Ian Rankin on his new Rebus play and his love of theatre - 'that communal thing is a buzz'

Rebus: A Game Called Malice by Ian Rankin (right) will have its Scottish Premiere at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre, with Gray O’Brien (left) in the title role.

Sir Ian Rankin sells novels by the crateload and is riding the wave of television stardom thanks to Gregory Burke’s hard-hitting Rebus adaptation. The Edinburgh author, however, also has a soft spot for the theatre. You might imagine a man who can count small-screen audiences in the tens of millions to have little interest in the intimacy of the stage, but not so. He seems as excited by the autumn tour of Rebus: A Game Called Malice as he would the publication of any of his 25 novels.

“It’s a very different thing when you’re sitting in a room with an audience,” he says when we meet at Edinburgh Festival Theatre. “Whether it’s a concert, an opera or a play, that communal thing – when the audience all laugh together, all gasp, are all talking about the thing in the interval – is a buzz I don’t get as easily from a screen or even a book because I’m at a distance from the reader or the viewer.”

His passion is genuine. Rankin is a keen theatregoer, often spotted in Edinburgh’s first-night audiences at the Royal Lyceum and Traverse and, since his 40s when he developed a taste for opera, at the Festival Theatre.

“I am a theatre fan,” he says. “We’re very lucky in Edinburgh that theatre companies do come here and we have very active theatregoers, performers and directors. You can see great work.”

Nor is it the first time he has written for the stage. In 2013, the Lyceum staged Dark Road, a murder-mystery co-write with director Mark Thomson, which starred Maureen Beattie as a chief constable with unfinished business. In 2018, he teamed up with playwright Rona Munro to write Rebus: Long Shadows, in which Charles Lawson (and later Ron Donachie) played a detective haunted by the mistakes of the past.

Rebus: A Game Called Malice has its roots during the pandemic when Rankin collaborated with playwright and screenwriter Simon Reade, batting ideas back and forth on email. He thinks it is no coincidence the play’s cloying single-set atmosphere was a product of the lockdown: “It’s set in a confined space in Edinburgh and it owes something to that claustrophobic nature of a locked room or a place you can’t escape from.”

The play had a first airing in Hornchurch, East London, last year and, after a rewrite, is being remounted for a three-month UK tour by West End director Loveday Ingram. Gray O’Brien is in the title role. In contrast to the backstreets and housing schemes of the recent TV series, this one is set in a middle-class dining room in the New Town – a fictional address in Heriot Row. Here, John Rebus is a plus-one guest at a dinner party where the hostess’s post-meal murder-mystery game reveals the kind of secrets the detective has spent a lifetime uncovering.

“It’s a drawing-room mystery,” says Rankin. “That’s a classic set-up for a play and Edinburgh has these Miss Marple-type rooms where people would have dinner parties and the hostess might think, ‘Oh, let’s have a wee murder-mystery game at the end of the meal.’ She devises it without realising one of the guests is going to be a retired detective.”

The run at the Festival Theatre (it also plays in Aberdeen and Glasgow) is of particular significance to a writer whose work is so knowingly set in Edinburgh. “I go to a lot of theatre in Edinburgh and it is a tough audience to please,” he says. “You very rarely see a standing ovation in Edinburgh. I’ll come to see this play three or four times with mates, and when you go to the bar at half time, there will still be trepidation: are they getting it? Are they enjoying it? Has anybody left at half time?”

He continues: “Coming to Edinburgh University to study literature, I was very aware in the late-70s that all the writers seemed to be working in Glasgow and writing about Glasgow. It was the time of James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead, William McIlvanney, et cetera. Nothing much seemed to be happening in Edinburgh. I thought, ‘Well, somebody needs to write about this city.’ Edinburgh was a place of contradictions, a place of all kinds of social issues and problems. At the forefront of my mind when I started writing about Edinburgh was that if nobody else is going to do it, then I’m going to do it.”

If Rankin is enthusiastic about Rebus: A Game Called Malice, the same is true of Gray O’Brien, the Glasgow-born star of Coronation Street, Peak Practice and Casualty. Another theatre fan, he recently completed a lengthy tour of Twelve Angry Men, before which he starred in Educating Rita in Perth. Some actors might be intimidated to follow in the footsteps of John Michie, John Hannah, Ken Stott and Richard Rankin as the famous detective, but the only thing that seems to concern O’Brien is his weight.

“I don’t worry because people love Rankin and love Rebus,” he says. “I’m excited because I’ve got nothing to base it on. I’m not worried about taking on Rebus because I don’t want to impersonate. I spoke to Ian and he said it’s exactly what you want it to be. Rebus talks about being out of condition and I’ve been looking after myself recently. I’m in the best nick I’ve been for a long time. Should I have a paunch? Ian said, ‘Not at all.’ It doesn’t matter. It’s an interpretation.”

Rebus: A Game Called Malice, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 10–14 September; His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, 16–21 September; Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow, 23–27 September.