Glow of Light on a Half-Filled Glass

Paborama speaks to a local boy who writes extensively for stage, screen and radio....

Do you recall that ‘wee bit of wind’ we had back at the end of May? Award-winning writer, Alistair Rutherford, was playing golf in the teeth of that gale – he is not a man afraid of putting himself out there.

Indeed, since his wife, Anne, took him to see his first play aged 30, this bespectacled ex-bus driver and computer programmer for British Gas has transformed into one of the most prolific and exciting writing talents to come from Edinburgh, this side of the millennium. “I’d never even been to the theatre,” he says above the crashing of pottery from behind the scenes at the café we’re sitting in. “Then Anne took me to see a production at the Lyceum. It was an Ayckbourn play, all I can remember specifically is that it rained on stage and you could smell the real grass they’d used for the lawn. I was struck by how immediate the live performance was. How you only get one take. Every single performance is unique and never to be repeated, a shared experience with that night’s audience and them alone.” He was hooked.

Next spur was a prize in a short-story writing competition. It was a black comedy with an upbeat ending about growing-up, set atop the old tower blocks that used to grace Lindsay Road. “I needed to write an upbeat ending,” he says. “Too much of Scottish culture has been miserablist; there’s a lot of light around here too, y’know.” In 1998 the competition received over 1100 entries. Alistair was placed in the top five. “That shot of confidence was enough to keep me going… enough to allow me to believe in myself.”

The Monday Lizard

Educated at Leith Academy, apart from a brief stint at university in Aberdeen, Alistair has never moved far away and currently lives in Corstorphine. Following the initial success, an artistic strand had entered his life and he asked his boss about the possibility of reducing his hours so that he could spend more time on his writing. And when head office subsequently moved to Glasgow he found that the commute was too big an ask and decided to pursue his new interests full time. “I owe it all to Anne,” he smiles. “She was fed-up of me going on about how I’d like to write more and she encouraged me to sign-up to a short course on creative writing.” This eventually led to him taking an MA in Screenwriting at Screen Academy Scotland.

Considerable success has built from this decision, although he wryly comments that radio drama has yet to produce a Hollywood – or even a Holyrood – lifestyle. “The Traverse Theatre used to run a monthly development workshop where new plays would be read by a professional cast: The Monday Lizard, it was called. I went along one night and stood and watched. Some of the pieces were amazing, far better than I felt I was at that stage, whilst others were good and I wondered if I could match them.

So I entered my first script, Moon Dancing, which was selected by the panel. The pieces were rehearsed in the afternoon before being unleashed on the public but I was too shy to go along. Anne and I went and sat in the middle of the audience in the evening and were amazed by the skill of the performers in lifting the action off the page.” He went on to have a dozen pieces performed in this public forum under the auspices of Ella Wildridge and successful playwright Zinnie Harris. He subsequently won a place on the Trav’s 2006 Emerging Writer’s residency.

Since then, Happy New Year, his tale of the prodigal son returned to Leith (originally a full-length play commission for the Leith Festival), has aired two years running on BBC Radio Scotland at Hogmanay. He has also adapted another of his radio plays, An Island Between Heaven and Earth, concerning the beginnings of George MacLeod’s Ecumenical Christian community on Iona, for the stage for last years Leith Festival.  “The idea took shape after a relaxing day swimming in the Atlantic off Iona, a centre for peace and hope, contrasted with news slowly trickling-in, on the Abbey’s limited technology, of events overseas.” The date: 11th September 2001.

This year Peapod Productions is taking Alistair’s The Garden on a UK national tour after an opening week at Leith Festival, and South Leith Parish Church is reviving an historical walking tour of Leith, originally commissioned from Alistair in 2009 to celebrate the Church in the Midst’s 400th anniversary. “Leith Festival is an amazing institution, recently celebrating its hundredth year. I feel honoured to work with South Leith Parish Church, it is the church we got married in and it is a beautiful, welcoming place.”