The Iron Laddie

This article was originally published in 'Discover' magazine, issue 50, summer 2024. 

Words: Leanne McGrath.

Margaret Thatcher is resurrected – and in a theatre near you. The Iron Lady, with her trademark helmet of hair and square leather handbag, is the "other mother" in the stage adaptation of 'Maggie & Me', the searingly heartbreaking yet hilariously witty and warm memoir from Lanarkshire-born author, journalist and broadcaster Damian Barr.

His story of survival amid deprivation and abuse is being brought to life by the National Theatre of Scotland. Barr, one of Scotland's most celebrated contemporary authors, has penned the script in collaboration with award-winning playwright James Ley.

Like his memoir, the play follows Barr growing up gay in Thatcher's Britain and thriving thanks to – or in spite of – the former Prime Minister, describing how she "made it possible – but not probable – for me to be the man I am now".

So even though "Maggie snatched all the milk… smashed the miners and took away our second sunset… made millions unemployed then cut their benefits… closed the mental hospitals… privatised gas and electricity so we ended up going to bed with clothes on… created Clause 28… [and] devised the Poll Tax", she "made a hero of the individual" and "made it OK for me to run away and never look back".

Yet look back he does in his thought-provoking memoir, and now on the stage. But how does it feel to have your childhood trauma – his violent stepfather, mother's brain haemorrhage, bullying – played out in front of your eyes?

"You can't prepare for it because it's not normal," Barr said. "But I trusted James and director Suba Das, and NTS has been totally respectful. What was really surreal, and sort of like a form of therapy, was seeing my mum and dad argue and me trying to stop them. I was holding my breath and felt dizzy, responding in a very childlike fashion. I then realised the actors were doing the same. That's one of the powerful things about memoir, telling your truth can connect you to other people. They might recognise something of themself, a place, time or feeling."

Yet amid the poverty and pain, there is love, loyalty and laugh-out-loud moments in 'Maggie & Me'. Barr's descriptive writing – the 'Pound Shop Dolly Parton' Mary the Canary, 'Rayson the Basin' with her bowl cut and 'Clare the Bear' who slips powders in her partner's Buckfast – is a delight, as is his vibrant West Coast vernacular, especially his Granny Mac's endless proverbs.

"Humour, as anyone who grew up in Scotland will tell you, is an essential part of life, particularly in the working-class community where I grew up" Barr said. "Humour is free, jokes are free. I didn't inject humour, it was already there. I remember laughing a lot as a young person. It's that whole tragedy and comedy, two sides of the same coin.

"Joy is a different thing. I did have a lot of joy but remembered most powerfully and painfully the bad things. In successive drafts of 'Maggie and Me', I rediscovered the joy I had forgotten – of books, friendship, first love and finding other people like me."

Barr's family "trust me as much as they ever did" to share their collective story and he expects "busloads of people from Newarthill, Carfin and Motherwell" will go to see the play.

"I feel a responsibility to my community, to the place I love, to give it an imaginative life," he said. "You know that famous quote from Alasdair Gray's 'Lanark' – "'Glasgow is a magnificent city,' said McAlpin. 'Why do we hardly ever notice that?' 'Because nobody imagines living here… think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.'"– I run that around in my mind. It's a responsibility and a privilege to represent my community.

"A key part of memoir for me was memorialisation, of people and places lost to time or to me. It's great that other people have connected with that. I hope people come along to the play and see something of their own story. I wish I'd had it myself, so it's lovely to think I can give other people that."

Telling his story, first published in 2013, also meant Barr could let an underrepresented voice be heard.

"Personal truth is so often obscured or devalued in our culture, particularly for someone like me, who is gay, working class, from a divorced family and a survivor of abuse," he said. "I spent so much of my childhood being told that no one will believe you and if you tell anyone, you and the people you love will be punished. It was part of a wider culture, one of Section 28. There was a culture of not just silence but erasure… a hand over your mouth.

