Interview with Sorcha Dallas

By Jen McLaren, 05.01.2024

Poor Things film still © 2023 Searchlight Pictures

The late Scottish artist and writer Alasdair Gray would have celebrated his 90th birthday in 2024 and, to begin the year, a film adaptation of his 1992 novel ‘Poor Things’ starring Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe will have its release in the UK.

Written and illustrated by Gray when he was in his late 50s, ‘Poor Things’ is a playful, multi-layered book that was inspired by Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, ‘Frankenstein’. It follows the story of protagonist Bella Baxter, who is reanimated by scientist Godwin Baxter.

The film is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, who has previously received acclaim for ‘The Lobster’ (2015) and ‘The Favourite’ (2018), and was adapted by Tony McNamara.

Sorcha Dallas, Custodian of the Alasdair Gray Archive in Glasgow, believes Gray would have found the project innovative and exciting. “Alasdair met Yorgos many years ago when he came to visit and was initially interested in optioning the book,” she says. This meeting took place around a decade ago and, at that point, Lanthimos had not yet made a film in the English language. “He had to get some critical support and success via ‘The Lobster’ and ‘The Favourite’ before he was able to make it in the way that he wanted,” Sorcha goes on.

 

“Over the years, Alasdair’s books had been optioned and nothing happened, so we didn’t know if ‘Poor Things’ would be taken further – it’s fantastic that it has. What Yorgos Lanthimos has done is made his own interpretation of the novel and, if you think about Alasdair’s work and his approach to making, he was always creatively borrowing from other sources, so his whole life’s work is a creative representation of things that existed already.”

The Alasdair Gray Archive is a free public resource set up following his death in 2019. Modelled on his own front room – where he also worked – it reflects his personality, practice and the collaborative way in which he worked. Because Gray’s approach to his work was so intrinsically linked with his fellow creatives – and he was always honest about his own processes – Sorcha believes “he would be interested and supportive of people using his work in that way too.” 

To coincide with the release of the film – and the renewed attention it will generate in Gray’s novel – the Archive commissioned an online resource that provides a digital tour of the book, its themes and characters. “What we were trying to do was root the novel back into Glasgow and into the people and places that inspired it,” Sorcha explains. “Hopefully it will encourage more people to read the novel and, of course, when they do they'll get that sense of it being a Glaswegian novel – and Alasdair and Glasgow are so integrated. You couldn’t think about Dickens without London or Joyce without Dublin, and there are adaptations of those writers’ works that have been made outside of the locales in which they are set, but there’s still been an investment into claiming those stories for those cities and those countries. That’s what we’d love to see happening going forward with Alasdair’s work.”

‘Poor Things’ was published in 1992 to critical acclaim, but Sorcha says Gray had always struggled to make a stable income from his art and writing. “I think ‘Lanark’ had been such a labour of love, it had taken three decades to create, when it was finally released into the world in 1981, we can look back and see what a seismic shift it created within the Scottish literary scene and beyond. It was radical, new, and took a bit of time for people to digest the significance of what it was. In many ways, people might have thought this was his magnum opus and it was going to lead to critical fame and attention and a secure, stable income and, of course, that never happened," she explains.

“But ‘Poor Things’ was different. It won the Whitbread Award, was launched to critical acclaim and was probably his most successful in terms of launching a book then having an impact. When people come to visit us and they haven’t ever read anything of Alasdair’s, I always recommend they start with ‘Poor Things’ as I think it’s such a great introduction into Alasdair’s way of thinking. It’s easy to digest and understand … it’s also really fun and playful and it’s one of these novels that grows. He is suggesting different viewpoints and ways of thinking about things, but it’s never judgemental. It’s not patronising or dictating and it really allows his books to grow over time.”

Alasdair never tired of learning and creating and even after a life-changing accident that severely restricted his mobility, he continued to work until his death at the age of 85.

2024 will mark 90 years since Alasdair’s birth and the Archive will be celebrating this with a series of events. In 2014, Sorcha curated a programme to mark his 80th birthday and since 2021, Gray Day has taken place annually on February 25th (the day ‘Lanark’ was published). A day-long celebration of Alasdair Gray’s life and work, Gray Day 2024 will take place at Glasgow’s Òran Mór, where he painted a ceiling mural.

Author Denise Mina will be involved with the Archive’s Creative Commission 2024 and there’s yet more going on with the expansion of the space as they work with the family of writer Agnes Owens –  a great friend and collaborator of Gray – to set up an archive of her work. 

 

Learn more about the Alisdair Gray Archive here.

Poor Things is released in the UK on 12^th January