How daring is David Ireland? Well, imagine Indiana Jones-meets-Edna O’Brien with a laptop and you have an idea. The playwright’s massively successful Cyprus Avenue, for example, told of an Ulsterman who believed his granddaughter to be Gerry Adams and its denouement caused walkouts in New York. An earlier play, Ulster American, featured one of his characters ask the question, ‘Is it ever morally acceptable to rape someone?

In the past, however, East Belfast-born Ireland has hinted that some of the ideas in his work have emerged from personal experience, with all of his plays, (and his recent Sky TV romcom The Lovers) referencing the Troubles. But what of his new play The Fifth Step, set in Scotland in the world of Alcoholics Anonymous? It features two men, the younger Luka (Jack Lowden) and James, his sponsor (Sean Gilder) as they go through the 12 Steps to recovery, and we learn their ideals clash louder than a marching band’s cymbals. So how much of David Ireland himself has made it onto his laptop?

Over a soft drink in Glasgow’s Oran Mor – where his first play was staged – he opens up and reveals The Fifth Step to be partly autobiographical.

“I stopped drinking when I was 23, and although I would never have called myself an alcoholic I had had big problems with drink, since the age of 14 or 15. In my neighbourhood, people began by drinking strong cider but I was drinking whisky and Jack Daniels.”

Bogart in CasablancaBogart in Casablanca (Image: free)

Why, David? “This sounds crazy, but I loved Casablanca and Humphrey Bogart, so I wanted to be the sort of guy who drank bourbon.”

He also loved the part time departures from reality which alcohol promised. “I was very shy,” he explains. “And drink would liberate me, give me great confidence.”

David Ireland’s dad died when he was young, and he grew up with his mum and two older sisters. As a teenager he escaped into youth theatre with the idea he would emerge as a mix of Gary Oldman and Kenneth Branagh. And he was good. So good he was accepted by Glasgow’s RSAMD.

Yet, while living in a bed sit in Glasgow’s West End the inherent shyness didn’t abate. And nor did the drinking. He recalls his drama college days. “I was drinking all the time, although I managed to turn up for classes, but not on a Friday, because that was the day the college did dancing and singing. I hated all of that. At one point I was threatened with expulsion if I didn’t show up, but I got away with it for a long time.”

Wasn’t singing and dancing part of an acting course, and career? “Not for me!” he laughs, “because I’d read Stanislavsky (Method acting) books and I wanted to be in the Godfather. Yet, while my exterior persona was of someone who was too cool to be dancing and singing, deep down I was just deeply insecure.”

He adds, with a wry grin. “When I was younger, I was naturally good at comedy, and told I was very good in panto, but I remember thinking ‘I don’t want to good at panto!’”

The hopeful young serious actor landed his first professional job in King Lear at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester in 1999, and incredibly his first-ever scene on stage was with acting legend Tom Courtenay, as Lear. (Ashley Jensen and David Tennant were also in the cast).

But Ireland was still pouring his life into the bottom of a glass. “I was drinking so much that this older actor took me aside one day and said, ‘Don’t be another drunken Irish genius. We have enough of those.’” The words hit him ‘like a punch on the stomach.’ “It was exactly what I needed to hear. And I thought to myself ‘I’m trying to be Richard Harris or Peter O’ Toole but I don’t have the talent – or the charisma – to back that up. What I am is a drunken idiot.”

He was also an actor in search of an identity. “One day I was supposed to doing a spear carrier part, and I was hungover, but I sort of thought that no one would notice I hadn’t turned up. But when I walked in (late) everybody looked at me, and they knew I’d been drinking the night before.”

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He cringes at the memory. “I think someone had told Tom Courtenay that I’d had a doctor’s appointment, to spare my blushes. But then Tom said to me ‘How was your doctor’s appointment?’ And I said ‘I wasn’t at the doctors. I was hungover.’ Tom didn’t say anything. He just looked at me as if I were crazy. And right then I decided to quit. And I never drank again. It's now 24 years now since I’ve had a drink.”

The Fifth Step isn’t about alcoholism as such, but it certainly delves deeply into the fragile male psyche. The older man is married. The younger man can’t find a girlfriend and thinks alcohol will offer the confidence he needs.

