Robert McLellan OBE (1907–1985) was a Scottish Renaissance dramatist, writer and poet and a leading figure in the twentieth century movement to recover Scotland’s distinctive theatrical traditions.
He found popular success with plays and stories written in his native Scots tongue and is regarded, alongside William Lorimer, as one of the most important modern exponents of fine prose in the language.
Some of these early works in short form, such as Jeddart Justice and The Changeling, were also picked up by other non-professional companies around the country and entered in the annual Scottish Community Drama Association competitions of the era.
McLellan's first notable success came in 1936 with Curtain's production of his full-length three-act comedy, Toom Byres, set among the Border reivers in the early days of the reign of James VI.
This latter production, with the young Duncan Macrae famously creating a sensation in the title role, is generally regarded as the one which confirmed McLellan's reputation as a comic dramatist of substance in Scots.
He continued to work with Curtain in mind, but his last production with the company, Portrait of an Artist, this time written in English with a contemporary setting, met with less critical acclaim.
As soon as hostilities ended in May 1945, while still in uniform but freed of his duties, McLellan straightway composed the verse drama The Carlin Moth during the fortnight after VE Day, by his own account, in the 'hot attic' of a mansion near Southwold on the Suffolk coast where his unit was stationed at the time.
Citizens did finally mount two McLellan debuts: the historical study, Mary Stewart, in 1950, and The Road to the Isles, a contemporary satire of land activism in the Highlands, in 1954.
One of the next highlights of McLellan's career was the broadcast of his award-winning verse drama for radio in 1957, Sweet Largie Bay, with its beautiful and elegaic evocation of generational change and decline in island life.
[4][5][6] Robert McLellan was born in 1907 at the home of his maternal grandparents in Linmill, a fruit farm close to Kirkfieldbank in the prosperous fruit-growing Clyde Valley region of Lanarkshire.
Although the young McLellan grew up in Milngavie, he generally spent his summer holidays the Lanarkshire farm of his grandparents, and it was those times in the immediate pre-First World War period, which later became the inspiration for his Linmill Stories.