No one since Joan Littlewood did more to advance the cause of popular theatre in Britain than John McGrath, who has died aged 67. A phenomenally prolific writer, director and producer who worked in theatre, film and television,his huge output was also extraordinarily unified. In a world full of lunging careerists, McGrath was always a passionate socialist: he believed strongly that the function of art was to reach as many people as possible, to heighten individual awareness and to help change society for the better.
He was born in Birkenhead into an Irish Catholic family. After schooling in Mold, and two years' national service, in 1955 he went up to St John's College, Oxford. As an undergraduate, he made his mark both as playwright, with A Man Has Two Fathers, and director: his open-air 1959 production of Aristophanes' The Birds, in which I played a very minor role, had a liberating gaiety and revealed a surprisingly encyclopedic knowledge of music-hall and silent-comedy gags.
But McGrath's concern was always to reach the widest available audience. After a brief period working at the Royal Court, he both wrote and directed many of the early episodes of BBC TV's Z Cars in 1962. "What we wanted to do," he said, "was to use the cops as a key or way of getting into a whole society... to use a popular form and try and bang into it some reality." The result was something that had never been seen on television before: a genre series with a social purpose.
Although McGrath spent much of the 1960s writing for TV and cinema - including the script for Ken Russell's Billion Dollar Brain (1967) - he had an ungovernable faith in theatre and its capacity to change people's lives. In 1966, he wrote Events While Guarding The Bofors Gun, based on his own national service experience and dealing with a group of British soldiers engaged in the futile exercise of guarding an obsolete weapon. As The Bofors Gun (1968), this was filmed by Jack Gold.
Random Happenings In The Hebrides, first produced in 1970, was the start of a long series of plays about Scotland's history and its struggles. It started as the story of a young Scottish Labour MP working for change within the system; but the writing was interrupted by les événements in Paris in 1968, and turned into a study of the need for direct, extra-parliamentary action.
McGrath's own form of direct action came in 1971, when he set up the theatre company 7:84. Its name derived from a fact, revealed in the Economist, that 7% of the nation owned 84% of the country's wealth. The company's avowedly socialist aim was to take popular, political theatre to venues shunned by the established national and regional companies. Scotland was its prime hunting-ground and often its subject, and McGrath wrote much of his best work for the company.
Its most famous production was The Cheviot, The Stag And The Black, Black Oil (1973), based on a Scottish ceilidh and telling the story of the nation's exploitation, from the Highland clearances to the oil boom: much toured, it was also successfully adapted for BBC TV. But McGrath tackled a whole range of subjects, from the rise of the Scottish National party in Little Red Hen (1975) to alcoholism in Out Of Our Heads (1976) and the growing political consciousness of a working-class woman in Yobbo Nowt (1977).
For much of its life, 7:84 had both Scottish and English branches. But the English company folded in 1984, when the Arts Council withdrew its grant for palpably political reasons. In 1988, McGrath himself parted company with the Scottish section in protest over changes recommended by the Scottish Arts Council. But 7:84 remains a testament to McGrath's visionary sense and to his belief that there was an audience, stretching from England's west country to Scotland's northernmost reaches, for theatre that addressed serious issues in a popular form.
Even after the rupture with 7:84, McGrath remained immensely productive. There were more plays on big themes such as Border Warfare (1989), which dealt with millennia of Anglo-Scots relations, and Ane Satyre Of The Fourth Estate (1996), which took a vigorous swipe at the power of Rupert Murdoch and which I, alone among critics, seemed to enjoy.
In 1993, septicaemia robbed him of a year of his working life but, once recovered, he resumed his endlessly productive career, writing television films such as The Long Roads, acting as film producer on Christopher Hampton's Carrington (1995), and polemicising in essays, articles and lectures.
Soft-spoken and unfailingly courteous, McGrath was a deeply loveable man. He and I occasionally crossed swords, especially over his blanket condemnation - expressed in his series of essays, A Good Night Out (1981) - of bourgeois theatre and national companies, but he was always a good-tempered adversary, and I had the greatest admiration for his work.
And even if the kind of popular, socialist theatre in which he passionately believed has waned in our market-driven world, he demonstrated its invigorating quality and its power to enrich and enlarge people's lives.
It is impossible to over-estimate the importance to him of Elizabeth McLennan, whom he met at Oxford and married in 1962. She was his wife, his creative partner, the performer in many of his plays and his constant companion: to be entertained to breakfast in their Edinburgh flat was to realise the strength of the bond between them. They also had two sons and a daughter of whom they were fiercely proud.
