Chris Hannan was born in 1958 in Glasgow, the setting for many of his plays. Yet Hannan has remarked that ‘in theatre as … in company … to avoid repeating yourself is just basic courtesy’, and if life in the West of Scotland is a recurrent theme it is one that Hannan has configured in radically different ways, and interspersed with a number of other interests. Among his early Traverse plays, the historical Klimkov: Life of a Tsarist Agent (1984) was followed by The Orphan’s Comedy (1986), using contraceptives to educate its audience in the basic principles of contemporary world economics. Of his two 1990 successes, The Evil Doers and The Baby, the former was a Glaswegian city comedy and the latter set among riots following the death of the dictator Sulla in pre-Christian Rome.
Hannan avoids following other playwrights as assiduously as he avoids repeating himself. Only Elizabeth Gordon Quinn (1985) seems close to an established idiom of Scottish theatre, apparently following earlier plays such as Bill Bryden’s Willie Rough (1972) in its setting among the rent strikes and agitation of the Red Clydeside period of the First World War. Yet Hannan hardly celebrates the solidarities of this period in any straightforward way, concentrating instead on an extraordinary central character determined to remain aloof from what she considers the more common people around her. A female figure convinced of her own superiority and that society does not exist was bound, in 1985, to suggest affinities with Margaret Thatcher, but it is on the character herself, rather than her wider significance, that Hannan’s attention is concentrated — consistently with his preference for theatrical situations where ‘emotions outrun or shortcircuit or otherwise cut across objective political forces at work’.
Objective political forces might likewise be seen at work in the typically Glaswegian landscape of Barrowland poverty and urban stress of Shining Souls. Yet the play depicts impoverishment in financial or imaginative terms partly redressed in spiritual or metaphysical ones — as if Hannan was extending the conclusion reached in his friend Simon Donald’s play The Life of Stuff (1992), that ‘what makes us … came from the inside of a star … everybody … no matter what they’re like as a person … is made from Stardust’. Looping between the mundane and the stellar, Hannan’s extraordinary dialogue repeatedly presses the play beyond realism and towards expressionism, projecting the inner feelings of characters preoccupied not — only — by the ordinary forces of city life, but by other powers which seem to transcend them, remaining, forlornly, just in view but mostly out of reach. Such tactics show Hannan to be one of the most original and promising of playwrights to emerge in the late 1980s and 1990s, able to exploit some of the idioms — such as gritty Clydeside realism — which have served Scottish theatre well in the past, but also to move on into new dimensions beyond them.