If you look at a map of Belfast, you’ll see Cyprus Avenue stretching out south-eastward from the city centre, towards the leafier suburbs. As fans of Van Morrison’s great 1968 song will know, Cyprus Avenue is only a mile or two from Belfast’s docks and old shipyards, and the working-class streets that surround them; but it is an elegant tree-lined avenue of spacious late-Victorian houses, and for Van Morrison it spoke of hope and yearning, of the pain of being trapped in a working class life, and of the intense desire, across that divide, that sometimes drives young men to despair, or raging ambition.

For the Glasgow-based playwright David Ireland, though – born in 1978 into the same part of working-class East Belfast – the meanings of Cyprus Avenue are very different, reshaped and disrupted by the 30-year civil war known as the Troubles which broke out in the very year Van Morrison’s song first appeared. In Ireland’s acclaimed 2016 play Cyprus Avenue, first co-produced by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and the Royal Court in London, the leading character is an ageing dyed-in-the-wool Ulster Protestant called Eric, now living in apparent peace in a fine Cyprus Avenue house.

Eric’s mind and soul, though, remain deeply scarred by the violent conflict he has known, and by his fears for the fate of the Ulster Unionism that is the cornerstone of his identity; so much so that he becomes convinced that his new baby granddaughter is the then Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams. Not that she looks like Adams; but that she is Adams, a fact he tries to emphasise by adorning her with a miniature pair of glasses, and a bushy beard drawn in thick black marker.

Sinead Sharkey, David Hayman and Ann Louise Ross in Cyprus Avenue PIC: Mihaela Bodlovic

It is, in other words, one of the most absurd, shocking and confrontational premises for a play in the whole dramatic canon, and one that spirals relentlessly towards a horrifying conclusion; and this week, seven years on, it finally receives its Scottish premier, in a Tron Theatre production, directed by artistic director Andy Arnold, that will feature leading Scottish actor and director David Hayman in the role of Eric.

“It is a huge challenge,” says Hayman, of the role first created back in 2016 by Irish actor Stephen Rea, “and it will be fascinating to see how a Glasgow audience reacts to it. Eric is a mentally exhausting character to play, in that he undergoes so many changes over 90 minutes or so; and you have to find your way through these shifts between terrifying unreason and bigotry, and moments or fragility and vulnerability where he questions everything he has ever believed.

“To me, the play seems even more relevant than when David first wrote it. The situation in Northern Ireland is once again changing dramatically; and we need to understand characters like Eric more than ever.

“It’s also hilariously funny, though, particularly in the early scenes. It has this tremendous black humour, and I think you sometimes need that, in dealing with such intense religious and political issues. As Giles Havergal and Philip Prowse used to say when I was a young actor at the Citizens in the 1970s, theatre should be absurd and anarchic and scandalous in ways that really open up a subject, and make us think again. This play has that quality; and there’s nothing more powerful than live theatre, when it achieves that.”

In the play, we watch Eric work his way through interactions with four other characters – his wife Bernie, played by award-winning actress Ann Louise Ross, his psychiatrist, his daughter, and a masked gunman known as Slim; and like David Hayman, David Ireland – who first came to Scotland as an RCS acting student 25 years ago, and now lives in Glasgow with his wife and two young children – also feels that his play may have become more timely and significant, during the years of Brexit and lockdown.

“For me,” he says “it was always a play based on two questions to which I didn’t have answers; how am I going to be a father, and am I Irish? Obviously the question about Northern Irish Protestant people and their identity is at the heart of Eric’s crisis; but there is also something there about being a father or grandfather, and the shock and fear that can come with that experience.

“At the time when it was first performed, I honestly wasn’t sure that it had much relevance at all. Things were relatively peaceful in Northern Ireland then, and it felt to me like a play that only Northern Irish people would understand; and when it opened in Dublin and London, some of the reactions seemed to confirm that feeling – although In London, there was more laughter. I would sometimes hear people laughing on their own, in the audience, and when I spoke to them afterwards it often seemed that they were from Belfast or Glasgow.

“But now – well, when it first opened, people used to complain that the characters were too extreme; now I notice they don’t do that any more, not after seven years of Trump and Brexit and other extreme global events. And yes, I suppose the play does resonate with some of the wild polarisation that seems to have taken hold of our politics now, and the conspiracy theories that go with that.

“For myself, I feel that writing about these themes, in this play and others, has helped me to move on from any legacy of bigotry and sectarianism that was part of my past; I don’t feel hatred, any more. But whatever audiences finally make of the play, I hope that they will find it entertaining, as well as shocking. And funny, of course; I always hope for that, to hear an audience laugh.”

Cyprus Avenue is at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow from 2-25 March

David Hayman on his role in Troubles-set Cyprus Avenue at the Tron: 'It is a huge challenge'