Photograph: Robert Perry
DOUGLAS Maxwell is big in South Korea. But n
ot as big as the South Koreans would like him to be. The Ayrshire playwright's debut play, Our Bad Magnet, has been running there for three years. Not surprisingly, audiences have tailed off in that time. Yet the theatre's solution is not to cut its losses, but to extend the run.
"I got this really grovelling e-mail saying they were only playing to 50% capacity, so in order to make up for it they were going to extend it by 83 shows," says a bewildered Maxwell. "Then they said: 'I can assure you the ladies' toilet facilities are excellent.' There was an attachment with a picture of the ladies' toilet. What was so wrong with the ladies' toilet that they've decided that was the reason the play hasn't worked?"
All this, the self-deprecating Maxwell finds very funny. Describing himself as a "popular playwright who's not that popular", he has nonetheless enjoyed a string of successes with plays such as Decky Does A Bronco – the Grid Iron production famously performed in children's playgrounds – If Destroyed True for Dundee Rep and his adaptation of Mancub revived by the National Theatre of Scotland in 2006. Even if he's bigger in South Korea than at home, he has become a familiar part of the theatrical landscape here.
But today as he sits in the foyer of Birmingham Rep, clutching a pint of Guinness to calm his nerves before the press night of The Mother Ship, Maxwell is feeling his age. Now a father to three-month-old Ellis, he is proud to have arrived in a smart suit that is not covered in baby sick. But it's more than the early-morning nappy changes that are making him view the world differently. As a new parent whose own father died during his wife's pregnancy, he is no longer the end of the Maxwell line. A new generation is lying in wait.
He's feeling this not just personally, but professionally too. In a theatre scene obsessed by youth and innovation, he is no longer the new kid on the block. Now that his friend DC Jackson has scored a debut hit with The Wall, currently being toured by Borderline, he is not even the only one writing very funny plays about teenagers kicking their heels in sleepy Ayrshire towns. "Scottish theatre is such an exciting, mercurial thing," says the 33-year-old. "In fact, it moves too fast. It won't be long before DC Jackson wipes me off the face of the Earth. I will no longer be able to work because he's doing it better. The names just keep coming. It's great.
"One thing Scottish theatre is good for is teaching you humility. We all start with the same ego and you will be taught eventually that you're nothing. When I started with Our Bad Magnet in 2000, there was nothing else going on. I was thrown in with the press and I was everywhere. Then Zinnie Harris came after with Further Than The Furthest Thing, a much bigger play, a much bigger success and that was it. The following summer was Gregory Burke's Gagarin Way and that was me finished. I had one summer in the sun and the other two had lapped me."
A lively conversationalist who's always quick to laugh, Maxwell is not the kind to be depressed by his changing place in the world, but the transition is interesting in terms of his writing. By his own admission, the typical Maxwell play concerns an awkward, geeky teenage boy – the video gamers in Helmet, the shape-shifting animal lover in Mancub – who is trying to make sense of his impending adulthood in an unforgiving world.
"Every playwright has his own little bit of theatrical real estate or you wouldn't be able to get a play on in the first place," he says. "There's a viewpoint that you have that no one else does. I can remember very well when I was a teenager and that time is bookmarked. I remember not just what happened but how I felt about it, in a way that I'm not sure I can remember about my student days. I can describe what I felt quite readily. There's also something about that character: it's not just an age, it's a type of person that crops up in the plays and suits the stories."
The same kind of character ("a sarcastic, beaten-down good guy in a bad situation") appears in The Mother Ship, in which teenager Eliot squares up to the prospect of going to university at the same time as his disabled brother Gary goes Awol, having apparently taken their shared fantasy about escaping to outer space too seriously. Maxwell says the difference with this play is that he returned to familiar territory fully conscious of what he was doing. "I was asked to write this play specifically for a schools tour," he says. "I knew the audience so I felt it was a theme I could come back to. I wasn't subconsciously blundering into this one."
But there's another plot line in The Mother Ship which, whether the playwright realises it or not, could signal the way his muse will take him in future. While Eliot and his friends are roaming the countryside in search of Gary, their young stepmother is at home pregnant. The play's happy conclusion, in which everyone learns to live with their distinctive personality traits, coincides with the birth of a baby and a symbolic hope for the future. It's as if Maxwell's subconscious is telling him there is life beyond the uncertainty of adolescence.
"Losing a parent, like becoming a father, is forced on you," he says. "You can no longer mess about. You've got to accept responsibilities. There's all that separation anxiety about who you used to be. For my generation, that's stretched out. This is me at 33 being a father for the first time. My dad would have been in his early to mid-20s when he had me. My mum was married at 19.
"The idea of moving on from who you used to be and of having to escape the cards you were dealt has been in a lot of my plays. My generation, we're like grown-up children. Why are we still collecting Star Wars figures, going to gigs and buying the NME?"
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The Mother Ship, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh (0131-228 1404), Tuesday until Saturday, 7.30pm,
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www.traverse.co.ukThe full article contains 1128 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
