Scots language in theory and practice in Graham Moffats Playwriting

This paper began with a puzzle that arose in drafting my new study, Scottish Theatre: Diversity, Language, Continuity (2013). (1) While researching the book, I returned to the work of Graham Moffat. Born in Glasgow in 1866, he carne to work from his Glasgow base as an actor and playwright and in time found his work established not only on the London stage, but in the wider context of the theatre of the United States and the British Empire. This overseas success was presumably, at least in part, supported by the existence of a Scottish diaspora, though, as we shall see, his reception in the United States seems to represent a wider appreciation of Scottish literary figures, at least so far as his coeval Barrie is concerned. Moffat emigrated to South Africa in May 1936 (Moffat, 1955: 158), dying there in 1951. As he became established as a playwright in the early twentieth-century, Moffat set up a company based around himself and his wife Maggie which, on 26 March 1908, he launched at the Athenaeum Hall in Glasgow. In the short pamphlet produced for this occasion Moffat calls his company the Scottish National Players (not be confused with the later company under the same name founded in 1921). Through this company, he asserts [...] an effort is being made to follow the example of the Irish National Players at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and to provide something similar for Scotland. [...] In 'Annie Laurie' and 'Till the Bells Ring' [two of his short plays presented on this occasion], the circumstances giving rise to the situations are Scottish, and all the characters speak the Lowland 'Braid Scots'(Moffat 1908: 1). The next day the Glasgow Herald says of Moffat, 'On the whole, Mr. Graham Moffat's venture as a writer of plays in is to be commended' (Glasgow Herald, 1908: 2). Such evidence seems incontrovertibly to confirm Moffat's self-identification as a playwright committed to working in Scots within a larger campaigning Scottish cultural framework. Yet Join me in remembering (Moffat 1955), his autobiography and memoirs, published in 1955, four years after his death, by his daughter, Winifred, also a member of his acting company, offers an alternative self-narrative. In that autobiography, Moffat describes his approach to writing his major first major full-length hit, Bunty pulls the strings (1911), as follows: 'One braid Scots word purposely placed in each act, as we put a touch of mustard on a steak to help the flavour!' (Moffat, 1955: 26) This claim is made by Moffat with regard to the use of Scots in his plays in the context of a theatre community beyond Scotland. Just before the quotation just cited, he reports a conversation with his friend Harry Lauder, who had guested as Geordie Pow in a charity matinee revival of A Scrape o 'the Pen (1909) in, possibly, 1926 (Moffat 1926 (?): 24): 'Harry,' I said, 'I know the secret of your phenomenal London success [...] you use the English language without even the usual Scottish abbreviations such as hae for have. You get the necessary Scottish flavour by your natural Lanarkshire accent and you speak slowly and deliberately.' 'Ye're right, Moffat,' said Harry, 'That's it.' (Moffat, 1955: 25-6) Moffat appears here to be aligning himself with Lauder's linguistic practice. Indeed, Moffat's standard texts--including A Scrape o ' the Pen, Bunty pulls the strings and Granny (1926)--as produced by the theatrical publisher Samuel French (Moffat 1932), are written not in Scots, but in Scots-accented English with a few Scots words dropped in, presumably for local colour. This, indeed, reflects Lauder's practice, which was not in fact, despite his disclaimer, simply to use English with a Scots accent. Lauder sprinkled his songs with Scots words like 'gloaming' and even a Gaelic phrase, 'deoch an dorais' (which, interestingly, he pronounces correctly in recordings now available, saying, phonetically, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] rather than the inaccurate /dcx/, sometimes heard for ). …

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