Underwood Lane: John Byrne's new play 'in the same spirt as The Slab Boys'

John Byrne in his studio, working on poster designs for his new play Underwood Lane

Hilary Brooks is bubbling with excitement. It is not only that she is back in the rehearsal room as musical director after so long in lockdown – although that is a huge part of the thrill. Nor is it only because her first show back involves actor-musicians on stage – adding an extra layer of complexity to deal with in her musical arrangements. It is also that, after more than two years of delay, she is finally working on that special thing, the premiere of a play by John Byrne.

“I’d forgotten how brilliant it is to do the job that I love doing and have been deprived of doing,” says Brooks. “It’s a joyous return to theatre and making music with people.”

The play, Underwood Lane, takes its name from the street where Byrne’s late friend Gerry Rafferty was born and brought up. Before he went on to have hits with Baker Street and Stuck In The Middle With You and to hang out with Billy Connolly and Stealers Wheel, Rafferty was a working-class lad from Paisley, just like Byrne.

John Byrne's illustration for Underwood Lane

The multitalented Byrne would go on to design album sleeves for his friend, who died in 2011, including City To City, Can I Have My Money Back and Snakes And Ladders. He even personalised the singer’s acoustic guitar with a fantasy landscape of twisted trees, animals and flowers plus a portrait of Rafferty reclining over the sound hole. Appropriately, Byrne has designed the costumes for the new production, with its set by Becky Minto.

The play is not about Rafferty, but written in his memory. Director Andy Arnold says it is “in the same spirt as The Slab Boys," Byrne’s string of acerbic comedies about the workers in a Paisley carpet factory. The original trilogy consolidated Byrne’s position as a playwright in the late 1970s, as audiences lapped up his rococo language and punchy west-coast humour.

Underwood Lane also has a touch of Byrne’s two acclaimed TV series, Your Cheatin’ Heart, in which Katy Murphy and Eddi Reader played country-and-western singers, and Tutti Frutti, in which Robbie Coltrane and Emma Thompson fronted a rock'n'roll band on a jubilee tour of Scotland's least likely clubs.

Sticking with the retro music theme, the new play is about an aspiring skiffle band with their eye on the big time – if only love, rivalry and death didn’t stand in their way. The two lead characters are divided by religion, one going to a Catholic school, the other Protestant, and even though they live right next to each other, it is only music that can bring them together.

Gerry Rafferty, who inspired John Byrne's new play PIC: Shutterstock

“It’s about the development of this little skiffle band,” says Brooks about the play, which opens in the newly refurbished Johnstone Town Hall before moving to the Tron in Glasgow. “And it’s about the traumas that are often associated with forming a band – and the shysters associated with that.”

It is an added bonus that Byrne has set the play in the 1950s and early 60s, the era that defined the playwright’s musical tastes. The play might have been staged several years ago had Byrne not initially imagined it would feature Rafferty’s songs, for which he could not get the rights. It was only when his wife Jeanine Byrne pointed out that Rafferty’s hits were from the wrong decade that Byrne made the switch to the 50s and early 60s. He even provided Brooks with a list of suggested songs. They include Three Steps To Heaven, Love Hurts and It’s Only Make Believe.

“It is his favourite songs from the era,” says Brooks. “And why not? The songs are beautifully crafted early-60s numbers that have been appropriated by our band for commentary on the story.”

Does Brooks have a favourite? “One in particular is haunting me,” she says. “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long by Otis Redding in the Etta James version. I will have heard it at some time in my life, but it’s never meant as much as it does within this play and where it happens. It just kills me. It goes from quiet, gentle and lilting to a huge crescendo with horns and feels totally right for the moment.”

She stresses Underwood Lane is a play with songs rather than a full-blown musical but, with its wealth of incidental music and numbers performed by the band as they hone their craft, it has given her lots of opportunity to pick the right song for the right moment.

“Every song has its place and its purpose,” says Brooks, one of Scotland’s most talented MDs whose credits include the first production of Sunshine On Leith and Cora Bissett’s Glasgow Girls. “John’s writing is beautiful, rhythmic and very dense at times. It has a musicality all of its own, but sometimes we just like to let the audience breathe out so they’re ready for the next bit to kick in. Or if there is a bit of a downer, you want to undercut with something that is really high energy, leading you into the next place.”

She adds: “It might be played with different instrumentation or, if it’s a song by the Everly Brothers, it might be sung by a girl and a guy rather than the two high tenor voices because it suits the plot, but it is a homage to the originals. The tunes are so good, so you’re not going to mess too much with that.”

Underwood Lane is at Johnstone Town Hall from 7–9 July and the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, from 14–30 July, see https://www.oneren.org/whats-on/events/underwood-lane/ and https://www.tron.co.uk/shows/underwood-lane/