Bill Paterson writes: The words of the poet Oisin - "the finest music is the Music of what is Happening" - were a favourite of John's, and they were in the air in 1973 when we gathered in Edinburgh for the first days of 7:84 Scotland. There we worked with John in a derelict disco and with laughter, argument and inspiration he turned a pile of black A4 jotters into The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil. Even during the first "performance", John was still pushing freshly scribbled pages into our trembling hands.
"The year of the Cheviot" was a 17,000-mile odyssey of Highland halls, city theatres and studios that changed my life and those of a good many others in Scotland. Suddenly, newly confident writers dragged hidden scripts from behind sideboards, and Scottish politicians found something useful to argue about. We ourselves claimed to be Marxist-MacLennanist, due to that clan's many fine contributions to the company.
Even nearly 30 years later, I still marvel at John and Liz's devotion to the company, the politics, and their two great boys, who travelled everywhere with us.
John's handsome charisma and political gusto shook up a culture in a way that still resounds today, and, right to the end, he was still pulling people together. His conviction that, given the chance, anyone could achieve anything, probably failed only once - when he longed to play drums in the Cheviot's ceilidh band. Only strike threats from the fiddler stopped him wiping out every reel from Dornie to the Butt of Lewis.
Otherwise, his belief that we gain so much when we share our talents never faltered. He was a beacon to us all.
Trevor Griffiths writes: Thirty years back, at the start of my own life as a playwright, I had the serious good fortune to spend a few hours talking with John McGrath at the family house they still have in Earls Court. Gramscian hegemony, the state of the unions, the Vietnam war, the spread of factory occupations, workers' control, cultural populism, the new National Theatre bodied forth the discourse long into the night.
On the doorstep, as I was leaving, he asked what I had on the drawing board. I mentioned a few ideas, then told him I didn't think it much mattered, plays couldn't cut it, I could just as well stop as go on. He gave me his famous boy's smile and said, "No no. You're not allowed to stop. You stop, they win."
Five years ago, dealing with leukaemia, gaunt, pale, he paid me a visit on his way up to Edinburgh. I asked him what he was doing. He said he was looking to take it easy. "What, stop?" I asked. The smile again. No, no. Nothing so drastic.
In the years since, John has taken it easy by creating and directing arguably the most important screenwriters' lab in Europe. Next week, friends and colleagues head off for New Zealand to help set up a writers' lab there under the auspices of the NZ Writers' Guild. John was meant to be there; and in spirit and inspiration will be: unstoppable.
John McGrath was the luck we had, all of us, whether we know it or not. And while his life may be over, I get the feeling his work is just beginning.
Troy Kennedy Martin writes: I first met John on the fifth floor of the BBC Television Centre in the days when it was occupied by directors and writers. He was 27 years old, tall, thin and had a quiet air of competence. But I was to find out that he had a steely determination as well.
For the next 10 years, we worked together, got arrested together, married, had children - roughly at the same time. When directing my work, there was never any need for any kind of detailed discussion, he just implicitly knew what had to be done.
I always took John's competence for granted, but looking back, on Z Cars for example, there were casts of 50 with 40-odd sets, going out live after one day's rehearsal, week after week. It was nothing short of a miracle that he made it work.
Both of us were passionately involved in television and its potentiality. But towards the late 1960s, both of us had moved on. Me into feature films, John to the theatre with the formation of the 7:84 companies, turning his back on television, which he already thought compromised.
One year I hired a VW van and went up to the Highlands with my small children to join one of 7:84's tours. The entire population of Kyle had turned up at the hall to see the latest show, which was to include fiddle-playing and songs as well as a ceilidh when the curtain came down.
They sat patiently through the political bits, heads bowed as the actors denounced, years ahead of its time, the dangers inherent in globalisation. Then the play continued, and afterwards came the dance. This was a genuine touring theatre, reminiscent of Agnew McMasters' perambulations through Ireland in the 1940s and 50s, and probably the last of its kind. It was the stuff of myth. Politics informed his life for as long as I knew him. He didn't go on marches, sit on political platforms, harangue audiences. Everything went into his companies and his writing.
After the Scottish Arts Council withdrew its support for him in the 1990s, he turned back to film. But it proved increasingly difficult to find support for his ideas. Hence his cry at Edinburgh some years back on the overpowering nature of the Hollywood machine and its effects on indigenous film culture.
To his surprise, he found a sympathetic ear in Robert Redford, who helped him to set up Moonstone, aimed at promoting a new independent vision. The number of writers and directors who have been supported and encouraged by John and his school is quite remarkable.
Despite his hostility towards Hollywood and his championship of independent film, my fondest recollection of him is way back one night around 1963; he awoke me in my bed in Ramatuelle. Restlessly, he had driven into Cannes to mingle in the film festival. He looked at me with a big grin on his face, puffing the end of a giant cigar, which he had nursed on the long ride back to the house. "I've just met Sam Spiegel," he said.