Elizabeth MacLennan: Actress and writer who co-founded the crusading political theatre company 7:84 with her husband John McGrath

The company embodied the true spirit of the medium

MacLennan with Ian McShane in 1963 in an ITV Play of the Week, ‘The Truth About Alan’ (ITV/Rex Features)

The beautiful, principled and graceful actress Elizabeth MacLennan was one third of the family that set up the 7:84 Theatre Company, and one half of a great love theatrical story. With her husband, the playwright and director John McGrath, and her brother, David MacLennan, she crystalised the spirit of crusading political drama with 7:84, a company named after a statistic that seven per cent of the population owns 84 per cent of the wealth.

Their first and greatest success, McGrath’s The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973), toured community centres and village halls to tell the story of the centuries-long exploitation of Scotland’s land, its people, and lately, its oil. Angry, jocular and moving (at one point, MacLennan hypnotically recited details of casualties of the Highland Clearances), the performances from the company’s strolling players, who included Bill Paterson and Alex Norton, were rousing occasions which blended drama with dance, music and ribaldry, and which were crowned with a ceilidh after the show. This was theatre returning to its roots.

The company embodied the true spirit of the medium, travelling from village to village with a fold-out set inspired by a children’s pop-up book that miraculously survived being transported nightly by roof-rack through the tough Highland climate. There was always a tremendous sense of fun fizzing through 7:84; I fondly remember a production of Antigone from 1993 (with Daniela Nardini and David Tennant in the cast) which not only saw a strong reassertion of the company’s political ethos, but even treated the audience to the odd chuckle. The 1980s had been a savage time for the company, and the Scottish Arts Council had forced McGrath to resign as Artistic Director in 1988, but it proved that the spirit they had worked so hard to invest in the company lived on.

Elizabeth Margaret Ross MacLennan was born into a comfortable Glasgow family in 1938; her parents were both eminent doctors. A musical child, she was educated at Laurel Bank Girls’ School, won a scholarship to Benenden, then read modern history at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. While there, she joined the Experimental Theatre Club; in her charming memoir, The Moon Belongs to Everyone (1990), she revealed that she met McGrath while participating in an exercise which required everyone to keep their eyes closed, despite which, magically, “we seemed to communicate”.

The couple first worked together when McGrath directed a production of Ulysses at Oxford for which he cast MacLennan as Molly Broom. After graduation and a year at Dundee Rep, she moved to London, where she studied acting at Lambda. She and McGrath married in 1962, and for a few years worked soundly in their respective fields. As a director, he did excellent work on the early episodes of the BBC’s Z Cars, which was breaking new ground in television naturalism and honesty; by the end of the 1960s he was writing Hollywood screenplays. His wife had established herself as an actress with roles such as Masha in Richard Eyre’s production of The Three Sisters (Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, 1968) and with a healthy run of television appearances.

But they were infected by the spirit of the age, and turned their back on lucrative careers to form 7:84, often working for nothing. The company broke barriers politically and stylistically; 7:84 was hot on gender issues, destroyed the fourth wall, and was influenced as much by working-class club entertainments as by Brechtian theory.

The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil was a clarion call for justice to the Scottish people, and the atmosphere of those performances is preserved in John Mackenzie’s film of the production for the BBC in 1974, which blended joyful footage of a performance before a lively Benbecula crowd with sobering documentary inserts revealing the truth behind the current oil boom, and brutal film realisations of some of the more sweeping moments.

Over the years the company toured most of the world, speaking out on political injustice well beyond just home shores, playing to everyone from prisoners to schoolchildren to the homeless. Highlights included the wonderfully titled Little Red Hen (Shaw Theatre, 1975), the story of an elderly political activist, which saw even London audiences feel the enlivenment of a 7:84 performance; Out of Our Heads (1976), about the less-celebratory aspects of Scotland’s drinking culture, and Men Should Weep (1982), a then-forgotten play of tenement torment, mightily resurrected. After a special performance for striking NHS workers, MacLennan made an impassioned speech attacking the Tory government and beseeching people to learn from history so as not to repeat it.

MacLennan was McGrath’s inspiration as well as his work and life partner, and after they left 7:84 he continued to write monologues for her. After his death in 2002 she concentrated on writing, and published children’s books, plays and poetry.

The MacLennan family leave behind them, like those gallivanting productions themselves did, a spirit of defiance, hope and community. No other British theatre company of the 20th century can have achieved such penetration, such cultural impact in the land of its birth, and remain so desperately needed in Britain today.

Elizabeth Margaret Ross MacLennan, actress, writer and producer: born Glasgow 16 March 1938; married 1962 John McGrath (died 2002; one daughter, two sons); died London 23 June 2015.