Glasgow's Tron Theatre delivers a double dose of drama with Go On and Krapps Last Tape

Playing at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre, the Citz company (as it is affectionately known on Clydeside) is staging a double bill of two solo plays. The acclaimed Irish actor Niall Buggy plays the title role in the great monodrama Krapp’s Last Tape, by his compatriot, and, arguably, the greatest dramatist of the 20th century, Samuel Beckett.

Excitingly, that piece is being partnered with a newly commissioned work by leading Scottish playwright Linda McLean. The new work will be performed by one of Scotland’s finest actors, the superb Maureen Beattie.

The actor, who currently combines her acting duties with her responsibilities as only the second ever female president of the actors’ trade union Equity, is delighted to be returning to live, in-person theatre. “The one-person show is a perfectly distanced piece of work,” she jokes, with a nod to Covid protocols.

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The double bill is the brainchild of the Citz director. Hill directed Buggy in Beckett’s great one-man play at Leeds Playhouse in the autumn of last year, during a relative lull in the Covid infection rate.

Feeling that the Irishman’s performance deserved to be revived as part of a double bill, Hill suggested to McLean that she write a one-woman piece that responds to Krapp’s Last Tape. The outcome is Go On, a new play by McLean in which a woman by the name of Jane is teaching her identical robot, named Jayne, how to be her following her unspecified leaving.

Beattie plays the parts of both the human and the AI droid. The actor is wary of giving away too much of McLean’s plot, but she insists that the piece is “not about immortality at all”.

Rather, she continues, the play is “about staying for a particular length of time”. In other words, it seems that, far from creating some kind of sci-fi alternative to Beckett’s opus, McLean is staying with the Irish writer’s existential interest in how human beings face up to their mortality.

McLean has written a play that is – as admirers of her past works, such as Strangers, Babies and Riddance, would expect – very much in her own style. However, Beattie observes, McLean “is a huge fan” of Beckett.

In Go On this manifests itself, not only in an emphatically Beckettian title, but also in a drama in which the motivations and thought processes of the protagonist are not obvious or easily deciphered. “I think it’s going to be really interesting for people to see,” the actor says of the 22½-minute piece.

Beattie will, she comments, be “really intrigued to know what people think” about a mini-play which, like Beckett’s dramatic oeuvre, is neither naturalistic nor conventionally structured.

“I now know, having been rehearsing it, what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling and why I’m saying what I’m saying in every single moment, but I’ll be very interested to see whether the audience get that.”

The actor’s sense of a possible dissonance between her perception of the play, as a performer, and the audience’s response to the piece will, one suspects, be familiar to any actor who has performed Beckett.

Beattie has excelled in classical theatre, including modern classics, throughout her illustrious career, but she has never performed in a Beckett play. That is unsurprising, perhaps, given how few female characters (Winnie in Happy Days, Nell in Endgame) appear in the major plays.

It’s clear, however, that McLean’s response to Beckett is giving Beattie a very similar experience to that which is reported by actors who perform the Irishman’s dramas. The actor is enjoying the modernist ambiguities and uncertainties of Go On, just as she is enjoying working on the play with Hill and McLean.

“It’s a very benevolent rehearsal room,” Beattie says. “Linda is a very benevolent presence… “Writers have every right to defend what they have written, but she’s very open to people asking questions. And Dominic has just been fantastic.”

Beattie’s only previous experience of being directed by Hill was in Michael John O’Neill’s piece Sore Afraid, which was part of the National Theatre of Scotland’s online pandemic series Scenes for Survival. It was an excellent experience, she says, and working with Hill on Go On has deepened her admiration for him as a theatre director.

ALL of which serves to reinforce Beattie’s passionate belief in the importance of the arts to people’s lives. As the daughter of the great, working class, Glaswegian comedian and actor Johnny Beattie, who, sadly, passed away last year, she has a powerful sense of how social inequalities manifest themselves in the arts. “Boris Johnson and his mob went to a school which has a fully-functioning proscenium arch theatre, a studio theatre, fully staffed, with an artistic director,” she says, alluding to Johnson’s alma mater, Eton College. Likewise, she continues, Eton boasts that it will procure for your child any instrument they want to learn.

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“They know how important the arts are to people’s lives,” Beattie comments, pointedly, “but they want to keep them for themselves.

“They understand that, if they want to be Prime Minister or a captain of industry, it’s going to be important to have good communication skills. Also, an understanding of the arts opens your mind to other things, so you’re not limited in what you do with your life.

“They understand that, and they want it for themselves.”

There are, in Beattie’s passionate articulation of the need for working-class people to have access to the arts, shades of the late, great Scottish trade unionist Jimmy Reid. As those who go to see her perform in McLean’s play will be fortunate to experience, it’s a passion that also finds remarkable expression in Beattie’s acting.

Krapp’s Last Tape and Go On are at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow until October 9. For tickets and further information, visit: citz.co.uk