Brian Beacom
WE’VE all been there, haven’t we? Gone abroad on an incredible adventure, fallen in love with a heavenly creature... only to discover they have cloven feet.
Martin McCormick has certainly been there. To Los Angeles in fact, and he did indeed fall for an angel in blue jeans.
However, Martin, who is one of Scotland’s hottest young playwrights – he has four scripts in production this year – realised his angel to be a devil. And the writer knew it would be a tragedy if he did not turn his incredible love story into a comedy drama.
He explains how he came to be LA bound. “The RSAMD at the time (he graduated in 2007)ran an exchange programme whereby students could go to the States. And in second year I put my hand up to go and was lucky enough to be selected.
“So off I went to this experimental arts college north of LA, which had once been a hippy commune.”
McCormick loved it from the moment he arrived. “Clothes were optional at this place,” he says, laughing. “It was a massive culture shock.”
It was a far cry from Drumchapel where he grew up, attending the same school as James McAvoy.
“Meanwhile, I was cutting about in a my Scotland top and somehow I felt a little invincible," he recalls. "Thanks to my accent I was exotic – and somehow more attractive to the opposite sex.”
He was certainly seen as attractive by one young lady. “I fell totally head-over-heels with this woman who was on the course,” he says, the passion in his voice reflecting his feelings at the time.
After his six-month stint, it was a love-struck Martin who returned home. But he could console himself with the knowledge his very own angel would soon be winging her way towards him, as part of the student exchange programme.
But then disaster struck: Martin took a call to learn she had been in a serious car crash.
What to do? For the besotted young Scot, there was only one answer.
“I dropped everything and jumped on a plane,” he recalls. “I headed for her home town, South Bend, Indiana.”
This was far from liberal LA. People not only wore clothes, they wore the demeanour of ultra conservative America. Martin, who began a degree in Quantity Surveying before getting a taste for am-dram and dropping out to do an HNC in drama at Coatbridge College, now found his angel to be a very different character back home.
“The woman my girlfriend said was her mother was actually her biological mother’s partner whom she had been brought up by. From the moment I arrived this step-mother woman decided I was her enemy.”
There was worse to come.
“The girl I’d been in love with was so incredibly medicated I could hardly have a conversation with her,” he says. (He doesn’t name her in the play).
“This woman seemed to have undergone a complete personality transplant since the last time I’d seen her. She was in AA. She was going to church. There was nothing of her that reminded me of the girl I’d fallen in love with.”
He adds: “And I soon learned the reason she’d crashed her car was because she’d been drink driving – and gone to jail as a result.
His voice becomes reflective; “It was days of wine and roses when we met.”
Now it was wine alley and jail terms. Martin had no choice but to pack his bags and leave. “But I had no money,” he remembers with a shudder. “So I walked out the door and walked, the sort of melodramatic exit you expect from a flouncy actor. And I got totally lost. And I’d walked so far the little wheels at the back my suitcase had worn away.
“By night-time I was dragging my case around and it was literally sparking off the pavement. Then I found myself in this ghetto project and, thankfully, I was rescued by a bloke who said to me, in very dramatic voice, ‘Get in the car if you want to live.’”
Amazingly, the African-American guy who’d rescued Martin revealed he’d been in a similar situation once in Italy, thanks to a failed romance.
“He knew exactly what I was going through. He even gave me money so I was able to fly home.”
It’s a tragic tale, but also an uplifting one, befitting the Livingstone panto which Martin also writes.
It’s a tale of young love that had to be told – and the result is South Bend, in which he is aided by Jess Chanliau, a recent RCS graduate who plays his angel and about 20 other characters, and Dave Pollock as Martin’s conscience, a sort of Jiminy Cricket voice.
And at the time Martin certainly needed one. You suggest that his life would have been very different had he taken a maddy, ran off to Vegas and married this fragile American – he wouldn't now be married to actress wife Kirsty and have two fantastic children.
“Well, it’s funny you should say that,” he says, laughing. “We did take a mad road trip to Vegas one time and it very nearly happened.
“Thankfully, that wee voice in my head appeared to tell me it was not quite right.”
His American girl must have been some actress to be able to convince him she was worth a trip to the Elvis Chapel...?
“What she had done was get out of small town America and reinvent herself, just as so many Hollywood stars had done in the past.
“She had changed her name and moved on from her past life.”
He adds: “But, yes, I’m glad it worked out the way it has.”
Indeed. He can now focus on writing and looking after the kids while Kirsty films the BBC drama Shetland.
But what did Kirsty say about him writing a play about a former lover?
“Here’s the thing; normally I read my lines of new plays with her. Her memory is so good she remembers everybody's parts. But because this piece is so autobiographical, I didn’t need her to run lines with me.
“As a result, when she came to see South Bend for the first time she had no idea what she was about to see.”
“I think she was mortified. But I did explain that you’re a very different person in your 20s."
He adds, smiling; "And I tell myself folk have done worse.”
South Bend is on at The Tron Theatre in Glasgow, until Saturday.
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