Author Andrew O'Hagan on the stage adaptation of his novel Mayflies

To paint our own picture, we’re sitting in the basement courtyard of Whighams Wine Cellars in the West End of Edinburgh, with summer about to arrive, and we’re talking about the imminent stage version of O’Hagan’s novel Mayflies, produced for this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe by site-specific theatre specialists Grid Iron.

‘We’ means O’Hagan, myself and musician and sound designer David Paul Jones, known to O’Hagan as DPJ, who has created the soundtrack for Grid Iron’s Mayflies. It’s appropriate, given Mayflies’ theme of Scottish males bonding in their shared youth then reassessing that friendship in a tougher and more tragic middle age, that both these men went to school together.

“I was aware of Andrew,” says Jones, who’s a year younger.

“His brother was in my year,” says O’Hagan. “I wish I’d known DPJ better because it would have been nice to know somebody who was moving towards the art world, but it wasn't that kind of school. It was a big Catholic school on a housing estate in a new town in the 1980s.”

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The pair were reacquainted when Jones composed the music for the National Theatre of Scotland’s John Tiffany-directed 2011 adaptation of O’Hagan’s book The Missing.

“DPJ transformed my understanding of what that show could be,” says O’Hagan. “The music became so elemental in that production and carried so much of the grief and silence it was trying to get to.”

They continued meeting up whenever O’Hagan was visiting his place in Edinburgh from his home in London. Then in 2024 Jones worked on Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me, an intimate, nostalgic solo piece by Grid Iron’s co-artistic director Ben Harrison.

“Ben and I were having a chat and I told him I was due to meet you socially,” Jones tells O’Hagan. “He asked, ‘are there theatre rights for Mayflies…?’ You took me for lunch and I asked you.”

“At just the right time,” replies O’Hagan. Others were exploring the possibility of putting Mayflies on stage. “They were speaking about a jukebox musical, the West End thing in London, which seemed potentially cheesy and terrible. I didn’t fancy it, but Grid Iron were looking to produce something about community arising from the same sympathies we grew up with in the 1980s.”

O’Hagan was a Grid Iron fan anyway: “Their commitment is endless, their taste is impressive.” He’s excited by their plan to stage Mayflies at Brown’s of Leith, a food, drink and events space set in a former engineering works.

“The theatre itself will become a character,” says O’Hagan. “The play is set in post-industrial Scotland and this is a post-industrial space. You can literally see the trolleys, the pulleys, the engineering works, the rough cast walls, they’re all part of the experience. There's a unity of form and content before you've even opened your mouth in a space like that, you're already in a mood and a place that resonates with the values of the story.” When he first set foot in the building, he thought of Robert Wyatt’s Shipbuilding.

What would O’Hagan say those story values are?

“It’s rooted in the Thatcher era, when Irvine was routinely described as an ‘unemployment blackspot’,” he says. “Heavy industry and manufacturing were disappearing before our eyes, and so was the notion of community itself. I tried to access that sense of vanishing in The Missing, but there was also a great camaraderie through feeling alienated and forgotten. And at the centre of that was music.”

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O’Hagan talks about bands like the Smiths, New Order and Joy Division, how their politics came from the anti-Thatcher left, embodied by “a sense of rebellion and resentment”. He thinks of Orson Welles in The Third Man, saying Italy under the Borgias brought about Michelangelo and Raphael, while Swiss brotherly love and harmony created the cuckoo clock.

That’s Thatcher’s Britain to him, its creative vitality its best legacy. A key scene in Mayflies centres around a rave at Manchester’s G-Mex, a former railway depot.

“It echoed with story, with memory, with our parents' generation's post-war industrial past,” says O’Hagan. “Thirty years later I write a novel centred on that experience, and now we come full circle with a dramatised version in another shed.”

Yet for men of O’Hagan and Jones’s generation in particular, a shared love of music took the place of personal connection.

“It's a story that should be common currency, but actually in a Scottish context, where there had been so few books about male friendship, it felt new,” says O’Hagan. He still gets letters from men who say Mayflies was the first book they read, given to them by a mother or female partner. “It made me cry,” they tell him. “It made me think about my old friends and about my life.”

O’Hagan’s youthful identity was formed by music, whether he experienced it watching bands like the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Pastels and Primal Scream at the seminal Glasgow club Splash One, or indulging his taste for the experimental and industrial, like the Birthday Party, Test Dept or Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel.

“Andrew is much more leftfield than I am,” says Jones. “I was obsessed by the Cocteau Twins, but shamelessly loved Duran Duran.”

“I found my identity among boys who were appalled by the idea of Spandau Ballet,” laughs O’Hagan. “But that abrasion drops away as you get older.”

Jones has two sonic worlds to navigate in Mayflies, the nostalgia hit of the first half and the more internalised tragedy of the second.

“I don't think the soundtrack stops at all in part one, it's just constantly there, even in the more reflective moments,” he says. “It's a protagonist. The challenge for me was part two, when the characters are older and sadness follow when they’re faced with loss. So memory will play a big part, a ghostly presence.”

Their hope is that everything – location, sound and Grid Iron’s production – will combine to bring the remembered world of Mayflies to life.

“We thought we knew what friendship was when we were teenagers because we were so good at it, so committed to it,” says O’Hagan. “But actually it was only Act One of what friendship means in a life. If you're lucky you have friendships that last over decades, and they only really kick in when you experience loss, when your parents are dying and you reach out to people you knew when you were young. The ones with whom you don't have to finish that sentence about Joy Division. They know.”

What does O’Hagan want audiences to take from this Mayflies?

“I'd love to give them pause at the sense of their own experience,” he says, “We're all busy, all preoccupied, but theatre slows everything down, puts you back in touch with your own heartbeat. That’s worth all the gold. If people have a rollicking, brilliant night at the theatre, hear some amazing music and feel themselves moved by this incredible human contact, I'll be well pleased.”

Mayflies is at Brown’s of Leith, 7-30 August, 4pm

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