‘To Meet The MacGregors’ was “a pastiche of Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Rob Roy’ “, and a return to musical comedy after six years of revues.
However, it was the only non-revue format Student Show produced during the 1940s.
It was directed by Thomas Forbes and written by Eric Linklater, celebrated novelist and Rector of Aberdeen University from 1945-1948.
The Monday night of Show had always traditionally been Students’ night, when both cast and production went out with a special wish to please their audience, not least the predictably noisy ‘Gods’.
In 1946, however, they greeted Linklater’s ‘To Meet the MacGregors” with pennies, flour bags and stink bombs. Such was the uproar that Principal Fyfe decried their behaviour in no uncertain terms to the press, and the management of H.M.T. intimated that no more Student Shows would be staged if there was a recurrence of such behaviour.
Mercifully, student audiences have been less exuberant in their reaction to Show since that time.
‘To Meet The MacGregors’ was eventually published by MacMillan (London) in 1950, and a copy resides in the National Library of Scotland.