Bailey Newsome chats with all the enthusiasm of a teenage footballer running onto the professional pitch for the very first time, confident he can’t fail to score.

Why? The actor is clearly chuffed about his appearance in a brand-new play, The Scaff. Yes, it has a football backdrop, but features themes which have very little to do with kicking a ball from one end of the park to the other.

“The story features the lives of four young schoolboys, aged 13 to 15, and what happens when one of them is called a scaff,” says the actor who grew up in Glasgow’s East End.

The name ‘scaff’ is a huge pejorative. “It means you’re a real dafty. It’s a nasty insult. And what happens is these boys, Jamie, Liam and Frankie, plan to get the revenge on Coco, the name caller. Now, they all play football together – nothing serious, jumpers for goals, that sort of thing – but to get their own back on Coco they decide he has to be tackled.”

Not simply challenged, but a real hard studs-down-the-shins tackle. But while they don’t really plan to hurt Coco in the way he comes to be hurt, the pals realise that actions have serious consequences.

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“The play then goes into the effects of this tackle, and along the way we look at the dynamic of the group and see what these young boys consider friendship to be about.

“We come to realise that Jamie does love his pals, but he can’t express that. And we come to appreciate that when you are young it’s hard to find your own voice, to find out who they are.”

Newsome adds: “It’s also a coming-of-age story in which young boys are confused about what they think are the rules in society. They have to cope with being told they have to be tough, being pulled along by this undercurrent, which constantly tells them ‘Be a man. Man up!’”

If that all sounds a little serious, it should be noted that the play regularly hits the back of the net when it comes to some lovely comedy moments.

“It’s really funny,” says the actor who plays Jamie. “There is lots of physical comedy and the writers (Stephen Christopher and Graeme Smith) have really got inside the heads of these teenage boys and managed to capture their world perfectly, to illustrate the confusion, the lack of expression and inability to release true feelings.”

The theme of repressed emotions explored via a football backdrop was explored wondrously in Eilidh Loan’s Moorcroft. “Yes, we do carry on similar themes,” says Newsome who, incidentally, also appeared in Moorcroft. “It’s great we can look at serious traits in our characters and explore them through football. And at the same time, it’s a world which offers up great opportunity for laughs.”

Bailey Newsome found an outlet early on in life in which to channel and reveal emotion. From the age of 10 he attended youth theatre then studied at the Glasgow Acting Academy before going on to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

“I didn’t get a lot of criticism at school (Eastbank High) when I said I wanted to become an actor,” he says, with a thankful smile. “I think that’s partly because my pals also had a creative background, and they’ve gone on to jobs that reflect this. But the school was also incredibly supportive, and in fact the RSC would come in and do workshops. So acting wasn’t a totally strange world.”

Newsome’s previous Oran Mor appearance was in Aodhan Gallagher’s immensely clever play Write-Off, in which he starred alongside Richard Conlin as two gay men from different generations. But what’s it like to return to Oran Mor and regress ten years?

“It’s great,” he says, laughing. “But I didn’t go all method for it. What you try and remember is the stakes facing a 13-year-old, rather than the way you were supposed to be then. Of course, it was a time when the things that were important to you were all a bit daft.”

This is an era in a young man’s life before girls were invented. “That’s right. There is not too much of a mention of girls, it’s about the boys. The focus is really on the friendship between this group of boys, this incredible dynamic they have, but somehow can’t say what they feel.”

It’s all about recognising honesty. Speaking of which, when he played football did he ever come up with the sort of tackle which skittles Coco? “Thankfully no,” he says smiling.

The Scaff, A Play Pie and a Pint, Oran Mor, March 25 – 30, also features Benji Keachie, Stuart Edgar and Craig McLean.

Don’t Miss

If you live anywhere near Ayr don’t miss Pushing Thirty, a remarkable, funny and poignant new play by Taylor Dyson and Calum Kelly, which runs at the Ayr Gaiety (March 28 -30).

It tells the story of two school friends bonded for life by music, until one of them becomes painfully out of tune with the needs of his best pal. Featuring sparkling performances Taylor Dyson and Sam James Smith.