by The work of the Scottish painter and playwright John Byrne, who died at the age of 83, was quite a piece. His characters and caricatures, on stage or canvas, emerged from a sly, literate sense of humor, a close knowledge of popular culture, and a fierce political independence.
Byrne himself entered that realm of popular culture with two acclaimed television drama series after 20 years of hard work in his studio and in the theater. Tutti Frutti (1987) was an explosively funny six-part BBC series about a chaotic touring rock band, the Majestics (“Scotland’s Rock Kings”), led by Robbie Coltrane, and whose members include Emma Thompson and Maurice Roëves, with Richard Wilson. as his increasingly harsh and exasperated manager.
Throughout the 1980s, Byrne was a contributor to BBC Scotland’s sketch show Scotch and Rye, but his second big personal hit, also for BBC Scotland, was another six-part show with a musical background, this one once a soundtrack of country classics. Your Cheatin’ Heart (1990), starring Tilda Swinton as a Glasgow waitress, John Gordon Sinclair as an investigative journalist and Ken Stott as a small-time criminal and drug dealer; The Glasgow underworld and tragicomic antics were a dramatic parody of the music’s narrative content.
Byrne fell in love with Swinton while working on the series, and their happiness over the next few decades made him more of a celebrity than he enjoyed. Everything about Byrne was in his work and he even hid behind it from the beginning, when he provided a series of spurious “naïve” paintings for his first major art exhibition in London, at the Portal gallery in 1967, under the name of his Father, Patrick. McShane, “a busker and retired worker.” They soon rumbled it.
He always looked and spoke like an artist, and executed an almost uninterrupted stream of self-portraits on canvas that were as revealing and inquisitive (about himself) as any of Rembrandt or Velázquez. He even resembled the latter, with his messy hair, bloodhound face and shaggy beard, and, like all great portrait painters, he could never be accused of narcissism. His most cited influences were Giotto and Magritte. He had no interest in the landscape.
He was born into an Irish Catholic family, the son of Alice (née McShane) and Patrick Byrne. Or so he thought. In 2002 it was learned, thanks to a knowledgeable cousin, that his biological father was actually the father of his mother, Patrick, his own grandfather. He insisted his mother really “loved” his father and regularly walked eight miles from the family home on the Ferguslie Park housing estate in Paisley, Renfrewshire, to see him. However, later in life, his mother suffered mental health problems.
Byrne was educated at St Mirin’s Academy, Paisley, and, after an apprenticeship in the color mixing room of a Paisley carpet factory in the mid-1950s, he went to Glasgow School of Art, where he graduated in 1963. He won a traveling scholarship. To Perugia, Italy, he worked in a Scottish television graphics department and returned to the carpet factory as a designer.
His reputation continued to grow and he was the first living artist to exhibit at the new Third Eye Center in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, in 1975. His exhibition was not a success and he did not exhibit again for another 16 years. He had discovered theater.
He added three-dimensional depth to his graphic and painterly skills in his theater design, particularly for the Great Northern Welly Boot Show (1972), with rising comedy star Billy Connolly. Connolly’s lush satire of the shipbuilding industry was a hit at the Edinburgh festival (the cast also included Bill Paterson) and he traveled south to the Young Vic in London. Byrne also designed the show’s posters, as he continued to do thereafter, and Connolly’s large pair of yellow banana boots, a signature accessory comparable to Ken Dodd’s tickle stick.
He became the regular designer for John McGrath’s fantastic Scottish company 7:84, touring community centers with The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973), a sweeping, rough-and-tumble musical theater show charting the permissions of the Highlands for political reasons until the arrival of the oil barons, with the concomitant destruction of local culture and communities in the name of progress and money.
Outside of that show, Byrne moved closer to the center with his first play, Writer’s Cramp (1977), which began as a half-hour radio monologue and expanded into one of the most deliriously funny evenings I’ve ever experienced in a theater. . Three of 7:84’s brilliant actors, Paterson, Alex Norton and John Bett, told, in a parody art documentary format, the sad story of Nitshill’s fictional litterateur, Francis Seneca McDade. Ironically, I suffered critical cramps watching the show’s premiere on the outskirts of Edinburgh in 1977, in a small studio; All the seats were gone, so I sat under one, which happened to belong to the mother of one of the actors. Laughing became stressful.
I was down, but Byrne was on a roll. He sourced the characters and setting for The Slab Boys (1978) from his days at the Paisley carpet factory (wigs, cigarettes and rock’n’roll) and developed that play into an interconnected trilogy and a BBC Play for Today in 1979. Kisses (1984), at the Bush Theater in London, was based on his days in Perugia: he made magic with a Florentine pensioner from 1963 on that small stage, wildly mixing an art student, a draft evader, terrorists Celts and a head of department of the Welsh church. municipalities.
More quietly, he designed a farcical Restoration comedy, Edward Ravenscroft’s London Cuckolds, for Leicester Haymarket and Lyric Hammersmith in 1985. At the Royal Court in 1992, he resurrected the legend of two homosexual Kilmarnock painters, Colquhoun and MacBryde, in a play theatrical. of that title that followed the two Roberts, played by David O’Hara and Stott, as they rose to fame in 1930s Soho, but crashed and burned in alcoholic obscurity in 1957.
As an adapter, he was a perfect fit for Gogol’s government inspector, providing a boisterous, irresistible version for director Jonathan Kent at Almeida, north London, in 1997. Gogol was relocated to a backwater somewhere near Paisley, overseen by a Ian McDiarmid’s apoplectic mayor with Tom Hollander as the accidentally disturbing unofficial visiting civil servant.
More recently, there have been three Scottish versions of Chekhov (Brian Cox as Uncle Varick), and in 2013 he painted a wonderfully colorful circle on the ceiling of the King’s, Edinburgh, showing flying figures, masks of tragedy and comedy, and a sinister harlequin. From 1991 he returned to exhibiting regularly and in 2007 he was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Scottish Academy.
He was married to Alice Simpson in 1964, separated in the late 1980s and divorced in 2014. He lived with Swinton from 1989 to 2003 and married lighting designer Jeanine Davies in 2014.
He is survived by Jeanine and two children, John and Celie, from his first marriage, and twins, Xavier and Honor, from his relationship with Swinton.
• John Patrick Byrne, painter, designer and playwright, born January 6, 1940; died on November 30, 2023
