Andy McLintock, A member of the Whitehills Experimental Theatre Group.


ANDY MCLINTOCK.
A member of the Whitehills Experimental Theatre Group.

Tell us about your association with the experimental theatre, the background to the experimental theatre.

“Yeah. Well, as I say my wife was in the light opera club, Gerry was in the light opera club and a group of people and he invited a group of people back and he said ‘I'm starting a madrigal group in this, this house at Whitehills farm, would you like to come along?' And they were all singers and they were very keen to come along and I was a sort of hanger-on, being husband of my wife as it were, but I came along. And em… in no time at all we were involved in folk singing and theatre and madrigals and it was tremendous.

And Whitehills Farm in these days was a house, a farmhouse and we started off doing things in the… would be the drawing room, which is a big drawing room so it was suitable for a group and for madrigal singing you might have half a dozen, eight, nine people so it was fine for that sort of group. But as it evolved, eh, Gerry obviously had ideas for using the barn. And in these days it was the cow stalls still there and the idea was to develop an experimental theatre in this basic place.

And eh… my wife was a drama-trained person and very interested in production as well as acting and singing, so she was very keen to use this as experimental theatre. Not to do the… the things you might do, run of the mill, but to do things that were more challenging and things that didn't require a big set because it was a basic space, so things that you could do with a fairly stark background, often not involving a big cast, couple of people, two or three people. And she would do Pirandello and Pinter and Schaeffer, Baldwin, there'd be lots of sixties, fifties and sixties playwrights em and it was very, very suited to this for small groups.

Most of the people that came around at that time had, they weren't… they all had some experience either professionally or long-term amateurs and in singing and there were some people involved in the SNO chorus and singing at that sort of level. But there were also other people who were starting out, trying things, so it was a mixture of people but it was all very much trying new things.

And one of the things that we were doing, for instance, would be doing folk singing. And I noticed… towards traditional folk singing, towards Gaelic singing. And I noticed that although I'm not in any way know anything about Gaelic or anything, I noticed that the lilt in the singing of Gaelic seemed to have some resonance with Indian music and at that time I had a student, I had a colleague, it was a colleague at work who had a student who was lodging with him, an Indian student, they were both Indians, and he, I talked to him about this and he said ‘yeah, this guy sings!' and I said ‘bring him along' so he brought this Indian student along to Whitehills farm and he would sing alongside a Gaelic folksinger and sure enough, there was a resonance between the two types of music.




And it's only like twenty years later there's been research done suggesting that Gaelic is a Sanskrit-related language and it has, it's come across quite separately and quite unadulterated from sort of the Germanic languages that we speak in terms of English. So that was an interesting sort of thing you could do at Whitehills Farm. And it just let you… it was just fun to try things and there was no big audience constraints. You just had the audience, small audience and eh… it went on for two or three years and the people we met then, we still know. Eh, there's a whole group that we're still very much in touch with”.

Tell us about the layout of the theatre. Describe, if you were sitting in the theatre now, describe it to us.

“If I remember it, we had the cow stalls and for the life of me I can't work out… the cow stalls are sort of stalls… and at a theatre you want to sit and look down and I don't know how you work with cow stalls in the theatre. If I was to take you to the theatre now it would actually be in one of the bars here. The whole complex has embraced the house and the bars so… and the restaurant complex, so there was a complex of buildings which hadn't… they'd been rebuilt because they'd been burnt down but the basic fabric of the building is still here. Coming up today for this interview, I was looking at it and you could see, yes, this is the house and there's the byre, but the area round about it you don't, you don't know where you are because you're in the middle of a housing area whereas before it was up a dark lane at night. It was a lovely lane during the day and one of the problems was getting people at night up this dark lane which was not part of East Kilbride then. It was on the way to the village of Auldhouse. So I wouldn't… you would have difficulty recognising its environs but you would recognise completely the building. It's been well-restored”.

What's your happiest memory of the place?

“I've got several happy memories. One is to meet a couple who we're still best friends with and we met them on the first night at the madrigal singing. And we wouldn't have met them otherwise and they're still folk singers and they're still singers, she's a singer with SNO and they do fiddle music and they do all, they do all similar things but they've moved on as well to do a wide range of things. Em, so that, that's one happy memory. Another happy memory is it was just such good fun and it was… I love experimental theatre. I don't like… don't like's not the word but I much prefer theatre where you don't have a lot of sets. I like just to focus on the actors. Whether it was singing in opera or theatre I love the interplay between human beings without a lot of sets and background or some very... and the stone walls of the barns were great. I'm also a painter, I love stone walls in general, eh… I've got a stone wall in my garden which goes back 200 years, I just love stone. So the whole, the whole context of the place suited me psychologically”.

What was the big attraction then of the place?

“The attraction was a small group of people who were like-minded and wanted to try new things. Em… I'm not a person that goes to the theatre regularly to see standard plays. I only really… I've been interested in the theatre when they're doing things that are surprising or challenging me in some way”.