Six Black Candles — Des Dillon's witches of Coatbridge
Six sisters, their ma and grandma get together to use a bit of womanly witchcraft, with murder in mind...playwright Des Dillon talks about about the deadly female of the species — and the real life role models for his Scottish Witches of Eastwick.
- By Helen Brown
- Published in the Courier : 28.03.11
- Published online : 02.04.11 @ 04.16pm
Des Dillon's hit play, Six Black Candles, was first performed at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh in 2004. It hasn't been seen in Scotland again until now, but it has made its mark as far afield as the Ukraine, where it proved so popular that it's been performed twice a month for years.
Des explained, "The project was to do this play and a Caryl Churchill one and when I was invited over there to see it, it was really interesting to see that everyone laughed at the same bits. The original novel has been number one in Moscow — Russia is one big Glasgow, with the same dark sense of humour.
"Maybe it's the Ukrainian/Scottish fellow feeling about being oppressed by a bigger force that binds us together in making black jokes about life, biting back at authority. Whatever it is, they really get the Scottish view.
"The play has been incredibly popular, so much so that the company over there was talking about bringing it to Edinburgh.
"That's when I thought, 'I want to do that, I don't want the Russians to bring my play back to Scotland.'
"So I decided that now was the time to do something about it and that's how this current tour with Goldfish Theatre has come about, going to a lot of well-known Scottish venues.
"What I'd really like to happen is that we take it on tour this time round, then transfer to bigger touring venues and eventually make it to the West End. I've real ambitions for that. "
Doing that 'something' about getting this show on the road has meant a lot of hard work for both Des and his wife Joanne who is involved in much of the organisation. A former teacher who read English at Strathclyde University, Des went back into the job for five months to help fund the project. "I
hate teaching so you can tell how much I wanted to put this on that I went back to it!"
It's a good line but in reality, discovering study and in particular, the study of English changed his life. In his youth on Coatbridge, a few skirmishes with the law, a bit of aimless work here and there, was followed by a stint in Germany, working on building sites.
Auf Wiedersehen, Hen
"If you remember Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, we were Auf Wiedersehen, Hen. Between the ages of about 13 and 20 I didn't read books — it was actually a mate who had learned to read in prison who put me onto reading again, starting, I remember, with James Herbert's The Fog.
"But I did start writing a bit — I loved the telly plays that were on at the time, Just Another Saturday and Just a Boy's Game, wonderful stuff.
"It was listening to Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell that made me decide I wanted to be a singer-songwriter although I couldn't sing and at that stage, my poetry was really bad — all 'woe is me, I'm lonely, lonely, lonely stuff', the way you do when you're in your late teens.
"Then a friend of mine who was a professional boxer told me that he was going to train as a PE teacher and that you only needed three Highers to do it. I thought that sounded like a great job so I enrolled at Coatbridge College to do the exams. A teacher obviously spotted something and told me I should do English and I ended up with the highest mark in English in the country for my year."
Nowadays, novels, poetry, plays and TV scripts, first for Take the High Road and then River City, jostle side-by-side on his CV. With his quick-fire delivery and quick-witted banter, it's no wonder he also does highly successful stand-up.
It still isn't easy to make a living purely from writing, even with his kind of versatility. "I wasn't published until I was 35," he explained. "It's still true that people take notice of how you talk and if you talk — and walk, 'cos I walk with an accent — like me, people tend to treat you like an idiot until they know better.
Class
"I think in some way I write more like an American writer than a British one — it's maybe the Irish thing about leaving the country and turning left to the USA. If my family had done that, I think my writing might have fitted in better. In America, the way you speak isn't connected to your class in the same way as it is here. I love Raymond Carver, for example, he's my favourite writer and he writes such simple English, telling the story and that's what I love.
"It's all about capturing that simplicity and the right tone. People's minds are powerful machines to create stories and images. Hugh Macdiarmid had a wonderful quote about 'Scottish steel tempered wi' Irish fire' and that's the balance I'm trying to get all the time. I think I'm the only Catholic in Scotland with a Protestant work ethic!"
Lately, a bit more recognition has certainly begun to come his way. Another of his plays, Singin' I'm No A Billy, He's A Tim has been touring Scotland to packed houses for the past couple of years, attracting audiences many of whom have never set foot in a theatre before. Recently, it sold out at the Armadillo in Glasgow, a 3000-seater auditorium.
"Fifteen years ago, I couldn't get it put on," he says.
With Six Black Candles about to hit the road again, more attention will be coming his way. These days, there aren't many plays with a cast of eight, let alone a cast of eight women, but this one has just that, with a plot and characters, Des declares, drawn directly from life — his own. It's all about what happens when heroine Caroline's husband, Bobby, deserts her for the wonderfully-named Stacie Gracie, and her sisters decided to exact a family revenge by way of ritual and spells.
Continued
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