This month I’m directing Knocking on the Wall, a series of three short plays by the great Scottish playwright, Ena Lamont Stewart, at the Finborough Theatre in West London.

I’ve often been asked why I’m staging these works from the 1970s, almost 50 years after they were first written, and I usually respond by giving three reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, it’s just great writing: the characters live on the page, the language sings. Secondly, she was way ahead of her time. More on that shortly. Lastly, she wrote from a desire to rebel, and I always think that’s an incredibly exciting place to start. In fact, she said herself: "One evening in the winter of 1942 I went to the theatre. I came home in a mood of red-hot revolt against cocktail time, glamorous gowns and under-worked, about-to-be-deceived husbands. I asked myself what I wanted to see on stage and the answer was Life. Real life. Ordinary people."

How brilliant is that quote? I still find it inspiring. That Lamont Stewart began writing for the theatre because she was angry about the type of worlds she saw depicted onstage is intriguing and revealing. It’s reminiscent of the Angry Young Men who emerged in the 1950s around the Royal Court, but is made more electrifying by the fact that she did it all on her own, driven simply by her own sense of truth and surrounded by a very conservative theatre culture. She wanted to see “real people, ordinary people” on stage, so she attempted to do just that with her works.

Lamont Stewart found early success with her frank and brutally realist plays Starched Aprons (1945) which was set in a children’s hospital, and Men Should Weep (1947) about working class life in a Glasgow tenement just after the war. But her later plays were rejected by the Scottish theatre establishment, which sadly, and predictably, discouraged her from writing for theatre. They weren’t ready for her voice (emphasis on the “her”) so she had to pursue a working life away from the theatre, becoming a librarian who wrote privately, when she could, around her responsibilities as a single mother raising her son.

I was lucky enough to speak to her son, Bill, and he reinforced to me that his mother lived an isolated life to the point of being a loner. He relayed how she struggled to find a literary community to connect with, perhaps one of the reasons she was drawn to marginal figures in her work and the reason she could write plays, like Knocking on the Wall, which so accurately and authentically depict people who are literally and figuratively walled in by their surroundings, unable to be themselves, reaching out for connection. The plays are deeply private and interior works, but outline characters shaped and thwarted by social forces bigger than themselves. Lamont Stewart wrote in a biographical note: “I had known from an early age that someday I would write.” Yet, for much of her life, she could not find recognition as a writer.

There’s also an incredible amount of joy and humour woven into her work – as well as music which Lamont Stewart loved, having grown up in a very musical family. When this combines with her powers of social and psychological observation, it’s a heady combination. Subtextually, her works are fascinating. In one play we catch, in glimpses, the struggle of a closeted homosexual man who has grown up in a repressive environment and, one assumes, decided to move abroad in order to be able to live his life as a gay man. The play was written in 1973, only a year after the Scottish Minority Group launched the Edinburgh Gay Switchboard, and two years before Scotland’s first Gay Centre was opened. It was not until 1981 that male same-sex sexual acts were legalised in Scotland.

In another play we see a subtle and complex exploration of class difference, both material and cultural, and in another a deeply sympathetic portrait of mental illness. You sense that Lamont Stewart wasn’t necessarily consciously deciding to write about these themes, however, but that they simply stemmed from her intuitive interest in unearthing stories about people, perhaps like herself, who lived on the margins, and had a rich interior life that they were unable to find an outlet for and fully express. Lamont Stewart conveyed how intuitive her process was when she wrote an introduction to the plays. She said that the characters: “had walked into my head and commanded me to reach for pencil and pad. Characters in full flow cannot be ignored. They threaten: ‘Get this down on paper, Ena. We’re not going to be whistled back just when you feel like it, you know.’ Playwrights, when cornered, can quite truthfully say: 'just wrote down what the characters said'.”

Lamont Stewart wrote the three plays that comprise Knocking on the Wall later in her life. Towards Evening, Walkies Time for a Black Poodle, and Knocking on the Wall were penned between 1973 and 1978, when her works had gone unperformed for decades. Thankfully she was finally able to see all three staged together in 1985, opening at the Traverse Theatre and then touring Scotland. According to Bill, his mother “revelled in the publicity,” her profile having already risen somewhat following a revival of her most successful play, Men Should Weep, by John McGrath’s radical political theatre company 7:84 in 1982.  It’s a great source of delight to me that Ena Lamont Stewart managed to briefly take pride and joy in how much her plays stirred audiences in the 1980s. Unfortunately, in her later life she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and so was unaware of just how celebrated she had become, that she had come to be regarded as a truly ground-breaking and pioneering playwright in Scotland. By the time of her death in 2006 Men Should Weep was on the school syllabus and everyone in Scottish theatre knew who she was.

Knocking on the Wall was last performed in London in 1988 and it’s certainly well overdue a revival. I’m so fortunate in the cast we have secured for the Finborough run and I know, quite simply, that this is down to the quality of the writing. The plays are complex, fascinating, character-led works which are immensely playable for the actors. We’re lucky enough to have Janette Foggo as part of our company – she was in the National Theatre of Scotland’s major revival of Men Should Weep in 2010 and is re-encountering Lamont Stewart’s work. It’s been a total thrill to discover the different ways each of the cast members has connected with the characters, approaching the material with such insight, intelligence and passion.

In a nutshell, the plays are beautifully observed slices of life that carry big themes: how can we communicate with each other across gulfs of understanding, how do we deal with mortality, grief and madness, how do class, money and place shape who we are and work their way into our most private thoughts?

Lamont Stewart is an observer of the human condition, an observer of Scottish society and a poet of the everyday. She sees the outcast, the spurned and the forgotten and gives them a voice. Like Chekhov before her, she writes with a cold-eyed clarity and a warm-hearted sympathy towards all her creations. These characters have lived long lives before they got here, and they will live on afterwards. They’re fully realised people, and we’re offered a brief glimpse into their worlds. I really hope that you’ll join us so that we can welcome you into their, and her, world too – it’s a pretty fascinating place to spend a couple of hours on a wet winter evening in Earl’s Court.