Jack Scoops To Conquer
In Aberdeen today for staff meetings and a catch-up with Frieda Morrison and Robbie Shepherd. Usually I would then hop on the afternoon train to Glasgow but tonight I'd been invited to His Majesty's Theatre to see Grassic Gibbon. It's a new play by journalist and author Jack Webster and it tells the life story of novelist James Leslie Mitchell, aka Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
The evening was made special by that fact that Mitchell's son Dylan was in the audience and I got the chance to meet him in the interval. He's a modest man who said he didn't inherit any of his father's genius for literature. He pursued a career in business instead.
The play itself was fascinating. I had no idea that the author of Sunset Song had been encouraged to keep writing by none other than H.G. Wells. Nor that Mitchell, while winning international accalim for his nostalgic description of life in rural Aberdeenshire, was provoking feelings of anger and shame from his family and friends in Scotland.
Just before the final curtain fell, Jack Webster took to the stage to thank the many people who had helped him get his play to this stage. He also had a bit of a scoop up his sleeve as he turned to his lead actress Vivien Heilbron and announced that she had just accepted a proposal of marriage from her long-term partner David Rintoul.
Once a journalist, always a journalist.
