John Byrne's The Slab Boys: Technicolored Hellhole in a Town Called Malice
Presents a detailed discussion and appreciation of the Slab Boys tetralogy, a sequence of four plays by the Scottish playwright and painter John Byrne, beginning with The Slab Boys (1978), focused on a group of apprentices in the color-mixing room of a Paisley carpet-factory in the 1950s, and then t...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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University of South Carolina Press
2016
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/101123 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5996-2122 |
| Summary: | Presents a detailed discussion and appreciation of the Slab Boys tetralogy, a sequence of four plays by the Scottish playwright and painter John Byrne, beginning with The Slab Boys (1978), focused on a group of apprentices in the color-mixing room of a Paisley carpet-factory in the 1950s, and then tracing the divergence of their lives through three later plays, The Loveliest Night of the Year (1979, later titled Cuttin' A Rug), Still Life (1982), and Nova Scotia (2008); examines Byrne's characterization, "excoriatingly destructive wit," and "rambunctiously demotic language"; analyzes the tetralogy's continuing major themes of the relation between art and life, high art and popular culture; and concludes that these are plays of "striking intellectual breadth" and "superb verbal inventiveness," combining "international with distinctively Scottish themes," and "producing a fusion of realism and fantasy probably unmatched in Scotland since the heyday of Hugh MacDiarmid." |
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