Among the dirt and lazy beds the plot thickens

KIM Millar couldn’t have timed the arrival of her latest play better had she an armful of Swiss watches running from wrist to elbow. The TV scriptwriter has set her new theatre musical, The Worm Who Turned, in the world of vegetables, which as we know is a subject as hot as a potato.

Or more precisely, the setting is an allotment. But how, you are wondering, can the cold hard ground which somehow offers up earthly delights in the form of cabbages, carrots – and Therese Coffey’s favourite, the humble tumshie – provide the conflict and drama from which comedy can spring?

Ah, well. It transpires that Juliet Allotments are the most sought-after allotments in Glasgow’s west end. Property developers are eyeing the land in the way supermarket shoppers eye up a luscious green pepper.

We learn that a company wishes to build luxury flats, but what will the allotment owners do? Will they bend, and take the bribes? Or dig in and protect their beetroots with all the energy they can muster?

Millar, whose last Oran Mor play was Mr Moonlight, the hugely successful story of Frankie Vaughn’s Glasgow adventure, admits she knew little of allotments before setting her story in the world of lettuce and cucumbers.

“I went to see one, to get an idea of what they were about,” she recalls of her research. And it was like a little village, with a toilet block, laid out in the Berlin allotment model.

“But of course, to write a play set in this world you have to create relationship conflict, and what I learned was that lots of people don’t actually go to their allotments to dig – they go to relax, to have a coffee and a bun and to chat with friends.

“That made me think about the partners who don’t go to the allotments. Does this suggest broken relationships? And I came up with this sex triangle idea.”

Miller reveals that her inspiration for the love conflict – getting dirty in the dirt – arrived from unusual source material.

“One of my favourite French films is Les Diaboliques,” she says, of the 1955 murder revenge tale. “And I’ve been reading Blott on the Landscape, Tom Sharpe’s depiction of how relationships break down – it’s wonderful.”

It sounds a heady mix. But to add to all that, the play features eight songs by Andy McGregor, the writer behind incredible theatre successes such as Crocodile Rock and Spuds. “Andy’s songs are fantastic,” says Millar.

“He knew instinctively how to capture the mood of the piece and how to use songs to take the

story forward. I never imagined this play would develop into a musical when I began writing, but I’m so glad it has. When you add to that the amazing talent of the actors, the result looks terrific.”

The play features George Drennan as Ford, one of the committee members. Clare Waugh plays Jane the treasurer and Helen Logan plays Ford’s wife.

But will the play sell the idea of allotments to those who may consider that world to be a little, well, wormy and dull? “I don’t know, but I want an allotment,” says the writer, smiling.

“They’re fantastic, and the perfect place to escape to. And you can really imagine lots more going on there than you would suspect.”

The Worm Who Turned is set in the earthy world of allotment gardening

The Worm Who Turned is showing at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until Saturday.