When Nat McCleary was growing up in Coatbridge and Glasgow, her passions were running and football. She left school at 15, took her Highers at college, and went to Glasgow University to study genetics; and it wasn’t until something drew her towards an advert for a student contemporary dance group that she began what was to be a long and winding journey towards a career in theatre.

She gave up her degree, went south to train at the London Contemporary Dance School, and worked successfully as a dancer and choreographer for a while, in Scotland and elsewhere. “I always loved storytelling, though,” she reflects, “and as I worked on various kinds of shows and tours, I began to realise that I really liked text.” She retained her interest in dance and movement, but also began to move towards an acting career, with roles in Play, Pie Pint shows at Oran Mor, and television series including Shetland and Guilt.

In 2019, she created the choreography and movement for Stewart Laing’s ground-breaking National Theatre of Scotland show Them!, at the Tramway; and it was also around that time that she encountered – among the stage crew of a touring show – a woman called Heather Neilson, who told her, during a coffee break chat, that she was a Celtic backhold wrestler. Like most of us, McCleary had never heard of Celtic backhold wrestling. Yet she was fascinated by what she heard from Heather about this ancient sport, a strange and powerful mix of hugging and fighting only staged during summer Highland Games across Scotland; and within weeks, the idea for her first stage play was born.

Lesley Hart, Maureen Carr, Adiza Shardow, Chloe-Ann Tylor and Efè Agwele in rehearsals for Thrown PIC: Tiu Makkonen

The result is Thrown, McCleary’s new play for the National Theatre of Scotland, which brings together her passions for sport, storytelling and strongly physical theatre, and has won the rare distinction of becoming part of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, with its demanding set of themes based on Martin Luther King’s book Where Do We Go From Here? The show will also tour the Highland Games circuit throughout July, visiting Dunoon, Ballater, Oban and Portree, among other destinations; and it follows a group of five women from hugely diverse backgrounds – young and old, black and white, poor and relatively privileged – as they try to forge themselves into a backhold wrestling team, and to work out their own relationships with a Scottish traditional culture from which many have felt excluded, but which now faces its own struggle for survival.

“I wrote a first draft, and it was 150 pages long,” says McCleary, “and that was when I asked the NTS if I could call in Johnny McKnight as director and dramaturg, because I knew he would be ruthless in helping me to cut it back, and making it fun for the audience.”

McCleary had never worked with McKnight before; but like most people in Scottish theatre, she knew him as the writer, director and star of hugely successful modern pantomimes at the Tron Theatre and the Macrobert Arts Centre, and as a sharply brilliant writer and director of relatively "straight” plays. He’s also a gay man who often writes on LGBT themes, and a proudly working class Scot; and all of these qualities suited McCleary down to the ground.

“I wanted someone who knew what it was to be “othered” and excluded, but who also really understands how to make theatre accessible and fun, and Johnny is all of that,” says McCleary. What the two are hatching up, though – along with a cast that includes Maureen Carr, Lesley Hart and Chloe-Ann Tylor, alongside Efe Agwele and Adiza Shardow – is no box-ticking vision of inclusion in the “new Scotland”, but something much more challenging; something more like a portrait of a society wrestling its way through a complex transition between old ways and new, that needs to learn how to show tolerance and respect as people make that transition at different speeds.

Nat McCleary PIC: National Theatre of Scotland

“In this play, the women are wrestling each other, for sure,” says McKnight. “But they are also wrestling something much bigger; huge questions about identity and belonging, about what it means to be Scottish today, and also about the process of change – just how we make our way forward through times like these.

“Nat said from the start that she didn’t want to write a boring play about identity, and she hasn’t – what we’ve got is 72 short scenes, leading us through this story in about 75 minutes, so it’s all very physical, and very challenging to stage. Yet there are also moments in Nat’s writing that are so beautiful and lyrical and poetic; and we absolutely need to make a bit of space for those.”

“What I want people to feel,” says McCleary, “is that there’s no virtuous perspective in this play, no ‘right’ point of view. I’m asking how people can really find unity in diversity, and work side by side as a team while recognising huge and importance differences.

"For my next project,” she continues, “I’ve already written a three-part television series called Astronauts, about my Dad’s story of coming from Jamaica to Scotland and marrying a Scottish woman – that’s available, if anyone would like to produce it! My dream, though, would be to adapt Thrown for television; because I wouldn’t be telling this story if I didn’t want it to be seen by as many people as possible. And I want people, when they’ve seen it, to be debating and discussing the questions it asks; not feeling they’ve seen something that offers tidy answers, when really, there are none – only a continuing struggle to listen, to know each other better, and to understand a bit more.”

Thrown is on tour across Scotland from 2-28 July, and at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, from 3-27 August

Nat McCleary on her wrestling play Thrown: 'It's not something that offers tidy answers'