The work of the Scottish painter and playwright John Byrne, who has died at the age of 83, was one whole. His characters and caricatures, on stage or on screen, all emerged from a sly, literate sense of humor, a close acquaintance with popular culture and a fierce political independence.
Byrne himself entered that realm of popular culture with two critically acclaimed television dramas after twenty years of hard work in his studio and in the theater. Tutti Frutti (1987) was an explosively funny six-part BBC series about a chaotic traveling rock band, the Majestics (“Scotland’s Kings of Rock”), fronted by Robbie Coltrane, and whose members include Emma Thompson and Maurice Roëves, with Richard Wilson as their increasingly strict and irritated manager.
Throughout the 1980s, Byrne contributed to BBC Scotland’s long-running sketch show Scotch and Rye, but his second major personal success, also for BBC Scotland, was another six-part film with a musical backdrop, this time a soundtrack of country classics. Your Cheatin’ Heart (1990), starring Tilda Swinton as a Glasgow barmaid, John Gordon Sinclair as an investigative journalist and Ken Stott as a petty criminal and drug dealer; the Glasgow underworld and the tragicomic capers dramatically parodied the narrative content of the music.
Byrne fell in love with Swinton while working on the series, and their happiness over the following decades made him more of a celebrity than he liked. Everything about Byrne was in his work and he even hid behind it from the start, when he provided a series of false ‘naïve’ paintings for his first major art exhibition in London, at the Portal Gallery in 1967, under his father’s name, Patrick. McShane, “a retired busker and laborer”. Soon he was confused.
He always looked and talked like an artist, executing an almost non-stop stream of self-portraits on canvas that were as revealing and curious (about himself) as those of Rembrandt or Velázquez. He even resembled the latter, with his disheveled hair, bloodhound face and scraggly beard, and, like all great self-portrait artists, could never be accused of narcissism. His most mentioned influences were Giotto and Magritte. He had no interest in landscape.
He was born into an Irish Catholic family, the son of Alice (née McShane) and Patrick Byrne. Or at least he thought so. Thanks to a well-informed cousin, it turned out in 2002 that his biological father was in fact his mother’s father, Patrick, his own grandfather. He insisted that his mother truly ‘loved’ her father, and regularly walked ten miles from the family home on the Ferguslie Park housing estate in Paisley, Renfrewshire, to see him. But later in his life his mother developed psychological problems.
Byrne was educated at St Mirin’s Academy, Paisley, and, after interning in the color mixing room of a Paisley carpet factory in the mid-1950s, went to the Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 1963. He won a travel grant to Perugia, Italy, worked in a Scottish television graphics department and returned to the carpet factory as a designer.
His reputation continued to grow and he was the first living artist to exhibit at the new Third Eye Center in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, in 1975. His show was not a success and he did not exhibit again for the next 16 years. He had discovered the theater.
He added a three-dimensional depth to his graphic and painterly skills in his theater design, most notably for the Great Northern Welly Boot Show (1972), with rising comedy star Billy Connolly. Connolly’s exuberant satire on the shipbuilding industry was a hit at the Edinburgh festival (the cast also included Bill Paterson) and made the journey south to the Young Vic in London. Byrne also designed the show’s posters, as he continued to do afterwards, and Connolly’s large pair of yellow banana boots, a signature prop similar to Ken Dodd’s tickle stick.
He became the regular designer for John McGrath’s great Scottish 7:84 company, with whom he toured community centers with The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973), a rollicking, gritty musical theater show that chronicled the politically motivated evictions in the Highlands until the arrival of the oil magnates, with the attendant destruction of local culture and communities in the name of progress and money-making.
After that show, Byrne moved closer to center stage with his own first play, Writer’s Cramp (1977), which started as a half-hour radio monologue and turned into one of the most deliriously funny evenings I’ve experienced in a theater. Three of the brilliant 7:84 actors – Paterson, Alex Norton and John Bett – told the sad story of the fictional Nitshill literato, Francis Seneca McDade, in a parody documentary. Ironically, when I saw the show’s 1977 premiere on the outskirts of Edinburgh in a small studio space, I was given a critic’s cramp; all the chairs were gone, so I sat under one, which happened to belong to one of the actors’ mothers. Laughter became stressful.
I was on the ground, but Byrne was on a roll. He sought the characters and setting of The Slab Boys (1978) from his days as a carpet factory in Paisley – quiffs, cigarettes and rock ‘n’ roll – and developed that play into an interconnected trilogy, and a BBC Play for Today in 1979 Kisses (1984), at the Bush Theater in London, drew on his days in Perugia – he conjured a Florentine pensioner from 1963 onto that small stage, riotously portraying an art student, a draft dodger, Celtic terrorists and a department head of the Welsh church intermingled townships.
More quietly, he designed a farcical Restoration comedy, Edward Ravenscroft’s London Cuckolds, for the Leicester Haymarket and Lyric Hammersmith in 1985. At the Royal Court in 1992 he revived the legend of two gay painters from Kilmarnock, Colquhoun and MacBryde, in a play. of that title that followed the two Roberts – played by David O’Hara and Stott – as they rose to fame in 1930s Soho but crashed and burned into alcoholic obscurity in 1957.
As an adapter, he was the ideal candidate for Gogol’s government inspector, who delivered a rollicking, irresistible version to director Jonathan Kent in the Almeida, north London, in 1997. Gogol was moved to a remote area somewhere near Paisley, overseen by an apoplectic mayor of Ian McDiarmid with Tom Hollander as the accidentally disruptive unofficial visiting official.
More recently there have been three Scottish versions of Chekhov (Brian Cox as Uncle Varick), and in 2013 he painted a beautiful colorful rondel in the ceiling of the King’s, Edinburgh, with flying figures, tragic and comic masks and a sinister harlequin. From 1991 he exhibited regularly again and in 2007 he became a member of the Royal Scottish Academy.
He was married to Alice Simpson in 1964, separated in the late 1980s and divorced in 2014. He lived with Swinton from 1989 to 2003 and married lighting designer Jeanine Davies in 2014.
He is survived by Jeanine, and two children, John and Celie, from his first marriage, and twins, Xavier and Honor, from his relationship with Swinton.
• John Patrick Byrne, painter, designer and playwright, born January 6, 1940; died November 30, 2023