Jings, what would Maw Broon say?

With a family of eight to contend with – nine if you include irascible old rogue Granpaw – Maw Broon is a classic no-nonsense matriarch. In her world, one suspects, feminism is something those fancy Edinburgh types might indulge in, but is not for the likes of her. Until now, that is. The Maw Broon Monologues, which opens at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre as part of the 2009 Glasgay! festival, finds Kay setting her subject squarely in the 21st century, without so much as a weekend at the But ’n’ Ben for comfort.

Here, Maw Broon finds herself embarking on such adventures as visiting her bank manager, tracing her family tree and reading Tolstoy. In her down time she enters reality TV show Britain’s Got Talent, helps save the planet and starts an online blog. She even has colonic irrigation, which is in no way connected to her meeting with her politically inclined namesake Gordon Broon. One suspects that by the end of all this activity, Maw Broon’s cosmetic, political and psychological makeover has made her a very independent woman. In Kay’s version, make that two women, one of them black.

“Scottish literature is full of doppelgangers and dualities,” says Kay, pointing to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde as an example. “Tragedy and comedy live in the same house, and by having doppelgangers, it’s a way of getting what we might think of as stereotypes to do something different. The Broons are Scotland’s first family, and they’re a great family who all have specific personalities that over the years you get to know.

“The joke’s usually the same, with someone having a grand idea that backfires, but with The Maw Broon Monologues, I wanted to take the idea of something unexpected happening, and see where that led.”

With this in mind, Kay and director Maggie Kinloch have cast two singer/actresses already possessed with big personalities to take on Maw Broon’s inner and outer self. While Terry Neason takes on our more familiar idea of the family-driven matriarch, Suzanne Bonnar reflects the inner yearnings and unfulfilled desires of her psyche. The result, over 10 monologues and seven songs, is a loose-knit narrative that charts one very familiar woman’s awakening to possibilities beyond her domestic circumstances.

It was Kinloch who first suggested to the poet some kind of staging of the work after watching Kay’s own performance at Glasgow Women’s Library of one of Maw Broon’s earliest forays into the big bad world beyond Auchenshoogle.

In its use of popular forms to reinvent familiar characters, The Maw Broon Monologues is the latest example of a proliferation of small-scale theatre events resembling the less strident end of feminist cabarets from the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, Victoria Wood reinvented another comic icon, this time to highlight the class war in her song, Lord Snooty and His Pals Are Alright. Now, Maw Broon might just be a woman of our time and – with black lesbian gags unlikely to be at a premium – an unlikely feminist icon. The presence of Terry Neason, whose theatre career began with John McGrath’s original 7:84 company before becoming a stalwart of Wildcat, is crucial in this respect.

“Terry and Suzanne’s voices work really well together,” Kay says. “I’d always had Suzanne in mind, because I’ve worked with her a lot before, but I’d watched Terry in Wildcat and doing her one-woman shows, and I think she’s one of these singers who manages to find the real emotion of a song rather than just her own. So that combination has worked out really well.”

The music for The Maw Broon Monologues is composed by Tom Urie, best known for another popular smash when he took on the role of Danny McGlone in the stage version of John Byrne’s comic television drama series, Tutti Frutti. While Urie’s presence in the show breaks up any accusations of all-girls-together separatism, Maw Broon’s stage debut does follow other feminisations of work made familiar in more macho ways. Most notable of these in recent times is

Denise Mina’s restyling of Hugh MacDiarmid’s epic harangue, A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle. Mina’s monologue was first performed at Oran Mor with a sweep of hen-night panache by Karen Dunbar, another star able to combine intelligence and depth with a good night out.

“Feminism in the 1970s was quite in your face,” Kay reflects, “but it was really exciting for the times. Feminist theatre then was more agit-prop in style, the way a lot of theatre was then. Now I suppose it’s more satirical, but still packs a punch.” Kay also reveals that one of her pieces bears the magnificent title A Drunk Woman Looks At Her Nipple, with the gazed-upon areola becoming an eco-friendly symbol of the planet.

“I’m thinking about how this could be done in lots of different ways,” reveals Kay. “It could even be called Maw Broon, The Musical.” Such ambitions are a long way from Kay’s first reimagining of Maw Broon in her early poetry collections. Now, she says, “I’d quite happily put a Maw Broon monologue in every book I write until the day I die.”

As with Maw Broon’s Cookbook, which was published a couple of years ago, any forthcoming collection of Kay’s Maw Broon Monologues would be a very different proposition to the Broons Annual currently on the shelves. Not that its publishers, DC Thomson, seem to mind. Kay, after all, is only adding to The Broons’ mythology. “There’s something very zeitgeisty about The Broons just now,” Kay laughs. “It’s like Broons Reunited.”

In its current form, The Maw Broon Monologues looks and sounds rather portable. Whether it goes on to have another life, however, remains to be seen. The material’s common touch may be already apparent, but Kay has been here before when her novel, Trumpet, looked set for the Hollywood treatment, with Halle Barry mooted for the lead role. Rather than burst on to the big screen with a fanfare, Trumpet festered in development hell and remains unmade. “Best deal with reality as it happens,” Kay says, sounding remarkably Maw Broon-like, “and not build one’s hopes up.”

As for what Maw Broon might make of being taken from a comic strip and made flesh onstage – and her dual depiction – Kay can see both sides of the argument. “One side of her would probably think, go oan’, yerself, hen,” she speculates, “but another would be pure black affronted. Maw Broon might even walk out and stage a protest.”

The Maw Broon Monologues, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, November 3-8, www.tron.co.uk