JINGS, crivens (and any other couthy Scots expletive you can come up with). How do you take an iconic, but two-dimensional cartoon strip such as The Broons and turn it into a braw, living, breathing, stage show?

How do you take a piece of Scots history conceived when the Spanish Civil War was raging and Billy Butlin was opening his first holiday camp, and present it in a modern context? And perhaps more to the point, how you give it a two-hour dramatic form, comedic value and a narrative strong enough to stop an audience from getting scunnered?

That’s the task facing Glasgow-born playwright Rob Drummond, who is taking this 1936 Sunday Post comic strip concept, always based on simple misunderstanding (for instance, the family hear Granpaw has bought a horse – six Chinese whispers later we learn it’s a clothes horse) and turning it into a nationally touring show. No pressure there then, Rob.

“You’re right,” says Drummond, smiling. “When David Hutchinson of theatre producers Sell A Door asked me to write the stage play I was taken aback. I said, ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right person?’ You see, a lot of the theatre I do is experimental and less populist, although I’ve certainly got nothing against populism.”

Drummond is the man behind marquee theatre events such as Bullet Catch and Wrestling, in which he studied the forms for months before performing as a professional magician and wrestler. He is a writer who analyses the human condition, tries to work out why we behave in the way we do. (In his play In Fidelity, Drummond played a writer considering having an affair.) He has written funny plays, but they were darkly funny, with human tragedy at their core. He has never entered the colourful world of black-and-white newspaper cartoon pages. Until now.

“We didn’t want to do an annual on stage, with eight frames and it looks like a sketch show,” he admits, smiling. “It would die on it’s a***. So what I’ve done is tried to find a mix of homage and new material.

“What we are trying to do with the stage show is to create something that’s faithful to the spirit of the cartoon strip, and deferential to the material, but also has something to say.”

How much of the intricacies of the mind can he reveal in a show about cartoon characters? “That was the challenge,” he says. “I read something from every decade of the cartoons and what I found amongst the comedy and farce was lots of pathos and emotion, which I never saw as a kid. Then one strip in particular struck home. Back in the 1970s, Maggie was getting married and Maw Broon (played by River City star Joyce Falconer) was crying at the loss. The readers knew why. How could Maw survive without her kids? She is called ‘Maw Broon’ after all. She doesn’t even have a first name.”

The Broons stage show features Maggie (Kim Allan) getting married. Again. Back in 1977, the Sunday Post strip featured her engagement. The following week it was as if it had never happened. Clearly, the writers feared they had opened Pandora’s Box. Drummond has re-opened it. “And now each of the Broons kids question if they should remain in the house they’ve lived in for 80 years – although they don’t use that time reference,” says the award-winning writer. “It’s a story about whether change is a good thing.”

Drummond reckons the theme of change and fear is entirely of the moment. “Given we are in a post-Brexit, post-referendum country, it’s really relevant this story is about a family trying to stick together and work out what they are as a unit, and somehow retain their Broonsianism.”

This isn’t a single-themed theatre show. That would never work. “Every character has their own storyline, which is a bit Tarantino-esque, and they all overlap. And in this way you have fast-paced movement. So there are loads of subplots going on which all feed into the main plot. And some of the scenes reference [current Broons] writer Maurice Heggie’s favourite strips.”

The original creators were writer/editor RD Low and artist Dudley D Watkins. How can the strip's humour translate onto the theatre stage? “Yes, it’s very much misunderstanding humour," says Drummond. "Paw says he has to get up at eight o’clock and the Bairn misunderstands and thinks he says ‘Potato clock’. And she makes him a potato clock. That’s the charm of it. And we have some of that. But running alongside the main plot are the sub plots.”

The Broons, the comic strip, has evolved (somewhat) over the years and is set in modern times: bookish Horace has a laptop, the twins have mobile phones. But surely the modern-day sensibility would be all-pervasive, and the anachronistic 1930s behavioural patterns abandoned? If this truly were the 21st century, surely The Twins (Duncan Brown and Kevin Lennon) would be off backpacking in Thailand, posting pictures on Facebook from a pole-dancing club? Maggie would be taking ecstasy at T In The Park and getting a Police Scotland caution. Daphne (Laura Szalecki) would be on Tinder every night searching for love. And Hen (Tyler Collins) with his very camp moustache and girl-less life would most likely be out as gay?

