Sailmaker: Writer's Methods and Techniques (SQA National 5 English): Revision Note

Writers and playwrights convey their ideas and achieve their aims through their choice of  language, structure, and staging. To analyse and engage fully with texts it is important to consider how a writer’s methods and techniques deliver themes to readers and audiences.  

Alan Spence conveys ideas through several methods and techniques in Sailmaker:

• Structure 

• Stagecraft

• Symbolism 

• Dialogue 

• Setting

Structure 

• The exposition begins with an adult Alec’s flashback which tells the audience about his mother’s death when he was 11 years old:

  • This introduces grief as a major theme, and builds sympathy for the protagonist

• The beginning of the play also introduces the theme of family relationships:

  • Spence depicts Alec’s close relationship with his cousin Ian

  • He shows Alec and his father Davie struggling to communicate

• Alec’s monologue describes his environment: a tenement block in Glasgow

• In the rising action, as Alec grows up, audiences see the breaking down of Alec’s relationships with his cousin and with his struggling father:

  • Alec and Ian begin to follow different paths — Alec works hard at school and takes a private-school exam

  • Davie is assaulted and loses his job as a debt-collector, sinking them deeper into poverty 

• The climax involves a fight between Davie and Alec after Davie comes home drunk:

  • Alec’s lack of trust in his father peaks when the electricity has been turned off and his father has gambled away his bursary money

  • Alec’s frustration is voiced: “There’s somethin I’ve lost. Something I’ve forgotten”

• The denouement marks the end of Alec and Davie’s relationship and a break from the past:

  • They burn old (sometimes treasured) possessions to keep warm

• This highlights the darkness that Alec describes throughout the play and acts as a symbol of his escape from Glasgow

• Davie’s past, too, comes to an end:

  • The yacht and some furniture he bought when he married Alec’s mother is burned

Stagecraft

Music

• Music is used in the play to bring light relief and to show close family relationships

• Songs create realism: 

  • Spence refers to songs reminiscent of the 1960s

• Alec and Ian sing “Red sails in the sunset” just before the stage directions state that Alec “brings boat down to rest on floor, face down”: 

  • Via the broken yacht Spence highlights the loss of dreams 

• Songs often relate to colours, sometimes raising the idea of religious division:

  • Alec and Ian discuss “bluegrass music”

  • Alec says blue “really is the best colour” referring to the colours of Rangers football club

  • Alec confides that he thought he saw “Mary. Our Lady. Dressed aw in blue”

  • Ian, a Protestant, suggests this is “creepy” (blue is the colour associated with the Virgin Mary, whom Catholics refer to as "Our Lady")

  • Billy sings a football song, “Sure it’s old but it is beautiful / And its colours they are fine” before Davie warns him not to sing songs that will get them “hung”

• The comfort Alec finds in religion is illustrated when he enters the scene singing a hymn: “Give me oil in my lamp keep me burning”

• Alec and Davie bond over jokes about boxers with broken noses who sing “Clementine”

• On the other hand, Davie’s drunken trips to the pub are marked with songs, too, which underscores Davie’s escapism and the growing distance between father and son: 

  • He tells Alec he likes a “Wee sing song”

Symbolism 

The yacht 

• The title of the play introduces the symbolic idea of Alec’s father as a sailmaker:

  • This represents Davie’s broken dreams

  • Spence presents the damaging effects of declining industry in 1960s Scotland

• The yacht that Alec finds in the cupboard represents Alec’s awakening:

  • He learns that his father is no longer a sailmaker and is now a debt-collector

• The yacht is broken and has no sails or mast, suggestive of Davie’s unrealised potential, and of the fracturing of the relationship with his son:

  • That Davie does not fix the yacht illustrates his lack of drive and sense of disillusionment

Books

• Both Alec and Davie discuss books:

  • This presents them as well-read and knowledgeable

  • Billy tells Davie: ”Ah know ye go in for the highbrow stuff. Dickens an that”

  • Davie tells Alec he has read all of Dickens’ books and “used tae read a lot”

• Alec’s escape from the cycle of poverty is symbolised by books and education:

  • Davie’s lost potential leads him to tease Alec about reading

  • He calls Alec’s reading a “craze” and suggests he will become an activist: “Is it gonnae be long hair an ban the bomb noo?”

• Davie is presented as humble and sympathetic via his references to books:

  • He tells Alec he got his “brains” from his mother 

  • When Alec reads about gambling from “How the Other Man Lives”, Davie accepts that he a “mug” for being one of the “punters”

  • Alec reads from “The British Working Man” and Davie makes comments that suggest he is resigned to his life

Broken mirror

• The shaving mirror that Davie uses is cracked “doon the middle”

• That “The two halfs don’t sit right” may symbolise both Alec and Davie’s dual identity:

  • They are not typical working-class males, both are intellectual and sensitive

• The broken mirror may represent their struggles with grief, that they are “fractured” since Alec’s mother’s death 

• Their reactions to the mirror highlight differences between Alec and Davie:

  • Alec thinks it is “stupid” but Davie “does” him “fine”

  • Davie is passive about his circumstances, but Alec wants to change his future

Dialogue

• The play is considered realist in style as it presents real world events and “real” characters behaving in authentic ways 

• The use of Scottish dialect helps Spence present characters in a realistic way

• In Alec’s flashback, the adult Alec speaks in Standard English:

  • He tells the audience: “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I can remember it. The feeling. I was only a boy. Eleven.”

  • This implies he has moved away from his roots

  • Immersed in the memory, he describes his father breaking the news that his mother has died and wanting to make food

  • Here, Alec speaks in Scottish dialect: “Ah’m no really very hungry”

• Spence makes a humorous reference to the 19th-century movement to standardise the English dialect:

  • Alec throws “The Approach to Standard English” on the fire

Setting

• The play is set in a run-down, working-class area of Glasgow, with scenes alternating between a tenement flat and the surrounding back courts

• Alan Spence describes bleak scenery in Alec’s monologue:

  • He describes the back close of the family’s tenement: “The sun shone on the grey tenements”

  • He describes “the middens” (rubbish heaps) on the “dustbins and the spilled ashes. It glinted on windows and on bits of broken glass”

• Spence uses constant references to burning and garbage to symbolise broken dreams and poverty:

  • Alec mentions how fire “scattered the ashes round the midden”

  • On his way to the “Mission” he says “Ah cut across the back courts” and “Somebody kicked over a midden bin, smashed a bottle” 

  • When he runs away from the “Mission”, he describes how the “back court was quiet. Just the sound of the TV from this house or that. Dark tenement blocks” 

  • He says he “kicked over a midden bin, and ran”

  • In the denouement, he throws their possessions in the fire or in the bin: “Thae other tools can go in the midden sometime”

• The idea of darkness is repeated: 

  • Alec complains that the place has “nae light. Place is like a midden” and describes “dark tenement blocks”

  • In a description of the day of his mother's funeral, Alec says the scene outside was "growing dark", and that he closed the curtains, "shutting out the night"

Sources

Spence, A. (2008), Sailmaker, from Spence, A. and Cooper, J. (2012), Sailmaker Plus, Hodder Gibson