Paw Broon is sitting at the window of his tenement flat, using his tongue to get raspberry jam seeds out of his falsers. And the woman who lives across the street is raging, so she is, because she thinks he’s pulling faces at her …
It doesn’t sound like much written down, but stories like this – which centre on some comic misunderstanding – have held Scotland in thrall since 1936, when The Broons cartoon strip first appeared in the Sunday Post. They rapidly became a fixed point in a world in flux. “Scotland’s happy family,” ran the tagline, “that makes every family happy.” In their very first strip, as the Post’s front page fretted over Hitler’s march into the Rhineland, The Broons offered consoling fun and mischief. In straightforward black-and-white drawings, they’ve been at it ever since, this unageing Scots everyfamily with their straightforward black-and-white values: loyalty, decency, affection and amused self-deprecation, with a healthy dose of hi-jinks.
Rob Drummond, the playwright now bringing the comic strip from page to stage, calls these values “Broonsian”. I’m watching all 11 of the family conga across a Glasgow rehearsal studio: there’s Hen, the impossibly lanky son; there’s the Bairn, wise beyond her four years; there’s swotty Horace and the tearaway twins; there’s Maggie and Daphne, dating mad; there’s Joe, noted for his looks and his love of boxing; there’s Paw and Granpaw, either amused or flabbergasted. And presiding over them all is Maw Broon, matriarch and maker of mince, the family’s fiercely loving heart and soul.
“It’s a miracle that it’s taken 80 years to do this,” says Drummond, “because it’s so much a part of Scottish culture.” If a scene or line felt Broonsian, he explains, it went in the play. If not, it got the heave. This makes sense – because Broons fans are a tough crowd. In the 1990s, the strip experimented with colour. “A disaster,” recalls Morris Heggie, the present writer. “It stopped just short of us getting death threats.”
Heggie, 65, has been writing the strip for 10 years. He works closely with 72-year-old Peter Davidson, who turns his gentle misadventures into drawings. These are men who grew up in the Scotland the strip still portrays (one in which boys “ken” how to “guddle” fish), and they’re keen on the idea that The Broons can exist in two time zones at once: the present day and a sort of perpetual 1950s. Yes, the characters have mobile phones, but they also have two old tin cans connected by string.
The stories just come to Heggie, though he knows to steer clear of politics. Nicola Sturgeon has appeared in the strip, but only as a public figure. You’ll look in vain for any mention of the independence referendum, or any sign that Maw and Paw voted to leave the EU. Drummond, however, sees those issues – and a Conservative government that Scots did not elect – as context for the show.
“Our values,” he says, “are very different from those in England. We’ve established that with the way we vote. There’s something in The Broons about being a family – a tight-knit community that looks after each other – that’s almost a socialist message. The weakest members, the Daphnes and Hens, are always all right at the end of the day. Without making too much of that in the script, there is an element of why we should be proud of the way we’re going in Scotland.”
This makes the play sound more earnest than it will be. It’s very much a comedy, but with more emotional heft than the strips, and plenty of singalongs. Based around Maggie’s approaching wedding, the material is adapted directly from classic Broons stories. To turn 10-frame comics into two hours of theatre, Drummond looked to the unlikely figure of Quentin Tarantino for inspiration, studying Pulp Fiction for its multiple characters and crossover storylines.
The Broons were based on real people and Joyce Falconer, the Aberdonian who plays Maw, feels these characters are in her DNA. “I grew up with The Broons,” she says. “Me and my sisters would lie on our tummies and read them out loud. They were real to us. Maw was so familiar. She was my aunties, my nan.” The Broons and its stablemate cartoon Oor Wullie were, she says, the only things written in Scots at that time. “They were saying words we used. So that made it personal.”
Not everyone loves The Broons. “Scotland will be reborn,” said the political theorist Tom Nairn, “the day the last minister is strangled with the last copy of the Sunday Post.” Some see the strip’s portrayal of Scottish life as narrow, parochial and stiflingly conservative, not at all the sort of thing contemporary theatre-makers should be bringing to the stage.
“That sounds a wee bit ‘Bah humbug’ to me,” says the director Andrew Panton. “I don’t see why you would speak like that about something that has brought a lot of people a lot of joy and survived for so many years.” Everyone involved in the play seems to feel the responsibility of that historic joy. “I don’t think we’ll keep everyone happy,” says Drummond. “But at every stage of the journey, we’ve been careful to do The Broons proud.” Even if they don’t get it exactly right, The Broons will endure, pinnies unruffled, pipes still puffing.
• The Broons is at Perth Concert Hall, 27 September to 1 October. Then touring Scotland until 12 November.
