Playwright Douglas Maxwell on 25 years of hits, from Our Bad Magnet to So Young

Douglas Maxwell can remember the day – almost 30 years ago now – when he realised that he could become a playwright. He had loved working on theatre shows at school in Girvan, he had played in bands, and as a student at Stirling University in the early 1990s he had co-founded the Stirling University Musical Theatre Society.

It was in his final year, though, that he was fiddling around with a script in his room one day when a sudden thought hit him. “Wait a minute,” he said to himself, “some people actually do this for a job.” And from that moment, through good times and bad, his fate was sealed; as he launched himself on a career that has seen more than 40 Douglas Maxwell plays and adaptations produced in Scotland since 2000.

His career has also led, over the last two years, to Maxwell’s unique achievement in winning the Best New Play category two years running at the annual Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland. In 2024, Maxwell won for his remarkable double monologue The Sheriff Of Kalamaki, at A Play, A Pie and A Pint; and this month, he took the prize again for his 2024 Fringe hit So Young, a superbly well made four-handed drama, staged at the Traverse Theatre last August, about the reaction of a midlife Glasgow couple when their recently widowed friend suddenly acquires a new girlfriend 25 years his junior.

Douglas Maxwell

“I think I graduated into one of the very good times for Scottish playwriting,” says Maxwell, who emerged from university in 1995, and began to follow in the footsteps of the outstanding generations of Scottish playwrights who emerged from the Traverse Theatre, and later the Tron, in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

“There were so many great role models around,” he says. “David Greig, Chris Hannan, David Harrower, so many more – wherever I looked, whatever I wanted to do, there was always someone there who could say – yes, I found a way to do that, and so can you.”

His first play Our Bad Magnet, about teenage boys growing up in Girvan, premiered at the Tron in 2000; and since then the vast majority of Maxwell’s plays have been produced by theatre companies in Scotland. “Because of all the pressures in theatre today,” says Maxwell, “most playwrights feel compelled to develop their work in other directions as well. They start to write for television or film, or go into directing, and end up running a theatre for ten years, as David Greig has just done at the Lyceum.

Sign up to our FREE Arts & Culture newsletter at www.scotsman.com/newsletter

“But for more than 25 years now, I’ve just had this one string to my bow, which is writing plays for theatre, mainly here in Scotland. And I don’t honestly want to do anything else.”

The good news for Maxwell fans is that two of his recent plays are about to reappear on Scotland’s stages. His 2024 CATS winner So Young – co-produced by the Citizens’ Theatre and Glasgow-based touring company Raw Material – will form part of the Citizens’ exciting reopening season this autumn. And this weekend, the Tron Theatre opens a new summer production of his 2022 Play, Pie, and Pint monologue Man’s Best Friend, an acclaimed solo drama which notes the extraordinary role pets played in so many lives during lockdown, and revolves around the character of Ronnie, originally played by Jonathan Watson, a recently widowed man in Glasgow who develops a half-hearted career as a dog-walker, after everything else in his life goes wrong.

This time around, Ronnie will be played by Jordan Young, much-loved star of River City, Scotsquad and the annual Edinburgh pantomime. “Jordan’s a younger actor,” says Maxwell, “which brings a slightly different energy to the story. And what I particularly love is that he’s an actor who really can shift from comedy to real tragedy in a single sentence. That absolutely suits my work down to the ground, because my plays are always funny, and always tragic.”

Maxwell turned 50 last year, and lives in Glasgow’s south side with his wife Caroline Newall, artistic development director at the National Theatre of Scotland, and their two daughters. And Maxwell does have one extra string to his professional bow as a teacher of playwriting. His workshops and playwriting courses are legendary, and he loves the work so much that he also reads many scripts sent to him by young writers for free, simply as a way of helping them along.

His own playwriting, though, remains his main preoccupation, as he mulls over possible new projects for next year, and nurses Man’s Best Friend and So Young towards their new stagings. “Both of these plays come out of the lockdown experience, really,” says Maxwell. “And both of them involve characters who are being asked or expected to ‘move on’, but who can’t, because they haven’t really had a chance to mourn. I’m asking what happens if you haven’t had a chance to mark a death, or to remember a life, in the way that we should remember and mourn, as a social act. I think a lot of people are still carrying those scars from the pandemic; and in theatre, we can at least come together to ask that question, and to recognise that pain, before we try to turn towards the future.”

Man’s Best Friend is at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, from 24 June until 12 July, with previews ending 21 June. So Young is at the Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, from 28 October until 8 November.