Introduction

In the 1930s, Scottish writers, like writers in many parts of Europe, were driven by the appalling conditions of the Depression to document the lives of the working classes, and to impress on audiences (mostly middle-class) the depth of the deprivations they suffered. In the West of Scotland, high unemployment, dense housing and encouragement of immigrant workers prepared to work for lower wages produced a downward spiral of social deprivation. The struggle against these terrible conditions was documented in novels such as James Barke’s Major Operation, published in 1936 and dramatised by the Unity Theatre in 1941.

Ena Lamont Stewart (born in 1912) was the wife of an actor and began writing plays for amateur groups in the 1940s because of her disillusionment with the falsity of plays being put on by professional theatre companies. Her first play, Starched Aprons (1942), was about a large hospital but was not produced till after the War when her husband was working with Unity Theatre. Men Should Weep (1947) was also produced by Unity and was so successful that it transferred to Edinburgh and London before returning to Glasgow in 1948. Thereafter, however, her work was forgotten until the 1970s.

Most of the works of that period — even with a female protagonist — adopted a fundamentally male perspective on social issues. Ena Lamont Stewart’s work is significant in that it presents working-class experience from the point of view of women whose lives have been defined by the success or failure of the men to whom they are — or are not — married, and who are struggling to find an alternative way of valuing their own experience. In Men Should Weep, the relationships between men and women, under conditions of extreme pressure, are explored as part of the struggle to achieve a common humanity in defiance of the brutalisation imposed on them by capitalism. In presenting a working-class, female perspective on the modern city, Stewart was, in 1947, well before her time — which may account for the fact that she substantially revised her play when it was revived by the 7:84 Theatre Company in the 1970s, taking out the many melodramatic deaths with which it had concluded and introducing some of the feminist perspectives of the 1960s and 1970s.