“Hen may be gay, but it was never said in the comic strip so to suggest that would not be Broonsian,” says Drummond. “But we do ask if Hen wants to go off and see the world. We do wonder if Joe (John Keilty) could still become a boxer? And there are little Easter eggs in there for the hard-core fan. We get to hint at why Grandpaw (Kern Falconer) is such a mischievous old codger. We give him a back story, and [Sunday Post publishers] DC Thomson have been very kind.”

DC Thomson have a reputation of being very tough and protective of their material over the years. “I’d heard that but I’ve never experienced it. They’ve been really nice. When I met with them early on I made sure to say this wasn’t going to be Rob Drummond’s version of The Broons. It was a show for the fans.”

The Broons may live 11-to-a-flat in 10 Glebe Street, but Auchentogle’s housing allocation unit will never come under scrutiny. “The Broons have changed slightly over the years to adjust to the time they find themselves but the core values – family, loyalty – remain. It’s a very Scottish thing. They work (as an entertainment form) because they are about community. It’s almost a socialist thing, even though they are a fairly conservative family. They are about looking after their own.”

Drummond adds, grinning: “What we have always had in the Broons is a family who squabble and fall out. And we think there is no coming back from this. But the last frame is always about them making up. This is timeless.”

Kim Allan plays Maggie in the stage show. But she never considered playing a cartoon character to be problematic. “Well, you don’t,” says the 23-year-old rising star of television and film. “The idea is to try and bring some truth to the character, play her as real. So I bring some of my own experiences to Maggie, about being a young woman having boyfriends, wanting to grow up. Maggie is a lot more glamorous than I am however, but I do belong to a loving family.”

Allan, who has starred in Outlander and Sky’s The Five adds: “My mum always says she wanted to be Maggie, this gorgeous woman who was a bit forward, who knows what she wants.”

But these days, Maggie would most likely be living with her boyfriend, or have a baby from an earlier relationship?

“Maybe, but what we focus on is the fact Maggie has a heart,” says the actor. “And that the Broons want the best for each other.”

Allan is delighted to be part of this production. “The producers have worked out that so many people who come to see this show won’t have been in a theatre before. They’re coming to see the Broons because it’s the Broons. That adds to the responsibility you feel, but also a sense of excitement.”

Still Game star Paul Riley plays Paw Broon. He admits that making the walrus-moustached, whimsical figure three-dimensional has been an interesting challenge. “Yes, for one thing, since we’ve never actually heard him speak we needed a voice. And we talked about that for a while and reckoned he’s sort of east coast, but not too near the ocean.

“What you do (to find the character) is look for clues in the cartoons, which centre around Paw.” Is Paw Broon henpecked? “No ... well, a little bit. Maw Broon is definitely the boss. But Paw knows who he is. You get a real sense of that.”

Riley, who starred in NTS theatre show Yer Granny, adds laughing: “I loved the Broons as a kid growing up in Glasgow, and I could never have imagined I’d one day play Paw Broon. But then I never imagined that one day Gregor Fisher would be my mother [as he did in Yer Granny].”

The Broons stage show features music from a range of decades, punctuating the emotion of a scene with song, from Frank Ifield to the Bluebells. But Rob Drummond is determined the script will operate on several levels, and still appeal to the die-hard Broonsians.

“I’ve tried to become an authority on the Broons,” he says. “You’ve got to know more than the majority of the audience, or you have no right to do it. But what I want is to create a show like Black Watch [the NTS worldwide success story]. It was populist but also brilliant. That’s the Holy Grail for me.”

Drummond grew up reading the Beano and the Dandy and in a sense he reveals his stage show is a homage to an entertainment form that may not be with us for too much longer.

“The Dandy folded,” he says softly. “I loved the Dandy. And who’s to say the Beano won’t go the same way? It’s the way of technology. Everything is going on online. And in this show I guess we’re teasing the idea the Broons may come to an end. So I guess this stage show about celebrating what we still have.”

The Broons tour begins in Perth Concert Hall on September 27 and visits Inverness, Kirkcaldy, Stirling, Aberdeen, Ayr, Dundee and Edinburgh, culminating at Glasgow Theatre Royal from November 7-12 (Mon-Sat eves 7.30pm

Thu & Sat mats 2.30pm)

Box Office 0844 871 7647 (bkg fee) Calls cost 7p per minute, plus your phone company’s access charge

www.atgtickets.com/glasgow (bkg fee)