"There were not very many role models and not many working class gay Scottish memoirs. If I wanted to find a memoir about posh people during the Empire or just about any other subject that was considered worthy of public discourse, I could do that. But my life, my story, wasn't somehow worthy of note.

"So many of the stories we're told and sold have quite a narrow view of what it means to Scottish, or working class, or gay. That is changing but it's still a struggle. There's more than one story but when you take a box-ticking approach to diversity, it's reductive and we lose voices and stories, and that makes me angry. Imagine publishing was controlled by working class gay people, with women in top jobs. It's bonkers as a suggestion, unimaginable."

Giving voice to "diversity in the fullest" is something Barr prioritises as host of the BBC's 'The Big Scottish Book Club', saying: "The appetite of Scottish readers is enormous, risk-taking, open-hearted and exciting. I love it when I hear from people who've watched the show and say, 'Oh, I'd never heard of that writer, I went away and picked up their book and loved it'. That's one of my favourite feelings in the world."

Books, stories and his local Newarthill Library were a "lifeline" for the young Barr, and feature heavily in 'Maggie & Me'. He is a passionate advocate for libraries and has fought alongside his former neighbours when Newarthill Library has come under threat of closure.

"I will continue to fight tooth and nail with the community to keep that library open," he said. "We saved it once, they tried to close it again, we saved it again. It's going to keep happening. Politicians of all parties have closed libraries in this country. That is wrong. Councils have a statutory obligation to provide a library service. It is not optional, it is not a nice extra.

"I've seen first-hand, through my own experience but also as a writer touring libraries, how important libraries and librarians are to communities. It's a fallacy that they are some kind of middle class oasis. The poorer and/or more isolated a community, the more important a library is. It is a judgement upon our civilisation when a library closes. You're closing opportunity, closing hearts, closing minds.

"Book ownership is really important and a library gives you a sense of what that's like. I'm sitting here in a room full of books and I know how safe and excited that makes me feel. John Waters famously said that 'if you go home with somebody and they have no books in the house, don't have sex with them'. That's a piece of wisdom for the ages.

"My terror is not losing my bank card, it's losing my library card. It's my library cards I take out of my wallet before I go away on holiday. That tells you everything!"

The Library has now acquired part of Barr's archive, and he believes archives are "really important for understanding that writers are humans and for seeing the [writing] process".

He added: "When you see a book on a shelf, that's the flourishing of something, not the stems, the roots or soil it grew in. An archive is all the rest of it. Archives are essential. I've been to see lots of archives, which I love."

His visits to archives across Scotland have included researching his next book, which is "a big gay Scottish love story… based on real people but a novelisation of their lives".

He added: "These are gay, working class, Scottish figures. The gaps in the archives are huge because they had to burn diaries, stories, letters, artworks, photographs, all kinds of things, to stay safe in their lifetimes. So archives are important for what they don't tell us as much as what they do tell us.

"So many serendipitous things are happening with this book, it's got a magical feeling. I was writing another novel, totally different, partially inspired by something I saw in the National Library, on a staircase of all things. Then, during lockdown, I saw a tweet and went in a spiral, and here we are finishing up this new novel."

Another memoir is also planned – "a follow up, though I'm not sure what bit of my life I want to tell". He is also in talks with a South African filmmaker about bringing his 2019 novel 'You Will Be Safe Here' to the big screen. The book follows Willem, an only child growing up in working class Johannesburg in the early 1900s who is sent to a camp that makes "men out of boys".

"People didn't expect me to write that after 'Maggie & Me' but I wanted to surprise and confound people," he said. "I hate the idea that I should stay in my lane or write what I know. Straight, rich, white men don't get that. They're like, 'Oh, I will write a novel about the Crimea and then I'm going to write science fiction'.

"But I was nervous because I was writing about a place and time that aren't my own. The new novel is closer to my own experience because it's Scottish, gay and working class. It's got loads of me in it. I'm loving writing it."