John Byrne

In the early 1980s, the artist and playwright John Byrne was approached by the then BBC Scotland head of drama, Bill Bryden, to create a new TV show. The only stipulation was it should be called Tutti Frutti. The resulting series, starring Robbie Coltrane, Emma Thompson and Richard Wilson, proved one of the most memorable and original shows of the decade. Byrne reworked it as a stage musical for the National Theatre of Scotland in 2006.

Bryden, a fellow Scot, clearly recognised in Byrne a uniquely quirky talent that both celebrated and exploited a particular kind of colloquial Scottishness. His gift had emerged a decade earlier in the acclaimed stage hits, Writer’s Cramp (1977) and The Slab Boys (1978), three interlinking plays about a bunch of loud-mouthed, working class Glaswegian workmates, loosely based on Byrne’s own experience as a slab boy in a carpet factory in the 1950s, a place he referred to later as “a technicolour hell-hole”.

The Slab Boys started out at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, directed by David Hayman, with a cast that included Robbie Coltrane in his stage debut, before transferring to the Royal Court, London, and subsequently being made into a BBC Play for Today in 1979. In 1983 it was staged on Broadway, with a cast that included Sean Penn, Val Kilmer and Kevin Bacon, and later still it was released as a film, directed by the author. 

The son of a shipyard worker and a cinema usherette, Byrne grew up on a tough housing estate in Paisley, near Glasgow. After leaving school at 17 he found work at the local carpet factory, grinding up the colours for the carpet dyes, the inspiration for his later trilogy. Aspiring to greater things, he secured a place at Glasgow School of Art, later winning a scholarship to study painting in Perugia, Italy, for six months. On his return he worked in the graphics department of Scottish Television before returning to the carpet factory as a designer.

At the same time, he was emerging as an artist in his own right and, bizarrely, exhibiting in London under the name of his father, possibly to protect his reputation in case his work proved unpopular. In the event, his work was well-received and he came clean about its provenance. Subsequently, his painting and writing ran along parallel, often overlapping, lines since he frequently designed both his own and other people’s productions, as well as album covers, portraits, caricatures, guitars, even the suit his friend Billy Connolly wore for an appearance on Michael Parkinson’s talk show early on in his career. 

Byrne designed Connolly’s 1972 comedy about the shipbuilding industry, The Great Northern Welly Boot Show, a hit at that year’s Edinburgh Fringe which later transferred to the Young Vic. Byrne became Connolly’s designer in residence, creating many of the posters and artwork for his touring shows.

In the early 1970s he was the designer of many 7:84 touring shows at the behest of his friend John McGrath, the populist left-wing playwright. He also designed for the Traverse, Hampstead Theatre Club, as it then was, the Bush, Scottish Opera and the Citizens Theatre. 

Following the success of his own plays, Byrne used his experience of designing for Scottish TV as the basis for his play Normal Service which was staged at the Royal Lyceum and Hampstead. His 1992 play, Colquhoun and MacBryde, staged by the Royal Court, was inspired by real-life Scottish artists and partners Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, feted in the 1940s and much admired by Byrne. 

In 2008, he came up with a fourth instalment of The Slab Boys, entitled Nova Scotia, produced by the Traverse. There was also a sequel to Tutti Frutti called Your Cheatin’ Heart (1990) starring Tilda Swinton whom he later married. They remained close friends even after separating in 2003.

Byrne’s original scripts – probably destined to become collector’s items – were always festooned with his illustrations. Several of his paintings hang in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, including portraits of Coltrane, Connolly, Swinton and one of many self-portraits.

John Patrick Byrne was born on January 6, 1940, and died on November 30, aged 83. He is survived by his third wife, Jeanine Davies, and his four children, John, Celie, Xavier and Honor.