Hitler on the Ballachulish Beat: The Plays of C. P. Taylor

Abstract

Although seven of his plays were performed at the 1992 Edinburgh International Festival, the Scottish playwright C.P. Taylor (1929-81) is much less well-known than some of this younger colleagues. This is particularly unfortunate as C.P. Taylor’s thematic concerns, and the dramatic vocabulary he employs to voice them, are unique in their contemporary Scottish context, albeit strongly indebted to European, specifically German, Modernism. The article will first provide a brief survey of C.P. Taylor’s life and writing career, focussing on his Jewish background (which informs, for example, such plays as Walter and The Black and White Minstrels), and on the conditions of writing in exile (as a Scot in England). The second part will consist of a detailed, comparative examination of three plays, namely, Bread and Butter, The Ballachulish Beat, and Good. In spite of their considerable differences —Bread and Butter explores the lives of two young Jewish couples in Glasgow, The Ballachullish Beat follows the career of a rock band, and Good discusses the question of euthanasia before the sinister background of 1930s Germany —all three plays are concerned with the responses of individuals to the pressures, but also the allure, of various kinds of totalitarianism. In addition, all three plays associate totalitarianism with music, as a pre- or non- rational form of experience; as a consequence, the role of music in these plays, both as a theme and as a dramatic technique, will have to be explored.