow workers proceed whichever government is in office and the gap between the industrial militancy of the class and the betrayals of Labour in power become more marked as the plot unravels.

The highest political level which Bessie and her daughter leach are the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party respectively, both of which, whilst channelling their industrial militancy down blind alleys, fail to confront the major political issues. The contradiction at the heart of the play cries out to be resolvedindustrial militancy confronting political stultification.

Central problem

The play's penultimate scene finds Bessie and her daughter watching the 1979 General Election results on TV and bemoaning the victory of Thatcher, blaming it upon "the erosion of class consciousness"

But that does not approach the central political problem, that a revolutionary socialist movement, about which McGrath is obviously passionately concerned, can only be built by taking the struggle for working class leadership directly into the heart of social democracy, hastening its ideological and organisational demise.

We can only hope that McGrath will explore that vital theme in his future productions.

Where do "The Blood Red Roses" come in? As the programme notes explain, they are "the Redcoats, the Englishor should I say • the British soldier", dominating over the Empire for centuries and Scotland as part of that"Empire.

Larger struggle

But they have been replaced by a new overlord, American imperialism which closes factories and townships in a trice, and commands "long black hulls (which) glide underwater out of the Holy Loch, full of terrible destruction, quiet as the grave."

The nationalist element, so evident in McGrath's earlier works, especially "The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black in the Oil" , is now subsumed larger struggle of the international working class against imperialism on a world scale.

McGrath is certainly endeavouring to confront the major dilemmas in the working Unwaged £1 SOMEO Campaign AND ACTION CONFERE Redefield School Blackbird Leys, Oxford Creche provided class movement.

In so far as he seek to penetrate and present his fi atically we shall all for that.

"The aim is to force the state to run the services we need. Many unions -NUPE, NALGO, NUT, etc., cover all sectors in the social and educational services, and their union officials must be forced to act in support of policies already accepted against the cuts... • 88 So states this vital booklet 60p plus 15p p&p from NCCC, c/o Surrey Docks Child Care Project, Dockland Settlement, Redriff Rd, London SE 16. continues to these issues idings drambe the richer

Scan page 8

ighting to save sugar jobs Tate and Lyle sugar silo Joint work by supporters of Socialist Press and Socialist Organiser at the threatened Tate and Lyle plant on Merseyside has begun to challenge the sabotage by the GMWU bureaucracy, through a campaign of leafleting and paper sales outside the factory.

The first mass meeting saw GMWU regional official Tony Humphries cynically refer to previous defeats of campaigns against Merseyside factory closures, and divert the eager enthusiasm of the workforce into a hopeless binge of protest and lobbying. mittee is still talking to the company and the government rather than occupy the refinery.

Two WSL leaflets have been put into the refinery attacking the role of Humphries and the GMWU bureaucracy.

On Friday 6 March supporters of Socialist Press and Socialist Organiser handed out an open letter to Humphries, to workers on the morning shift and also at the shop stewards meeting later in the day (where Humphries was collared by a young Socialist Organiser supporter _and personally handed the leaflet). saying what "Anyway, do?"

The youth said, "I was made redundant". Moving in for the kill, Humphries said Why didn't you fight to save your jobs?"

"Because we did not have a strong union" replied the youth, triumphantly!

The open letter was followed up by another leaflet into the mass meeting scheduled for 10 March entitled "Ten questions for Tate and Lyle workers to ask the "Action" Committee and Tony Humphries at today's mass meeting". • It concentrates on demands for occupation, blacking action and a national conference of shop stewards in the sugar