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Plays
Elizabeth Gordon Quinn
A Marie Antoinette of the slums, Elizabeth Gordon Quinn refuses to learn how to be poor, priding herself on the piano which sets her apart from her working-class neighbours, even though she cannot afford to eat.
It's 1915 and there's a war on. When the entire city rises up in defiance of the government and goes on rent strike, Elizabeth stands alone. What price will she and her family have to pay for her individual stance?
Elizabeth Gordon Quinn - Author Comment
The first production in 1985 had three things that were fantastic about it. One was designer Dermot Hayes' stark white set. Given the references to dirt and poverty in the script this was counter-intuitive.
But although the play is set in a tenement it's not a "tenement play". Elizabeth is contesting the reality in which she lives - Dermot's design helped us to focus on this contest. Also, the more attempt there is to create a living-room, the more the piano is liable to look like just another piece of furniture. On a more abstract set it has an aura. Poetry.
The Evil Doers
Tracky is a teenage heavy metal fan with an alcoholic mother, a taxi driver father and a best friend who's after the loanshark who's after her father. The father has started a new business as a tour-guide, and his crazy optimism deeply antagonizes his daughter. All day long she sets about sabotaging him - furious that he is unable to solve the fundamental problem in their lives - his alcoholic wife and her alcoholic mother. Throughout the mayhem of the day she grabs onto his coat-tail and will not be shaken.
The Evil Doers - Author Comment
There seems to be a prejudice against re-writing. As if you should leave the work of the Muse alone and not tinker with it. That's not how I feel. Laurel & Hardy used to watch their films in the cinema with an audience, then go back and re-edit them; the Marx Brothers would go to a theater in San Francisco and try out their material in front of an audience, then revise it before they shot their films. Are comedians the only ones who take their work seriously?
The Baby
Rome, 78BC. The ruler of Rome, Sulla, has just died. He has been much loved and much hated. Loved, because he has cut inflation and interest rates and restored public order. Hated, because he has achieved this by repressing the working-classes and lowering expenditure on the poor. When he dies, the professional mourners who are asked to wail at his state funeral don't like the idea of weeping and tearing their hair for someone who caused them so much grief while he was alive, and they threaten to strike. This brings about massive retaliation from Pompey (Sulla's political heir) - which falls mostly on the head of the heroine, Macu, the woman who has led the wailers' protest. To teach the wailers a lesson, Pompey orders his followers to start a fire in the part of town where they live - a fire in which Macu's daughter dies.
The Baby - Author Comment
Reviewers and sub-editors love to riff on a play's title and The Baby got any amount of "ill-conceived conception" and "premature death of a tragic baby" and "ugly miscarriage" and so on.
I wish I could tell you audiences stood out against the critical reception and loved it. It did have its fans - but large sections of the audience were cold and hostile. People seemed to have not the faintest idea what it was about.
For the record I wrote it while I was living in a part of Glasgow where more than a quarter of the population were unemployed (me among them). It was first produced in 1990 after a decade where politics had clearly been responsible for many private tragedies which could not be put right. And I began it after the leader and the party who had been responsible for those griefs had been triumphantly re-elected for the third time.
Shining Souls
Think of the carnival atmosphere of the Day of the Dead transferred to the streets of Glasgow.
At half six in the morning Charlie, who's homeless, turns up at his wife's door to borrow some dough. When his wife is reluctant to part with any of her small amount of cash, he pitches her the story that his mother is dying and he needs the money to get to the hospital - a story which has him in tears. Later, on this metaphysical day, he finds out his mother really is dying. Instead of going to see her he spends the day losing himself among strangers.
Shining Souls - Author Comment
If an actor playing Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream comes to the director worried that the audience just won't believe it when he wakes up with an ass's head, the director can offer him some reassurance based on past audience behaviour; but who knows if an audience will believe some totally made-up modern fiction?
In Shining Souls I wrote a contemporary play whose heroine has a backstory like a Greek tragedy, and whose homeless hero is so at the edges of his own consciousness he can scarcely comprehend himself. There are also two characters called Billy, both in love with the heroine who can't make up her mind between them.
Adaptations
In 1991 Hannan was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company to adapt Henrik Ibsen's The Pretenders, which was directed by Danny Boyle of Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire fame. It was performed at the Barbican in London (The Pit) and starred David Calder and Paterson Joseph.
In 1987 he prepared a version of the Gogol play Gamblers for the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, which received another production at the Tricycle Theatre in London in 1992.