Dark comedy covers class issues

SCOTTISH writer Gregory Burke has been reminiscing about the play that launched his career.

It has been nearly 25 years since Gagarin Way was performed on the stage at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. Burke was then a university drop-out, working in a factory and, he says, wanting to “do something to change my own life”.

Politically charged, yet darkly comic, the play is full of passionate, sharp political insights.

“Gagarin Way just came out almost fully formed. It was from years of doing jobs and listening and thinking, and it just came out,” he says. “I wanted to write, I sat down to write a novel and it came out as dialogue.”

Deeply rooted in Burke’s West Fife roots, “Gagarin Way” refers to the Lumphinnans street named for the Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, who was onboard the first crewed space flight. “It was about all those fights of unions and rights for workers,” he recalls. Older colleagues in the factory would berate the youngsters, telling them, ‘You have no rights anymore! These factories don’t allow unions. You’re badly paid. These rights are getting taken away from you!’

The play premiered in 2001 at the Traverse before becoming a global sensation. “It completely changed everything. It made me become a writer and I really didn’t know how to be a writer. I had no idea.” He found the sudden exposure bewildering. “I wish I’d just been an enigma. I wouldn’t have revealed the depths of my ignorance.”

At one point, he found himself sitting next to theatre director Peter Brook in Paris and not recognising him. “I thought he must be the dad of one of the actors or something and I just went, ‘All right mate, so do you like the theatre?’”

The first performance of the play was unforgettable. On opening night in Edinburgh, everything changed. “People started laughing immediately, it was thrilling. I don’t think I’ve ever had a feeling like that ever since.”

Class is a recurring theme. “We don’t talk about class. Everybody talks about identity politics, but nobody talks about class politics. Nobody talks about money, about inequality. That goes back to Gagarin Way.”

For Burke, the play’s enduring relevance lies in its stark message: “If you don’t fight for what you have, it can only get worse. Britain is in such a precarious position at the moment.

“I really do feel that, particularly being out of Europe now as well. It has exposed everything that is wrong. I never would have thought back then that we would have got to a place now where the rule of law is becoming weaker.

“Maybe, just maybe, it starts by not defending your right to a tea break. We think, oh, it’s just a tiny incremental thing that we’re giving away here, but actually you’re giving away everything.”

Today, Burke reflects with nostalgia about the ease of writing Gagarin Way. Now he insists that writing is “just about graft, 10 hours a day at your desk, working and working, rewriting and rewriting.”

He urges any aspiring writers not to give up. “Everybody’s first draft is terrible. That’s what stops people doing it because they think, ‘oh no, it’s terrible’. But everything’s terrible at the beginning, so just get it done.”

The immediate future is looking secure with a commissioned second series of Rebus for BBC, Atomic now streaming on Sky Atlantic and a TV adaptation of The Trading Game, based on the book by Gary Stevenson for Motive Pictures.

In a quarter of a century, Gagarin Way has not lost its bite. Reading’s Progress Theatre stages its own celebration of the play’s 25th anniversary from Monday to Friday, September 29 to October 4. Featuring strong politics, strong emotions and strong language, this is unforgettable theatre.

It is a fitting opener to a Progress autumn season that follows with Shakespeare’s gore-fest Titus Andronicus and the tragic-pastoral of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, adapted by David Calcutt.

For more information, visit progresstheatre.co.uk