Little Red Hen

Commissioned by the Finborough Theatre as part of its Scotland Decides/Tha Alba a’taghadh2014 season to coincide with the Scottish Independence Referendum on Thursday 18 September 2014, a staged reading of John McGrath’s seminal Little Red Hen plays at the multi-award-winning Finborough Theatre for one performance only on the day of the Scottish Independence Referendum itself – Thursday, 18 September 2014 at 7.30pm.

Glasgow in the 1970s. The battle for Scottish independence is underway, and young Henrietta wants to join the activist movement fighting to free Scotland from English rule. Until her ancient, cantankerous and spirited grandmother interferes: ‘aye, but do you know which way you’re goin’? Or how you’re gonnae get there? Do you buggery.’

Old Hen recounts to her granddaughter the story of The Red Clyde, when government fear of a workers’ revolution in Glasgow led to the deployment of 10,000 English soldiers and tanks in the city… The Red Clydeside movement comes alive before our eyes with poetry and song as we hear how John MacLean, Jimmy Maxton, John Wheatley, Willie Gallacher and many others fought capitalism and parochialism, when Old Hen was not so old, but young and full of zeal, at the epicentre of a doomed revolution…

Originally written in the run-up to the failed Scottish devolution referendum of 1979 and unseen in London since 1976, John McGrath’s sweeping history of Red Clydeside explores what it means to be free, and whether political self-determination is achievable without economic independence.
 “In Little Red Hen, we try to take a look at that earlier time of high hopes, and at the present moment of aspiration, through the eyes of one of that older generation. What went wrong with the first period – which ended in the misery of the ‘30s – may be of interest to people today who are working, as she did, for a better future for the people of Scotland.” – John McGrath