Val McDermid's new play has been 40 years in the making

The Herald Scotland

10-07-2025

The crime writer's long-time ambition to tackle the unsolved mystery over the death of 16th century English playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe is about to be realised at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, which has just been taken over by the Perthshire-born actor.
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McDermid sent Cumming her unperformed script for 'And Midnight Never Come' after plans to bring it to the stage of one of Edinburgh's best-known theatres were abandoned due to a lack of funding.
However the play has been rebooted by Cumming in his first year as artistic director at Pitlochry, after agreeing to stage a special 'script-in-hand reading' ahead of his first season of full-scale productions in 2026.
Alan Cumming is helping to bring Val McDermid's new play to the stage. (Image: Supplied)
McDermid is working with director Philip Howard, former artistic director of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, to bring to life her script, which will be performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival the night after its Pitlochry premiere.
And Midnight Never Come will focus on the run-up to the death of Marlowe, who was said to have been fatally stabbed in a guest house in Kent on May 30, 1593.
Crime writer Val McDermid has sold more than 19 million books to date. (Image: PA)
There have been centuries of debate and conflicting theories over Marlowe's death, including claims that he may have been killed over an involvement with espionage, was assassinated on the orders of Queen Elizabeth I, was targeted for his religious beliefs or was murdered by a former lover.
McDermid, from Kirkcaldy in Fife, initially pursued a career as a journalist after studying English at Oxford University.
She said: 'I was captivated by Marlowe as a writer when I was an undergraduate student. When I read up on what is known about his life I found it fascinating.
"The more I read and discovered the more the version of his death seemed to be implausible.
'I came up with my own theory about what happened to him and that's what underpins the play, although I don't want to say any more about that theory. People will have to come and see it for themselves.
'When you are writing something that is rooted in the past you know certain things. It's about trying to come up with a story that makes sense with the facts that we know. That's what I've done with Marlowe.
"My first attempts at this were more than 40 years ago. I just couldn't work out how to do it structurally and tell the story that I had in my head. I went back to it time and again over the years."
McDermid has sold more than 19 million books and seen her work translated into more than 40 different languages since her first attempt at a novel when she was working as a trainee journalist in Devon.
She recalled: 'My first attempt at a book was full of tortured relationships and all the big emotions – grief, rage, jealousy and love. It was truly terrible although I did finish it.
'But I also sent it to a friend of mine who was an actor and she said to me: 'I don't know much about books, but I think this would make a really good play.'
'I thought: 'That's easy. I'll just cross out the descriptions and leave in the speaking bits.' That's essentially what I did.'
'I wrote some extra scenes to cover the bits I'd crossed out and went to the local theatre. The director was very excited about it and said it would be perfect for a season of new plays.
'Completely by accident, I was a professionally performed playwright by the age of 23.
'I thought it was the start of something big and that I was going to be the new Harold Pinter, but it didn't work out that way.'
Although McDermid's debut was adapted by the BBC, her career as a playwright was halted when was dropped by her agent 'after a couple of years of not making him any money.'
The writer recalled: 'I just couldn't write any more plays because I didn't understand what I'd done right. The ambition and desire were there, but unfortunately skills and ability were not. Nowadays you can go off on a course and learn the nuts and bolts of your craft. But that wasn't really available back then.
'I just didn't know what I was supposed to be doing. I thought I should go off and do something that I understood how it worked. I had read a lot of crime fiction since I was about nine years old, so I thought I could maybe have a crack at a crime novel.
'At the time, in the early 1980s, the only British crime fiction that was around were village mysteries and police procedurals. I felt I didn't know enough about the police to write a convincing police procedural novel, so I got a bit stuck.
'What finally got me moving was when a friend of mine who had moved to America sent me a copy of Sara Paretsky's first novel, one of the early iterations of so-called new-wave feminist crime fiction.
'Her private eye character was a woman who had a brain and a sense of humour. She didn't rely on the guys to do the heavy lifting. When the going got tough she just got tougher. What I also liked about her novel was its strong sense of place. There was a sense that the story arose from the city of Chicago. It had a sense of social politics as well. That book really inspired me to get started.'
McDermid's debut novel, Report for Murder, was published in 1987 and kick-started a career which has seen her write more than 50 books to date, and develop five separate series. One of the most recent, focusing on the detective Karen Pirie, is about to return to ITV for a second series this month, with Lauren Lyle returning to the lead role.
McDermid's return to theatre work has emerged seven years after a foray into the lunchtime drama series A Play, A Pie and A Pint, with political comedy Margaret Saves Scotland, about a Yorkshire schoolgirl who returns from a holiday filled with a burning desire for Scottish independence.
The experience of working on that show with director Marilyn Imrie persuaded McDermid to return to the idea of a play about the Marlowe mystery several decades after she had first started to work on it.
McDermid's play, which depicts the last day of Marlowe's life as well as key events in his life, was snapped up by the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh and went into development for a full production, which was shelved after the theatre decided it was unaffordable.
McDermid was in talks over a possible performance of her script at last year's book festival, which did not go ahead due to a programme organised to mark 200 years of James Hogg's novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
Within weeks, though, Cumming had been unveiled as Pitlochry Festival Theatre's new artistic director.
McDermid said: 'When Alan took over at Pitlochry I thought: 'I'll let Alan take a look at it.'
'He got very excited about it and said: 'This is fantastic, I love it, we must talk about it.'
'He said would talk to me about it at the Winter Words book festival earlier this year.
'The weekend went on and nothing had happened. I said to my partner: 'I think he was just being nice.'
'After the final event at the festival, he collared me and said: 'We have to talk now!'
'He told me he wanted to do a rehearsed reading of it. I said that the Edinburgh book festival had talked about doing that, but it hadn't actually happened. He suggested that it was done as a joint project. Two days later we were all in a Zoom call to sort out the details. It was amazing.
'My main hope now is that people out and enjoy it. I also hope that a producing theatre will have someone in the audience who thinks: 'We should be putting this on stage.'
'I know theatres have timetables, schedules and budgets. I'm not putting any pressure on anyone to do it.
'But I would love it if it was on at Pitlochry because there is such a great team there and it's a place where you can have a real day out. They've got a wonderful restaurant, you can eat in the restaurant and then go and see a play.
'Alan is a man of great passions, his work-rate is phenomenal, and he just makes things happen for people. He's the kind of person we need working in the arts at the moment.'
McDermid's Marlowe play will finally see the light of day in Pitlochry and Edinburgh in the wake of her book interpreting the story of Lady Macbeth.
She said: 'My idea of the perfect novel is one where you don't have to do any research at all because you already know everything you need to know. But that never happens.
'With historical stuff, it's a case of digging down, looking at all the available sources and working your way through them. It just takes a bit longer before you can get started on the writing.
'It does create more work when you write historical books, but when an idea roots itself in your head the only way you can get rid of it is to write it."