Double click on the the questions below to hear the answers. 

The interview contains some swearing.

Why write plays? Why theatre?

I was at University. I ran my own theatre company there. Me and my friend had got kicked out of the local drama society, SUDS at Stirling University, and we decided we'd run our own wee theatre company out of the studio theatre doing plays, and we did musicals on the main stage at the Macrobert. And I finished and I realised I wanted to do something to do with theatre. I just loved it so much.

I just loved the performance bit of it. I was also a failed rock and roll star and it's the closest I could get to that audience feeling. But I knew that I wasn't really an actor. I could read the words but I got so nervous and I could never quite disappear into character. I kind of compared the parts. I couldn't really act and I didn't have the temperament for directing, I still don't: I was sitting in the tech rehearsal yesterday and I was ready to burst. If I'd been in charge I would have been screaming and sacking people. Clear your s**t out! But I wrote for my English dissertation an adaptation of James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner and I loved the fact that you were sitting at a desk, music on, with your notes creating this world. The whole writing thing. But it didn't stay written, you took it into rehearsals that night, I was putting it on as a student production and it kind of came alive with all these other people involved, it's a social thing and they make it better and it keeps going. Theatre's not archive-able, it's mercurial, it's never the same. You can rehearse for six years Russian style if you want and an actor comes in hung-over - all bets are off! You can never quantify it. Theatre's never carved in stone and it should never be. I loved all that.

What advice would you pass on to young playwrights?

Not to give up, because everyone else gives up. When I first started there were about 5 or 6 names you'd hear all the time and you sent a script in to this place, the Traverse Theatre and it's an open door and they'd meet you and talk to you about your work whenever you want. They'll read your script unlike most other places. And they'd say there's so-and-so and so-and-so. You'd never meet them. I didn't go to Writers Groups or anything like that. One of them was Isabel Wright and out of that whole group there's only me and Isabel left and not because of any kind of private talent on my part, it's just because I stuck in and everyone else gave up, and another thing is keep on writing and writing and learning and don't give up and push yourself further. Never try and join in on some kind of zeitgeist. Never think, oh well, mountaineering seems to be popular just now, I'll write a hillwalking play. It'll be too late. It just won't work.

The biggest thing that happened to me in my writing, the big change around in my life, was the old cliché about write what you know. I saw an Alan Ayckbourn play in the Lake District when I was on holiday with my girlfriend once and it set me back about three years. Everything I wrote after that had an Ayckbourn tinge to it and Ayckbourn doesn't make any sense up here. There are no common links at all. All my plays had kind of patios at the back, middle-aged couples having a golfing crisis and somebody was probably going to have a nervous breakdown towards the end and it was just rubbish.
So what I'd say is find something that you know, eliminate the guesswork. You don't want to be guessing. I'm thinking about a middle-aged man from Cheltenham in a caravan and I don't know anything about that. I have no interest in it and I don't know what he would do in any situation. However, I do think of my friends and family, people I know, or people I've researched really well and am genuinely interested in. I know what to do. I can hear the voice. I can work it all out and eliminating guesswork is really part of it.
On a practical level a piece of advice would be not to include a stamped addressed envelope even if they tell you to include one. You don't want it back. You just don't. You're never going to hand out a script that someone else has read and you want it kicking about the office because Decky Does a Bronco was found by James Brining when he started at TAG and it had been in that office for years. He most have started reading the “out tray” instead of the “in tray” and he really liked it so you don't want it back. Don't pay for your plays to be read either. Don't pay money for anything. That's not the way it works. They pay us. It can be tricky if you're setting up your own company, that's a different thing but if a company comes to you and says they'll put your play on for £400 say no, no matter how tempting it is.

Do you think this is an exciting time to be working in Scottish Theatre?

It is the exciting time. There hasn't been a time as exciting as this in Scottish Theatre before and we're not really allowed to talk about it because we're right in the middle of it. I think it's like the sixties. The Scottish theatre equivalent of the 1960's. It's got that feeling that people know. Also it's like the sixties because it's got lots of independent artists and companies working to their absolute best and with no crossovers. Think about all the playwrights in Scotland from Ian Heggie to David Harrower to Linda Maclean to David Greig, Zinnie Harris, Henry Adam, Gregory Burke, Chris Hannan, Liz Lochhead, John Byrne…
These people are all working to phenomenal levels, the best they are doing and yet there's nobody doing the same thing, there's no two people working in the same field, and it hasn't been created, it's just happened like that. And there's also great companies who are creating new work, who don't use a script like Vanishing Point, Grid Iron, Suspect Culture, Cryptic, Babel, these companies are turning ten, they're are really well established, they're great companies and doing really interesting work. And theatres are in great shape as well. Dun dee Rep, Tron, the Arches are amazing. CCA does some brilliant stuff and then there's the Tramway which is a whole different thing. Actually, I don't know very much about it, it's not my field. It's just so exciting.
You add to that the Playwrights Studio that has started up to give us a resource, an archive, a voice, a kind of way of connecting things up and on top of that you've got the National with Vicky. There's someone in charge of the National Theatre who is going to do, crazy s***, brilliant stuff with the money. I can just feel it, and who wouldn't want to come up to Scottish Theatre just now, it's just great. It's dead exciting.

Mancub is an adaptation from a John LaVert novel. What kind of challenges do you face when adapting a novel into a play?

Since my first ever dissertation which was Confessions of a Justified Sinner , it's the only thing I've ever adapted. I said I would never adapt things because I think sometimes playwrights do adaptations and translations for money because they're easy and don't take long. With a novel I found the biggest problem was not f****** it up. Here's this amazing book that I've adored since I was fourteen and it's completely set in America, high schools and lockers and dates and cars and American football games and all that, and it just has this spirit and this wit and I thought if I ruin this I'm never going to be satisfied with myself. The biggest problem is it's a process of condensing nearly 400 pages into an hour and ten minutes so almost everything has to go apart from the bare bones of the story.

Of all your plays, which play are you most proud of?

I'm proud of them all in different ways, I think. I always say that your plays are like your children. It's never really a good time to say you prefer one over the other, people don't like it. My favourite ones are Our Bad Magnet at the Tron and If Destroyed True , it's on in London just now. If Destroyed True I'm probably most proud of because it came from a period when I didn't think I'd ever write anything again. I didn't think I had that in me, that kind of invention. But I also love plays like this or Decky Does a Bronco or Helmet that play to younger people and that young audience. I like any play of mine that has an emotional connection with the audience, it's that feeling of making people laugh or making them cry.

"Playwright for Sale!"

The way I work is probably quite unique. Because Our Bad Magnet , Decky Does a Bronco and Helmet were all written in the ‘90s but put on in the 2000s, by the time people started asking me if I wanted to write another play I already had a number of plays ready to go, so I would then give them those. Traverse have a play called Melody that I'd already written and then there was a play called James II so I was always ahead of it and because of that I've never been paid money for a play before I've even had an idea. You do get lots of playwrights being commissioned and they have to go away and think, “God, I have to do a play for Traverse in nine months and don't have an idea what to write for it,” but I don't have to do that. So on the one hand it's great because I write only what I want to do, but on the other hand you might write a play that no-one wants and you don't get any money for it. So now it's catching up. I have other plays ready to go on at Traverse and with Grid Iron next year but they're all paid but I don't have any new commissions so I'll have to work on that. It's a bit awkward to have to go, “Playwright for sale!”