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Joan Ure was thepen name ofElizabeth Thoms Clark (née Carswell) (22 June 1918 – 1978), aScottishpoet andplaywright.[1]
She was born Elizabeth Thoms Carswell on 22 June 1918 inWallsend,Tyneside, of Scottish parents who moved toGlasgow. She had a daughter, Frances, by Jack Clark, a businessman.[2]
In the 1950s she chose the pen-nameUre, because it sounded more Scottish to her. Her deceased sister Joan provided the first half of her pen name.[2]
Having been born in England made her self-consciously Scots, and she adopted an ironic refrain throughout her public writing: "Scottish, more or less" and "as Scots as I am". In correspondence she wrote "I could say I am an Englishman, and spite 'em all."
Joan Ure wrote short stories and poems as well as short plays, but she made her mark with her work for the theatre. She never wrote a full-length play. Her first play,Cendrillon, was written inFrench, for her 4th year school class to perform. One of her professionally produced works,I See Myself as This Young Girl, an exploration of a mother-daughter relationship, was directed by Michael Meacham at the Close Theatre Club, Glasgow, in 1967. It demonstrated her lyrical gifts. During her career Ure wrote over thirty short plays, several of which were performed across Scotland and on BBC radio.[3]
Her companion dramas,Something in it for Cordelia andSomething in it for Ophelia, are feminist revisionings of two female characters from works byShakespeare. Both plays were staged on theEdinburgh Festival Fringe in 1971 in a basement room in Edinburgh’sGeorge Square. They were a response to the staging ofKing Lear at theAssembly Hall as part of the officialEdinburgh International Festival programme.[4]Something in it for Cordelia was staged again byDundeeRep as part of a series of short plays directed byCharles Nowosielski in the late 1970s.[5]
One of her best received plays is the revueNothing May Come of It which incorporates song and dance. She characterises people she knew including her correspondent as the lead actress inNothing May Come of It as well as Puck inSeven Characters out of the Dream.
Death by suicide is one of the themes of her writing. Her poem, "In Memoriam", published inScottish International in 1971, deals with the death of her sister Joan.
Her poemSignal at Red, written 1964, is addressed to her correspondent, John Cairns, and alludes toIan Hamilton Finlay, with whom she had put on plays at the Falcon Theatre in 1962, hers beingPunctuated Rhythms. He is also the disappointing lover referred to in her short story,Midsummer's Eve, published inWords 6 in 1978. She claims he was almost the death of her, though she doesn't specify how and there is nothing in her correspondence, 1963–1971, to suggest that she ever contemplated leaving her husband for him.
The Tiny Talent: Selected Poems by Joan Ure, edited byRichie McCaffery and Alistair Peebles, was published by Brae Editions in 2018.[6]
Her correspondence with John Cairns provides a framework for understanding her life and work and is shortly to be published by Ki Publishing as CORRESPONDENCE.
Joan Ure,Ena Lamont Stewart, andAda F. Kay were among the founder members of theScottish Society of Playwrights, which was set up after a meeting called in September 1973 by Hector MacMillan, Lamont Stewart and John Hall.
A poem by Joan Ure was suggested by members of the public as one of the runners-up for theScottish Parliament's Canongate Wall Project to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Holyrood Parliament:[7]
A country makes the artists it deserves / As it makes governments / Our artists shriek in paranoiac discords / When they are not just havering / You hope they do not feel they speak for you.
TheUniversity of Bologna,Italy, teaches several English Literature modules, using Joan Ure's playsQualcosa anche per Cordelia (Something in it for Cordelia), andSette Personaggi Venuti dal sogno (Seven Characters out of a dream).
TheUniversity of Parma, Italy, also uses two plays by Joan Ure in their English Literature programme:Come una ragazzina (1968) andRiprendi la tua costola ! (1974) are available in the Italian translation by Panozzo Editore who describe her works as "confronting the themes of the condition and emancipation of women .... with the irony which characterises the whole work of Joan Ure".
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