The 1980s were hardly salad days for British youths, but Andrew O’Hagan captured the salt and the sweet of that decade beautifully in his vivid semi-autobiographical novel Mayflies, published in 2020. It follows a group of pals from Irvine who are united by their love of pop culture and their hatred of Thatcherism. In the summer of 1986, they embark on an unforgettable weekend at The Festival of the Tenth Summer in Manchester, where their world is shaken by “a nuclear fuckfest of musical talent” that includes bands like The Fall, New Order and The Smiths.
Grid Iron will stage an immersive, site-specific adaptation of Mayflies at this year’s Fringe. Ben Harrison, co-artistic director of that celebrated Edinburgh-based theatre company, is writing and directing, and he recalls having O’Hagan’s novel pressed into his hands by his daughter, who told him, “This is basically you”.
“I read it in a day and a half,” Harrison tells me. “I’m usually quite a slow reader, but I devoured it. I read the last 30 or 40 pages through floods of tears.”
The waterworks are understandable. The effervescent first half is told from the point of view of 18-year-old Jimmy, aka Noodles, a bookish, gentle soul. The group’s ringleader is the slightly older Tully, a handsome rebel who models himself on Albert Finney’s Arthur Seaton from British New Wave classic Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The second half of the novel takes place 30 years later. The daft boys are now accomplished middle-aged men, and Tully has devastating news to share with his old friend – and a huge favour to ask.
Harrison and his partner at Grid Iron, Jude Doherty, agreed that Mayflies was an ideal project to mark the company’s 30th year, and in 2025, they found the perfect venue. After engineering outfit George Brown & Sons vacated their vast warehouse on The Shore, it became available as a creative space in its new guise as Brown’s of Leith. “I walked in and thought, ‘This is The Haçienda!’” Harrison says of his first visit to Brown’s. From there, the play’s structure quickly formed. “The concept is that the characters never really leave the envelope of that weekend,” he explains. “And the audience doesn’t leave it either.”
The source material is a realist work, but Grid Iron’s staging of Mayflies will incorporate a dash of surrealism. “There’s a sense of ghostliness and a dream-like quality,” confirms Harrison. “And the two generations will actually interact; there’s a lot of merging of young Noodles and Tully with the older versions.”
O’Hagan joins Harrison and me at a bar in Leith that’s a stone’s throw from both Grid Iron’s offices and Brown’s of Leith. This is not the author’s first adaptation rodeo. Mayflies has been particularly popular. Andrea Gibb adapted it as a two-part TV drama for the BBC in 2022, and Grid Iron aren’t even the first to attempt a stage version. “I’ve seen a few theatrical proposals,” says O’Hagan. “One was a jukebox musical idea for the West End.” It was a potentially lucrative opportunity, but it didn’t feel right. “It wasn’t Scottish enough. I felt from the beginning that [Mayflies] should be made in Scotland, but also by a company that’s interested in pushing the envelope theatrically, and that’s Grid Iron.”
One of the chief pleasures of O’Hagan’s novel, and we assume Harrison’s immersive play, is that it paints a picture of working-class Scottish life that avoids the usual clichés of Scottish miserablism. “Sometimes you write a novel because you want to read it,” says O’Hagan. “I hadn’t read a novel that really depicted the truth of working-class life of boys in Britain in the 80s. Something really happened to masculinity and to working-class life during that period, which was a kind of implicit decision to go at life differently.”
He and his friends, O’Hagan explains, rejected the values of their fathers’ generation. “We weren’t sitting around the pub being misogynistic, racist, and sexist. We were sitting around talking about the NME or how much we loved Brookside and Neil Jordan films. We were fascinated by what was happening in American culture, by CND, by resisting. Our fathers might have been on the left, but it was the ‘My wife better get the dinner on the table’ version.”
O’Hagan mentioned earlier that he wanted Mayflies to be adapted by a Scottish company, but part of why the novel has been so successful is that its bittersweet depiction of friendship across decades speaks to anyone who has had pals they love and cherish. “For me, the particular is the universal,” says Harrison. “I mean, I grew up quite posh in Norfolk; I couldn’t be further away from these boys from Ayrshire in terms of my background. But that’s the joy of it, it still resonated across that class divide.”
“These types of bonds and friendships are universal,” adds O’Hagan. “I could see a manifestation of this story in any country in South America or Africa or Australia. And in class terms, too, a bunch of boys from Eton or Harrow could have a similar sense of valuing each other.
“I love the idea that stories can cross all boundaries. In this particular case, these boys come from this town, at that time and have that kind of lingo, and I wanted to dive into that. I’m happy to see that Ben’s also interested in that milieu, but if he’d come to me and said, ‘Actually, I quite like the idea of setting this in a series of igloos,’ I would have been interested in that too.”
That’s a fascinating prospect, but I note the music would probably be a bit different. “Yes,” laughs O’Hagan. “Maybe more Björk.”
Mayflies, Brown’s of Leith, 7-30 Aug (not 11, 18, 25), 4pm