Sunday Times, 17 September 2006 - Art nouveau genius given an encore

In celebration of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s brilliance, his letters are being dramatised and re-enacted in Glasgow, reports Anna Burnside.

As a student at Glasgow School of Art in the 1940s, John Cairney barely noticed the Mackintosh masterpiece where he attended lectures. Just 16 years old and fresh out of St Mungo’s Academy, the marvels of the library, the headmaster’s room, even the ornate iron railings went sailing over his head.

“I was too young,” recalls Cairney. “The place was full of prisoners of war just back from Burma. I only lasted two terms. There was not a mention of Mackintosh while I was there.”

Today he is something of an expert, refers to the architect as Charlie and behaves as if he were almost a member of the Cairney family. His dramatised reading of Mackintosh’s letters, currently performed as a double act with his wife, Alannah O’Sullivan, playing the architect’s wife, Margaret Macdonald, is coming to House for an Art Lover later this month.

Cairney has been performing the show, in various permutations, for the past 30 years. When the idea was first mooted, he had carved a name for himself as an actor in repertory and with a one-man show on the life of Robert Burns. It was 1974, when purple swirly carpets and G-Plan wall units covered the floors and walls of the Scottish bourgeoisie.

The Kirkcaldy-based Mackintosh furniture company, however, turned its back on teak and kept on producing magnificent high-backed chairs.

Its chairman, in Newcastle for a conference, happened to attend a theatrical performance of Cyrano de Bergerac played by John Cairney. The chairman was impressed and wondered if the actor would be able to do for Mackintosh what he had done for Burns? Cairney was willing to give it a go. He accepted a retainer of £100 a week and set to work on a script. With the help of dealers and academics he used a series of letters exchanged by Mackintosh and Macdonald as the basis of a dramatised reading.

He performed it for the first time in 1975 at an architectural conference organised by the furniture company. The warm applause convinced him there was mileage in the misunderstood man.

The show became a series for STV in the late 1970s. It expanded into a four-hander — adding Margaret, then her sister Frances and her artist boyfriend Herbert MacNair. Although his dream of developing it into a film has not come to fruition, Cairney has expanded his research into a book, The Quest for Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

“He was a spoilt boy and became the kind of professional artist spoilt boys become. He had a big petted lip and a temper, out of which came an impatience with lesser talents,” he says.

“Mackintosh was brought up under a mound of antimacassars at a time when even the billiard table legs were covered in case they were a temptation. The way he combined artistry with architecture was a whole new thing. Within the William Morris movement at the time, if there was a junction or a hinge you showed the hinge clearly, you didn’t cover it up with Victorian frippery.”

The more Cairney excavated Mackintosh’s life, the more he appreciated Margaret’s role in the creation of their trademark Glasgow Style.

“She saved him as a man and assisted him as an artist,” says Cairney. “I thought he was a wild bohemian whom Glasgow didn’t appreciate, but as I learnt more I realised she sobered him up literally and metaphorically. It was as a pair they made a real impact, which was why the tearooms they designed for Miss Cranston were so gorgeous. They were at their most superb in tandem.”

Cairney’s show has evolved along with the city’s love affair with Mackintosh. He has seen the House for an Art Lover go from a forgotten set of plans to a lovingly created part of the Mackintosh trail — and a venue for performances such as his own. Today he is both astounded and delighted to be performing the show as part of a festival conceived, in part, to showcase Glasgow’s desire for its Mackintosh buildings to become a World Heritage Site.

“It’s the size of the artistry and the genius of it. I still ask Charlie: how did you do it? how did you see that when nobody else was seeing it? To build from the inside out was totally controversial. People would ask why the window is half way up a wall. But when they went inside it made sense. That would be where the sun came in and hit the fireplace, which was bronze so you would get this fantastic burnishing effect. It was magic.”

For Cairney there can be no such thing as too much Mackintosh. He has been dramatising his letters for so long the boundaries have become a little blurred. “I don’t know if he said this or I made him say it,” he says mischievously, “but Charlie said: ‘I would love Glasgow to play with. If you would give me that stretch of Sauchiehall Street from the art college to Charing Cross, I would give you a Scottish Parthenon.’

“He wanted to build a theatre. My final ambition would be to see his concert hall built, and I would like to see it in Kelvingrove Park.”

Mackintosh designed a concert hall with a capacity of about 10,000 in 1901. “One thing is for certain,” says Cairney. “I will not be around to play Mackintosh at the launch party.”

A Mackintosh Experience is at House for an Art Lover, September 26-28. Tickets, £45, include champagne and dinner with wine. Contact 0141 353 4770

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