THE last and just about the only time writer Daniel Boyle set foot in a theatre he left during the interval. He can't remember the name of the play but it was showing at the Edinburgh Festival and it had won a barrowload of awards.

''It left me confused and bemused because I didn't understand a single word,'' he explains. ''I went into the bar at half-time and heard people saying it was terrific and wonderful and - what was the phrase? - yes, so well-crafted. I was standing there feeling like an idiot and I didn't go back in after the interval.''

This week Boyle, the accomplished television dramatist who has written many a Morse script and who brought Hamish Macbeth to the screen, might just work up the courage to return to the theatre - this time to see his own work, a play called Love, Lies, Bleeding, which is a collaborative effort with Glasgow's Raindog company. Then again, he might not. ''I don't know if I have the bottle,'' he admits. ''You put things on television and they're watched by millions but they don't fill you with the same sense of trepidation as this does because the audience isn't there with you. Imagine sitting in the stalls and the guy next to you says: 'What a load of old tosh.'.''

Which is why Daniel Boyle is seriously considering taking his family to the premiere at the Citizens' Theatre, and going off for a couple of pints on his own until the curtain comes down.

He is, one imagines, worrying needlessly. Call it first-night nerves. Theatrical experience or not, his is a safe pair of hands with a firm grip on the write stuff. For Raindog, like Boyle, the project is a departure. Since its formation in 1991, the innovative company has always eschewed the services of any recognised writer, preferring instead to rely upon their own improvisational skills as actors to form both the structure and the substance of what they perform. It has been a brave way of working and one which, on the whole, has been successful.

Love, Lies, Bleeding, a comedy drama about a widow (Barbara Rafferty) and a widower (Sean Scanlan) whose relationship blossoms during one night in a pub, started out in the usual Raindog way, with the actors video-taping improvisation and working it into a story. But then the decision was made to invite a writer to contribute.

Daniel Boyle was the obvious choice, not only because he is hugely talented, but because almost half the cast (Rafferty, Scanlan, Anne Lacey, Brian Pettifer) and the director (Stuart Davids) were regulars in Hamish Macbeth. Boyle explains, almost diffidently: ''I didn't exactly jump in feet first. I had to give it a lot of thought because I'd never written anything for the stage before. But Stuart Davids, who played Lachie Jr in Hamish, assured me the type of thing he wanted wouldn't leave me intellectually drained. He wanted entertainment, a good night out. So that seemed well within my scope.

''I felt reasonably capable of doing that. I don't expect the critics to spend the next 100 years worrying about the meaning of the silences. As a matter of fact, I don't think there are any f***ing silences. But there's a lot of shouting and bawling.''

Boyle's brief was to use his skills to bring more of a structure to the piece, mould it into a proper narrative. ''It was a strange way of working for me. And quite a challenge. There were 12 characters - and 12 actors playing them - which I had to use. Too bad if I wanted 13 or 14, and equally too bad if I only wanted 10 or 11. I went in and watched them improvising for two weeks and then I decided I had enough to go away and start working on a script. The core of the story was a widow and a widower who are trying to get it together but who are encumbered by the loyalties to their departed loved ones.''

Unlike his television work, Boyle was not starting with an empty sheet of paper. The characters were other people's creations and, like it or not, he had to work with them. For a writer it was, he says, a pretty frightening way of operating because he didn't have his normal degree of control over the work. He chose not to familiarise himself with the technical side of writing for the stage, leaving it to others to type in the instructions: ''The key for me was to get the story down.''

Another thing which Boyle found strange was the necessity to be on the set much of the time. Some television writers like to be there on location throughout a shoot. He isn't one of them. ''I find that really tedious and boring. But I had to be on hand during the rehearsals for the play. And, when you hear your lines being repeated over and over again, you begin to have doubts about what you have written. Something is funny the first time you hear it said; it's not so funny the twelfth time.''

However, the theatrical project has turned out to be a liberating experience for the writer. He says: ''Clearly, you can write things for the stage that you wouldn't be allowed to get away with in a million years on television. The language in particular - in everyday life people use four-letter words and all the rest of it. But there is an unrealistic air about television in that everybody speaks rather cleanly. If you have the potential for controversy in your work then the theatre is the place to do it.''

n Love, Lies, Bleeding is at the Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, from tomorrow until Saturday, May 23 (excluding May 17 and 18) and at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, from June 4 until June 7.