David Ireland says that was part of his own story for a number of years. “I felt a bit of a weird person. I couldn’t talk to people. I was a member of the Dundee Rep ensemble about 15 years ago but was another city in which I was lonely and struggling to find a girlfriend. And yeah, that’s why the part Jack Lowden plays is of a young man struggling to find his place, who desperately wants to find a girlfriend.”

Haud the bus right there, David. Audiences will be asked to believe that Jack Lowden can’t get a girl? Lowden is the bookies favourite to be the next Bond. “Jack is such a good actor he can make himself look less good looking,” says the playwright, grinning. “But no, we do address that in the play. It’s all about a lack of confidence.”

Back to David Ireland. He explains why he walked away from acting life to try his hand at writing plays. “It was after three years of no work, except working for the Job Centre and in Costa in Glasgow city centre, that I moved back to Belfast, to try my hand at writing.” He smiles. “It’s not that I wanted to be Ernest Hemingway. I just wanted to stay in the business, and not have to do a real job.”

But he loved writing. And when he wrote up his characters and gave them adventures he came to realise he was writing about himself.

“I think it was (playwright) David Hare who said that plays are really just things you can’t say in public, and then they all pour out on the page.” He laughs. “Which is kinda horrifying when you look at my plays; ‘Is that what I really want to say?’ In The Fifth Step for example, the older man is also based partly on me. It’s a bit like a conversation between me now and the younger me. And in dealing with this younger man, his own demons come back to the surface.”

Writing offered David Ireland the chance to be himself, to release his sense of devilment and fun and keenness to provoke. (It’s no surprise to learn one of his writing heroes is the massively talented – and provocative – American writer David Mamet.)

Yet, interestingly, it was Glasgow’s Oran Mor theatre which offered to produce his first play, What the Animals Say. (And where he met his future wife, Jen. “I think there is a sensibility specific to the west of Scotland and Northern Ireland,” he suggests. “It’s one of dark comedy that’s slightly absurdist and dangerous, the comedy of the likes of Frankie Boyle and Limmy. I think I’m in that category.”

The Fifth Step is a National Theatre of Scotland productionThe Fifth Step is a National Theatre of Scotland production (Image: free)

The Fifth Step, a National Theatre of Scotland production, doesn’t however feature the Troubles. Does it feel odd to have left Ulster behind this time around? “Not really, because I’m so disconnected from Northern Ireland these days. But this play does feature the Catholic-Protestant divide.

He adds, grinning. “I left Ireland to escape sectarianism. I once thought if can make it to London I can make it to LA or New York but the furthest I’ve come is Glasgow. And when I arrived here, I thought ‘This is just a bigger version of Belfast.’”

And what of the shock content in this play? How Edna O’Brien daring does he go? “There is a line in the play which is very inflammatory and anti-Catholic,” he reveals. “But I think it’s entirely justified because I think it motivates the other person’s reaction.”

His characters also use language to talk about women or gay people that some will find uncomfortable. “But I’ve heard men speak in this way,” he maintains. “This story is based upon conversations I’ve had with people, yet we don’t hear them spoken about because theatre is so safe and clean so much of the time. What I’ve written about is what goes on behind closed doors.”

Who is David Ireland today? He has overcome his shyness with women. But he doesn’t perform the role of Confident Successful Playwright.

“It’s taken me 12 years of sobriety to be able to work out how to talk like a normal human being,” he admits, laughing. And he can’t meet up with the luminaries who turn up to applaud his plays. “I was once asked if I wanted to meet up with Noel Gallagher and Kristin Scott Thomas, but I said no. And ideally, I like to work with famous actors - but not actually meet them.”

He will meet lots. Ireland is currently writing an ITV drama Cold Water, set in Scotland and starring Andrew Lincoln, Indira Varma and Eve Myles. And it’s only a matter of time before the dreams of writing a film romcom becomes a reality for the hottest, most daring, writing ticket in town. He laughs hard at the praise.

“Well, some may think I’m clever. But do you know I can’t even pass my driving test. And every time I take it, I forget what I’ve learned before. That tells me I’m actually stupid.”

The Fifth Step will preview at Dundee Rep Theatre before opening at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh(Edinburgh International Festival) and touring to Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow in August. www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/events/the-fifth-step