The Scotsman 4 March 2022

Outside the theatre where Yes! Yes! UCS! is being staged, you’ll see a blackboard. Audiences are free to chalk up messages on the way out. The other night, someone wrote, “Power to the people!” That’s the kind of show it is.

Written by Neil Gore for Townsend Productions, it is a play with songs about the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ dispute of 1971. In the summer of that year, the workers took control of John Brown and Co’s shipyard in Clydebank. Led by charismatic shop steward Jimmy Reid, they stood up for their threatened jobs not by going on strike, but by staging a work-in. [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).