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Playwright’s Note

Sometimes you don’t end up exactly where you thought you were going. Sometimes your actual destination is better. Even if it does involve a dive into the freezing waters of the Tay.

Tay Bridge and The Signalman both had their origins in conversations while working some years ago with an actor called Tom McGovern, who was inspired by a Thornton Wilder novel called The Bridge of San Luis Rey to look again at the story of the Tay Bridge Disaster…but not at the incompetence and possible corruption which led to the disaster, but from the viewpoint of people aboard the train who have no idea what is about to happen to them. What lives were interrupted by the accident? What journeys were never completed?

I loved the idea. There was something inherently theatrical, I thought, in EVERYONE in the audience knowing that a disaster is coming, but the characters on stage knowing nothing. I came up with the idea that Tom would play the Signalman Thomas Barclay who sent the train onto the Bridge…haunted ever since…and that the play would also feature those accidental passengers.

And like most ideas, it got filed away under ‘One of these Days’.

Cut to a conversation a year and a bit ago with Andrew Panton, the director of Dundee Rep, who said he wanted a show specially written to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Ensemble of actors who make Dundee Rep so unique in Scottish Theatre – written by someone who knew them all, tailoring the script to their particular and considerable skills.

And what had been an idea for one play became an idea to create two shows…one for the very special circumstances of Dundee Rep’s Birthday Celebrations – the show marked the 80^th birthday of the company as well as the 20th anniversary of the Ensemble as a collective – and the other tailored to Tom McGovern’s extraordinary inventiveness and intensity as an actor, facilitated through the good offices of Glasgow Lunchtime Theatre at Òran Mór.

I began exploring historical sources, reliable and unreliable…and found that stories, true or not, about the passengers and crew, had emerged almost at the moment their bodies began to rise out of the silt where they had fallen. The most moving of these records is the bald statement of their names and dress and possessions assembled by the Tay Valley Family History Society. I would also draw on the testimony given to the Official Enquiry by Thomas Barclay. I would match the real stories to the real actors as best I could…and fictionalise the rest in the two scripts published together here.

At Dundee Rep, well as the actors, Andrew Panton assembled quite a team to tell their stories. Composer MJ McCarthy, Lighting Designer Simon Wilkinson, animations director Lewis Den Hertog and designer Emily James. As for Tom McGovern, he and I were very fortunate to get the assured and inspired support of Ken Alexander as director for the solo show at Glasgow Lunchtime Theatre.

The writing of these stories has meant an entrance into the mental world of Scotland a hundred and forty years ago…and an exploration of memory and what memory means. That has been a journey in itself. But it is the unexpected journey to become part of what I hope are two strong and deceptively ambitious theatrical experiences that wasn’t quite the journey I anticipated making…and which I’m especially glad and pleasantly surprised that I made.

Peter Arnott, September 2019