Rob Drummond: The Broons terrified me but now I'm bringing them to the stage

Not a bit of it. In fact, he once trained for six months to turn himself into a serious wrestler for a theatre show, Wrestling, despite having the body of a librarian. During his training, Drummond leapt from the ropes onto the canvas hundreds of times, deliberately landing on battered knees and elbows in order to trick his body into thinking he didn’t feel the pain any more.

Read more: Rob Drummond on The Broons and why Piers Morgan is his ideal dinner guest

He then trained for over a year to become a magician for Bullet Catch, in which an audience member was given a gun filled with a live bullet - and told to fire it in the direction of his teeth. (Even Houdini refused to do, claiming it was far too dangerous.)

Drummond loves to take risks. The more dangerous the better. His recent play, In Fidelity, saw the married writer of ten years write and perform the story of what it would be like to have an affair. You can only guess what his lecturer wife Kirsty thought of the idea.

Now however the writer reveals his “most frightening project yet.” Help ma’boab, the young man from Rutherglen has taken the iconic cartoon strip The Broons and turned it into a theatre play. “I feel more pressure with the Broons than anything else I’ve ever done before,” he says in a rapid fire speech, as if the words were fired from a tennis ball machine. “When I trained to be a wrestler I knew a bit about wrestling, but I also knew there weren’t hundreds of thousands of people waiting to see the show. Bullet Catch was a new show. If it didn’t work out, then so what? But the Broons? The Broons already exists. And people love the Broons and are very precious about it. When I was asked to write it by producers Celador I was terrified.”

Entering the world that is 10 Glebe Street has to be scary. How do you take an iconic two dimensional comic strip which generations have grown up with since 1936 and turn it into a living, breathing theatre play set in modern times? Drummond reveals he turned to Tarantino for answers.

“When I began the project, I started reading up on Broons, taking something from every decade of 80 years worth of material. And I discovered a story about Maggie (the sexy, in a 1936 Dundee-ish sense, blonde) almost getting married. That gave me my central storyline. Then I thought about how this marriage would affect every family member and wanted to be a bit Tarantino-esque whereby every character gets their own storyline. In this way you have fast-paced movement, loads of subplots going on, which all feed into the main plot. And of course there is lots of comedy.”

Read more: Rob Drummond on The Broons and why Piers Morgan is his ideal dinner guest

Rob Drummond doesn’t tackle any project without looking deeply into the human psyche. He loves to study motivation, to try to work out what makes people work, their desires. But what of the man himself? He admits he’s driven, a perfectionist who’s on a perpetual quest of discovery. Was he an anxious schoolboy? “Oh yes,” he admits, smiling. “I’m still nervous and socially awkward, but better than I used to be. If I’d grown up nowadays I’d probably be diagnosed with ADHT. I was all over the place.”

Teachers had a tough time with the young Robert. “If I was interested they could see it in my face. But if not . . . for example, once in class I wasn’t trying to be cheeky but I asked my teacher ‘Why should I care about Maths, Miss?’ And she replied ‘One day you may want to be a Maths teacher.’ I saw right through her from that moment and looked out of the window. I got a ‘D’ in Maths, but in everything else I got an ‘A’.”

He was always a performer. “I was in the choir and appeared in church plays. My mum played the piano and sang. So I was used to performing before I knew I wanted to do it professionally.” Did he ever think of entering the ministry? “I think everyone who grows up in this world thinks about it at some point in their life.” He adds, grinning; “My dad is a preacher and the rest of my family are all teachers. They all stand up in front of someone and tell them how to live their lives. I ask an audience to think about how we live our lives.”

Drummond studied English and Theatre at Glasgow University, becoming President of the Theatre Society, putting on plays. Meantime, he learned to act. “It was an itch I had to scratch. I don’t think I’m a very good actor, but I can perform on stage. I can be a version of me. In Wrestling I was a scared little boy trying to be a man. In In Fidelity I played a man who was married but considered cheating. They are both versions of me.”

Read more: Rob Drummond on The Broons and why Piers Morgan is his ideal dinner guest

Drummond applied to do a Post Grad in acting at drama college, but the course was cancelled that year. “It was the best thing that happened to me. It made me go out and do it for real, and I wrote for the Arches Theatre. Drummond has gone on to become one of the biggest names in Scottish theatre, his reputation taking him to the Traverse and the National Theatre of Scotland. His work is seen to touch the parts other theatre makers don’t even know exist. But it’s not all about the audience. He needs to learn. He gets to study a world and present it to the watching world, as writer or an actor, or sometimes both.

“Maybe I’m greedy,” he says, smiling. “I want to do it all. But the acting and the writing keep each other honest. And I don’t get into a rut. I write for a while, and then appear in a play. I don’t get comfortable, I don’t get lazy or sloppy and phone it in.”

But does he sleep nights? “How did you know,” he says with a wry smile. “I don’t sleep. I lie awake listening to Fawlty Towers on my laptop. I use earphones so my wife can’t hear. I guess I’m constantly on eggshells with everything I do. I’m always thinking ‘How do I make this work?’ But it makes me more rigourous.”

And it could also suggest he’s slightly off his head. At one point Drummond turned to CBT to help calm the raging questions he would throw at himself, until his mind surrendered to the 4am darkness. Sleep however comes easier now because he’s moved to Loughborough, where his four-months pregnant wife landed a job. “It’s close to my agent in London,” he says with a smiling shrug. “I try to be positive. There’s no point in being miserable, even though Loughborough is a miserable place to live.”

Read more: Rob Drummond on The Broons and why Piers Morgan is his ideal dinner guest

Drummond’s positive energy and quest to explore the darker recesses is reflected in his new theatre drama, the “Hitchcockian” play Grain In the Blood. It’s about ethics and morality, about split decisions you may make to save a loved one. He’s delving into the soul. Again.

But how far does he deep into the souls of the Broons? (Which he talks about expansively in this week’s Sunday Herald). Does he take a few liberties with the cartoon characters, send the Twins off backpacking to Thailand, for example, or hint that Hen could be gay, given his Village People moustache?

“Hen may in fact be gay, but it was never said in the comic strip so to suggest in the play that would not be Broonsian,” he says, laughing. “But there are little Easter eggs in the show for the hard-core fan. We get to hint at why Grandpa is such a mischievous old codger. We give him a back story, and DC Thomson have been very kind about this.”

Rob Drummond is delightfully intense, but also great fun to talk to and exceptionally sharp. He’s serious about his work, and an international class worrier, but at 34 is he still driven enough to bash his elbows to bits? “I worry less these days. But I still I doubt myself. Every time I write something I think it will be rubbish.”

Which of course is why it won’t be.

*The Broons tour begins in Perth Concert Hall from September 27 and visits Inverness, Kirkcaldy, Stirling, Aberdeen, Ayr, Dundee and Edinburgh, culminating at Glasgow King’s Theatre from November 7-12.

END