'It's wild with grief' – Douglas Maxwell on adapting Orphans for the stage

Reuben Joseph, Harry Ward, Charlie West and Martin Quinn in rehearsals for the new National Theatre of Scotland production of Orphans PIC: Eoin Carey

Douglas Maxwell has written a Peter Mullan dictionary. He felt he had to. Tasked with adapting Mullan's award-winning movie Orphans for the stage, the playwright reckoned it was the only way to capture such a particular use of language. Both Maxwell and Mullan are from the west coast, but there are 55 miles of lexicographical difference between the former's Girvan and the latter's Glasgow Southside.

"I had to make a glossary because he writes in his own version of Scots," says Maxwell. "It's not the way I write dialect. It's phonetically different. The way he uses apostrophes is different. The way he uses the letter Z. If you get a text from him, it's written in that language. I had to write all the text in his voice because my guys aren't quite the same as his guys."

Language was only the start of it. Maxwell also had to repress his inner romantic. Released in the UK in 1999, Orphans is a portrait of a Glasgow family – three brothers and a sister – trying to hold it together on the night before their mother's funeral. It has a jet-black working-class humour and a quality bordering on magical realism, but it is also unforgiving.

Portraying a night of boozy violence and obsessive behaviour, Mullan makes no special pleading for his characters. Only Sheila elicits our sympathy as Michael disguises an injury as an industrial accident, John gets hold of a gun to settle a score and Thomas occupies the church in a fervour of grief. There could be no room for any Maxwell sentimentality.

"I think there's something romantic in my work," says the playwright, author of plays including Decky Does A Bronco, Charlie Sonata and Fever Dream: Southside. "Even though nothing tends to work out for my characters, there is some kind of redemption and they get a second chance. Peter's work is really unromantic."

For the most part, Mullan was happy for Maxwell to work on the adaptation alone, but when he gave notes, he was direct and to the point. He said Maxwell liked the characters too much. "That is true," laughs the playwright. "I write from a point of really loving my characters. I don't start a play until I feel a pang of sympathy for them. Not all writers do – and I don't think Peter does."

Unlikely though it might seem, this version of Orphans is a large-scale musical. It is the brainchild of director Cora Bissett who, working with the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS), drafted in songwriters Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly, even before she approached Maxwell. By the time he came on board, they already had a couple of songs written, giving him a clear sense of how the show could work.

Daniella Fakoor Damptey and Martin Quinn in rehearsals for Orphans PIC: Eoin Carey

"One song was for the young brothers fighting in the street and the other was for this young father in the pub who gets everybody singing when he's just had a baby," he says. "I loved them both. One is really funny and felt like a big musical-theatre piece. The other one is quite dark but is taken from lines in the movie – 'A storm is coming and I'm going to kill Duncan' – and you think, 'This film is quite high style.' It fits the musical form because the characters are always exploding at the top end of their emotion."

Maxwell reckons the result is the missing link between the pizzazz of a Broadway musical and the recognisable earthiness of Mullan's Glasgow. "It's familiar and new at the same time," he says, recalling a scene in which Michael is locked in the back room of a pub. "He has this hallucinogenic kind of experience. That's a dream ballet! That's how old school it is."

Revisiting the film two decades on has allowed the team to look at some elements afresh, in particular its portrayal of disability. In the original, the role of kid sister Sheila is played by Rosemary Stevenson, whose performance gives the film much of its warmth. When her wheelchair gets stuck on cobbles, she relies on the kindness of strangers to rescue her and goes off on an adventure of her own.

It's part of the film's distinctive charm, but the part has relatively little dialogue. That would be hard to account for on stage, especially in a musical where characters routinely sing out their dilemmas in full voice. Now played by the ebullient Amy Conachan, best known as teacher Courtney Campbell in Hollyoaks, the part has necessarily grown.

"Rosemary Stephenson played the part in the film brilliantly," says Maxwell. "But we knew we were going to put a woman on stage who was going to sing, which means she's going to be verbal, which means she's not going to sit and take a lot of her brothers' crap. She has the same story but she's just active in those scenes. She's making decisions and doing things."

If a film about grief and violence sounds unlikely material for a musical, Orphans would be in good company. Who would have imagined a novel about the French revolution, the story of the USA's founding fathers or some poems about cats would create such West End hits? "For all the comedy, it is grief-driven," agrees Maxwell. "It's wild with grief. There's a huge amount of extremity in it. But the NTS has loved it since the first showcase and everyone said, 'This is what we want.' They've come out swaggering."

Orphans, Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, 1–2 April and touring until 30 April, www.nationaltheatrescotland.com

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