In a light and airy room in the National Theatre of Scotland’s (NTS) Glasgow headquarters, a 10-strong cast of actors in T-shirts and sweatpants are in full-on rehearsal mode. Opening night is just 11 sleeps away.

From behind an array of desks another dozen or so people look on. Among them are the show’s co-creators Isobel McArthur and Michael John McCarthy, the first an actor, director and award-winning playwright, the second a musician, composer and sound designer.

The huge space is criss-crossed with lighting rigs. To the right, a skull and crossbones hangs limply from an aircraft ladder. Beyond that is a selection of props and accessories. I spy a double bass, a blue and yellow 1960s-style sun lounger with a garish pattern and some traffic cones. Oh, and a life-size plastic sheep on wheels.

Off to the left sits Malcolm Cumming, last seen in the fourth instalment of NTS’s acclaimed historical series, the James Plays. In this production he plays a dashing fellow named Alan. Right now he’s strumming a burnt-orange coloured Gretsch, the guitar favoured by 1950s rocker Duane Eddy. Fellow cast-member Ryan J Mackay paces the central space. His character is named David, though Alan refers to him affectionately as Davie. As McArthur and McCarthy watch, the cast come together and break into song – a rendition of Road To Nowhere by 1980s art-rock band Talking Heads. Only they sing it in Gaelic.

Have you guessed what it is yet?

The answer is Kidnapped, the 1886 novel by Robert Louis Stevenson which drops unworldly Lowland teenager David Balfour into a rip-roaring Highland adventure in the company of Jacobite renegade Alan Breck Stewart – and this after having escaped a sea-borne abduction by accomplices of his villainous uncle, Ebenezer.

McArthur’s brief from the NTS was pleasingly vague: make some theatre, your choice. She opted for a novel adaptation and, having always loved Stevenson, chose what she thinks is the author’s most Scottish work – or at least the one which is most about Scottishness.

As well as dipping into the social and political aftermath of the 1745 Rebellion as Davie travels from the Borders to Edinburgh to the Highlands and back again, Stevenson places his protagonist at the scene of the Appin Murder of 1752, a notorious event in the history of the Highland Clearances. Step back from the plot and the novel is stuffed full of binaries: Whig vs Tory, Jacobite vs Redcoat, Lowlands vs Highlands, English vs Gaelic, city vs countryside, joy vs joylessness.

When I join her and McCarthy in a rehearsal break, McArthur explains more about her choice, talking about the themes she found in Kidnapped and in particular the ones she feels still resonate in the national discourse today. “I think we are ultimately playing out a lot of the conversations that were pertinent when he wrote this novel, again and again, as Scots,” she says.

Such as? “This real need to define Scottish identity, what the benefits or disadvantages are of doing so, what Scottishness is … We have to have a plurality of identity to be the kind of place where anybody would want to exist. But there is [also] a cultural paranoia that Scotland has as a country, just invaded again and again and again, that we still grapple with.”

But true to form, McArthur and McCarthy have added welcome twists to their take on Stevenson’s story. After all, these are the hitmakers behind Pride And Prejudice* (*sort of), the West End smash which re-told Jane Austen’s novel through the eyes of the household servants and bagged McArthur an Olivier Award in 2022.

One addition is the music, a crowd-pleasing collection of synth pop ballads and rock classics sung and played live by the cast. “There’s a pretty strong Scottish connection to a number of the selections, though not all of them,” says McCarthy. “There’s lots and lots of Scottish pop.” Among the other bands whose music features are Big Country, The Eurythmics and the Average White Band, whose various members had roots in Dunfermline, Aberdeen and Dundee.

McArthur adds: “I was particularly interested in subcultures – that is such a key theme in the book – and in these notions of identity: the idea of there being canon and alternative music, and the notion of a deviant and an Other.”

For audiences, however, recognition is key. “There’s a sweet spot to be found there,” McCarthy admits. “A lot of the bands have their roots in subcultures then went on to meet an audience, and the material we’re using is that material as opposed to the earlier stuff.”

Another change is the introduction of a narrator. McArthur has gifted that role to Stevenson’s characterful American wife Frances, played in the production by Kim Ismay. “When I started looking at her life and their relationship there were uncanny parallels with the book to the extent that I can only assume one has been drawn on to the other,” says McArthur. A gun-toting single mother who rolled her own cigarettes and was several years Stevenson’s senior, Frances played a key role in the novel’s development – it was basically her idea – and some editions include an introduction written by her. So it wasn’t too much of a stretch to write her into the play.

A third addition is a love story between the two leads. Here McArthur has turned what is undeniably an 18th century bromance into a fully-fledged romance. “I think it’s there in the text, every time I go back to any page in that book,” she says, reeling off examples. “There are a multitude of political reasons why it feels important and useful to me, but I also feel it’s in the pages of the novel. They clearly love each other.”

For McCarthy, it’s also a coming-of-age story and a road movie. “So in terms of genre it’s an intersection of several different ones. I think it was ahead of its time. But for Davie, in particular, it’s a story of first love, and the heartbreak that almost inevitably comes with pretty much every first love.”

But while the production’s foundations rest on big themes and important issues, McArthur and McCarthy haven’t forgotten the basics: Kidnapped promises to be as thrilling a piece of theatre as you could hope to see. “What I’ve tried to do structurally is make sure everybody is on the edge of their seat for the vast majority of the show,” says McArthur. “It really moves at a pace.”

It certainly does. And to that pace you can add a great dollop of passion. Back in the rehearsal spaces the cast are on stage for a run-through of the rousing finale, and if my own response is any measure of future success – there was a tear in my eye – Kidnapped will have them cheering in the aisles.

Kidnapped opens at the Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock on March 28 (until April 1) then tours to the Theatre Royal, Glasgow (April 5-8), Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh (April 11-22), Eden Court Theatre, Inverness (April 26-29) and Perth Theatre (May 3-6)