ONE of the radical strands in this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival really couldn’t be timelier as the referendum in Scotland draws near.

Border Warfare: John McGrath’s Work In TV, Theatre And Film features a season of 10 films by the writer and director who, from the 1970s until his death in 2002, was one of the most influential figures in the left theatre of England and Scotland.

Though McGrath had a highly successful career in film and television, his main passion was theatre. He was most certainly a man with a mission —  to reach as many people as possible through theatre, heighten individual and collective awareness and move politics in a left direction.

In 1971 he founded 7:84 Theatre Company — its name derived from the statistic that 7 per cent of the British population owned 84 per cent of its wealth — whose aim was to challenge that statistic by producing radical, popular theatre with an avowedly socialist intent.

It was a period when, with support from the labour movement and state funding, groups like 7:84 and its offshoot Wildcat Productions flourished until the Tories wielded their political axe via Arts Council cuts from the mid-1980s on to left-wing theatre companies. 

While not totally eschewing the theatre establishment 7:84 gained a big following, especially in Scotland, where a sister company established new audiences by performing in “non-traditional” venues such as pubs, clubs, ceilidhs and labour movement events and rallies — all places the mainstream regional and national theatre companies ignored. 

It was high-quality, highly acclaimed popular theatre — 7:84 attracted some of the leading actors, singers, musicians and directors around for their productions as well as nurturing home-grown talent — and McGrath drew on that experience in his polemical 1981  book A Good Night Out, still an inspirational read.   

The 10 films in the festival programme feature only a few of the works McGrath wrote, directed or produced. 

They range from short features set in the Highlands and the Orkneys to the mainstream films Billion Dollar Brain, Carrington and The Reckoning,  the latter a visceral — and neglected — feature which targets the brutalities of the upper-crust business world.

Also well worth seeking out is the film The Bofors Gun, adapted from one of his plays, which has a group of British squaddies at their commanding officer’s throat as they pointlessly guard an obsolete weapon at the height of the cold war in West Germany. 

That’s well worth seeking out,  as is the screening of an episode of Z-Cars which, for the first time in the 1960s,  brought a sharp and innovative dose of social reality to the police series formula on TV. As McGrath said, “it was a way of getting into a whole society, to use a popular form and try and bang into it some reality.” 

McGrath used popular forms in his theatre too, most notably the ceilidh in the hugely acclaimed The Cheviot, The Stag And The Black, Black Oil (1973), again adapted from the stage for TV, which tells the story of  Scotland’s exploitation from the Highland clearances to the oil boom. 

Also being screened are Border Warfare and John Brown’s Body, both epic trilogies on Scotland’s fractious relations with England and the history of Scotland’s industrial classes. 

And there’s the TV adaptation too of There Is A Happy Land, a three-part concert of stories in English and Gaelic which tells the history of the Gaelic-speaking people of Scotland, revealing along the way how they’ve been treated by central governments in Edinburgh, London — and Washington.

Border Warfare: John McGrath’s Work In TV, Theatre And Film runs from June 20-29 at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, details: www.edfilmfest.org.uk.