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16 Major Playwright II: James Bridie and His Theatre
Get accessGerard Carruthers is Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His recent publications include, as editor, A Companion to Scottish Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2024), The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns (Oxford University Press, 2024), and Scottish Stories (Everyman, 2023). He is the General Editor of the multi-volume Collected Works of Robert Burns for Oxford University Press (2014? ) and the modern editor of James Bridie in The Devil to Stage: Five Plays by James Bridie (ASLS, 2007).
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Published:20 March 2025
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Abstract
‘James Bridie’ (the pseudonym of Osborne Henry Mavor) was one of the most prolific and often-performed Scottish playwrights from the late 1920s until the 1950s. Bridie/Mavor was also a highly important cultural activist in Scotland, during his professional life, helping establish a number of enduring artistic institutions. His themes often relate to Scottish history, medical advancement, the amorality of human ‘progress’ or ‘civilization’, and—alongside such concerns—ideas of good and evil. A sardonic observer of the middle-class milieu especially, his work is often also unnaturalistic and supernatural in its plotting and overtones. Rather curiously, his work has largely fallen out of critical favour in recent decades.
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