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.” [READ MORE]