Peter Arnott on his new Indyref play, Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape

Set in a Perthshire country house on the eve of Scotland’s 2014 Independence Referendum, Peter Arnott’s new play may be a comedy, but as some of the characters’ pasts come back to haunt them, “there's an awful lot going on”, he tells Mark Fisher

How long does it take to write a play? If you ask Peter Arnott you might be surprised by the answer. He has been working on Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape since the late 1980s.

More accurately, he has been living with the characters in his head all that time. Only now has he found the right vehicle for them.

"The play is a red-hot response to the fall of the Berlin Wall," laughs the playwright, who has more than 50 plays to his name, most of them written while this one was in gestation. "When I began thinking about the characters, it was about what happens to left-wing intellectual types in Britain when communism is coming to an end in Europe. They've kept their past, so they've become extraordinarily well rounded. I know exactly what's happened to these people for the last 50 years."

The cast of Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape

Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape is set in a Perthshire country house one day in 2014, when all the talk is about the Scottish independence referendum. The family patriarch, George Rennie (played by John Michie), is an academic and political thinker and there is much speculation about whether he will come out as a yes or a no voter.

"It's about this generation of basically very nice middle-class people without any apparent problems, who have their ghosts to deal with," says Arnott.

There are two reasons it took him so long to write the play. First, he needed the referendum to crystalise his ideas. Second, he needed the subsequent years to get some perspective on what seemed, at the time, to be a crunch moment in Scotland's history.

"There was a deep freeze of Scottish politics from 2014, and the breaking of that glacier has happened this year," he says, thinking of the resignation of first minister Nicola Sturgeon after nine years of post-referendum leadership. "The unfreezing of the Cold War precipitated one set of events for this family and the unfreezing of Scottish politics has unlocked the play. It has turned it into a rather joyous celebration of a generation of people. The tone is light – it's a comedy – but the depth of the people's experience means there's an awful lot going on."

"It turns out the referendum was the end of something not the beginning," says David Greig, who is directing the play. "It was the end of a kind of normal. After that, we had Brexit, Trump, Covid and the climate getting much worse. In retrospect, 1997–2014, the devolution generation, is a glorious time when nobody had anything very serious to worry about. I know people did, but in retrospect, that was an end when everybody thought it was a beginning. That has liberated the play."

Greig, who is no mean playwright himself, has been itching to stage the play since it landed on his desk at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum, where he is artistic director, five years ago. "It had an emotional tug that I really liked," says Greig, whose production opens at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, where the resident ensemble will make up the nine-strong cast, before transferring to Edinburgh.

"It was sad, elegiac, truthful, painful and brittle and dealt with the aches and pains of age. If you're a writer, you should only direct a play you couldn't have written but you wanted to write. I couldn't have written this play, but it's expressing something I needed to express."

With its country house setting and richly drawn characters, the play sounds like something Anton Chekhov might have written. Greig agrees there are parallels with the work of the Russian master. "Neither Peter nor I have the hubris of setting ourselves up to be compared with the great Russian giant," he says. "But there are two things that drew me to that analogy. One is the country house, the other is privileged people who don't realise their privilege and are sitting on the edge of a precipice. Chekhov's plays were set ten-to-15 years before he presented them. He was writing about the recent past and he was writing elegies about people who don't know this is all over. I look at Peter's play that way: a family from our recent past and we all know this is the end of something but we can't quite pin it down."

Another parallel with Chekhov is in social class. Arnott wanted to write about Scotland's intelligentsia – a group underrepresented in the theatre. "I don't see middle-class Scottish families portrayed on stage very often," says the playwright.

Greig agrees: "We as Scots like to see ourselves on stage in the Highland, Glasgow, underdog or historical form, but not in the middle-class salon you would get in Kelvinside or Stockbridge, where academics and writers are talking. It's putting that Scottish political intellectual class under the microscope in the way we've put many other sections of Scottish life under the microscope.

"I'm expecting many people to go, 'Urgh! You want me to spend time with these people!' But to return to Chekhov, for the first act, you go, 'Why do I have to spend time with these awful people?' In act two, you go, 'But at least they're funny.' In act three, you go, 'Actually, I do quite like them.' In act four, you're in love with them and by act five, you're crying. That's what I hope we can chart."

Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 25 August–28 September; Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, 4–14 October