The Guardian 26 August 2025

If you were to come up with a list of the Scottish playwrights least likely to write a musical about William Wallace, Rob Drummond’s name might be somewhere near the top. Musicals about icons of Scottish history have no more been his thing than plays about bagpipes and Highland cows.

Drummond is the enterprising dramatist and performer who got the audience to help invent a play every night in Mr Write; who asked someone to turn a gun on him in Bullet Catch, and staged a real-time speed-dating event in In Fidelity. He upturned the murky world of light entertainment in Quiz Show, and he trained with the Scottish Wrestling Alliance to perform Wrestling.

It was all marvellously unexpected stuff, but nothing to suggest he would turn his attention to the hero most famously portrayed by Mel Gibson in Braveheart. “Hitchcock once said that having a style is just self-plagiarism,” Drummond says. “Maybe I’m bored and I want to try something completely different.” [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).