A decade before John Osborne and the angry young men of the Royal Court, a woman was spurred to write for the stage by “a mood of red-hot revolt” at what she saw there: “cocktail time, glamorous gowns and underworked, about-to-be-deceived husbands”. Ena Lamont Stewart (1912-2006) wanted to witness “Real Life. Ordinary People”.
Stewart portrayed Glasgow’s children’s hospital in Starched Aprons, a title that earns a place beside the artist Clare Leighton’s contemporaneous memoir, Tempestuous Petticoat. She chronicled tenement life in Men Should Weep, spectacularly staged 13 years ago at the National. She wrote the trio of short plays staged as Knocking on the Wall.
