John Byrne (playwright)
He wrote The Slab Boys Trilogy, plays which explore working-class life in Scotland, and the TV dramas Tutti Frutti and Your Cheatin' Heart.
John Patrick Byrne was born into a family of Irish Catholic descent in Paisley, Renfrewshire, and he grew up in the Ferguslie Park housing scheme.
He was initially angered by the revelation, but eventually reconciled with the truth of his lineage: "I think he gave me that wonderful mixture of genes with his own daughter, the eldest of the family.
[4] Much of Byrne's art was portraits, in a wide variety of styles ranging from fairly conventional oils to what are effectively caricatures.
A cover letter detailed his father's hard, lonely life, and claimed that there were another 50 works by him at his small house in Dunoon.
[13] He received a number of museum retrospective exhibitions, including "John Byrne at 60, The Unsolved Artist", 2000, Paisley, Renfrewshire, "Sitting Ducks", 2014, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, "Ceci n'est pas une rétrospective", 2022, Fine Art Society, Edinburgh, and "John Byrne: A Big Adventure", 2022, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow.
[14] In the 1970s Byrne started writing his own work; Writer's Cramp was a success at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1977 before transferring to London.
The main characters in the first part, The Slab Boys, generally the most popular, are working-class Glaswegian teenagers, and the play launched the careers of several young actors: Robbie Coltrane in Edinburgh, and in the 1983 Broadway production, Kevin Bacon, Sean Penn, Val Kilmer and Jackie Earle Haley.
[15] His writing found much success in the 1987 BBC television series Tutti Frutti, starring Robbie Coltrane, Emma Thompson and Maurice Roeves, which chronicled the final days of a failing rock 'n' roll band.
The series received much critical acclaim, including winning six BAFTA awards,[16] the one for Graphic design naming Byrne himself.
[17] He followed this in 1990 with Your Cheatin' Heart, a six-part series set in the Glasgow country music scene, starring John Gordon Sinclair, Ken Stott and Tilda Swinton.
