Brian Beacom

WE’VE all been there, haven’t we?

Gone off to another country on an incredible adventure, fallen in love with a heavenly creature . . .

Only to discover they have cloven feet, a forked tale and are seriously in need of professional help.

Well, Martin McCormick has certainly been there. To Los Angeles in fact, and he did indeed fall for an angel in blue jeans.

However, given actor Martin is also one of Scotland’s hottest young playwrights - he has four scripts in production this year- the greatest tragedy would be not to write about his incredible love story.

“The RSAMD at the time (he graduated in 2007) ran an exchange programme whereby students could go to the States,” he recalls of the American adventure.

“In second year I put my hand up to go and was lucky enough to be selected.

“So off I went to this experimental arts college north of LA, which had once been a hippy commune.”

Martin loved it from the moment he arrived.

“Clothes were optional at this place,” he says, laughing. “It was a massive culture shock.”

It was far from Drumchapel where he grew up, and indeed had been an alter boy partner to James McAvoy.

“Meanwhile, I was cutting about in a my Scotland top and somehow I felt a little invincible. Thanks to my accent I was an exotic to them, and somehow it made me more attractive to the opposite sex.”

He was certainly seen as attractive by one young American lady.

“ I fell totally head-over-heels with this woman who was on the course,” he says, the passion in his voice reflecting his feelings at the time.

His six month stint over, it was a disconsolate love-struck Martin who returned home to a Scotland that now seemed to be all the more a dark and depressing.

His glow of invincibility had all but disappeared. But not quite. He knew his very own Miss America was set to come to stay, as part of her exchange programme.

However, disaster struck. Martin took a phone call telling him his angel had been in a serious car crash.

What to do? For the besotted young Scot, there was only one answer.

“I dropped everything and jumped on a plane to America,” he recalls, with a wry grin.

“I headed for her home town, which turned out she lived in South Bend, Indiana.”

This was far from the glamour of liberal Los Angeles. People here not only wore clothes, they wore the demeanour of white, mid-western Conservative America.

Martin, who began a degree in Quantity Surveying, before getting a taste for am-dram and dropping out to do an HNC in drama at Coatbridge College, was to encounter other problems.

“The woman my girlfriend said was her mother was actually her biological mother’s partner whom she had been brought up by.

“And from the moment I arrived, this step-mother woman decided I was her enemy.

But there was worse to come.

“The girl (he doesn’t name her in the play) I’d been in love with was so incredibly medicated I could hardly have a conversation with her,” he says on meeting his Angel.

“This woman seemed to have undergone a complete personality transplant since the last time I’d seen her. She was in AA. She was going to church.

“There was nothing of her that reminded of the girl I’d fallen in love with.”

He adds; “And I soon learned the reason she’d crashed her car was because she had been drink driving - and gone to jail as a result.

“At this point she was “I thought; ‘This is the very antithesis of what I thought I knew of this woman.’”

His voice becomes reflective; “It was days of wine and roses when we met.”

Now it was wine alley and jail terms. Martin had no choice but to pack his bags and leave.

“But I had no money,” he recalls, grinning. “So I walked out the door and walked, the sort of melodramatic exit you expect from a flouncey actor.

“And I got totally lost. And I’d walked so far the little wheels at the back my suitcase had worn away.

“By nighttime I was dragging this case around and it was literally sparking off the pavement. Then I found myself in this ghetto project and thankfully I was rescued by a bloke who said to me , in very dramatic voice, ‘Get in the car if you want to live.’ “

Amazingly, (you couldn’t make this up) the African-American guy who’d rescued Martin revealed he’d been in a similar situation once in Italy, thanks to a failed romance.

“He knew exactly what I was going through. And he even gave me money so I was able to fly home.”

It’s a tragic tale, but also an uplifting one, in that Martin, befitting the Livingstone panto which Martin also writes.

It’s certainly one that had to be told. And the result is South Bend, in which Martin tells his tale of young love.

He is aided and abetted by Jess Chanliau a recent RCS graduate, (and part American) who plays the woman and around 20 other characters, and Dave Pollock, who becomes Martin’s Scottish conscience, a sort of Jiminy Cricket voice.

And he certainly needed one.

Right now, Martin is married to actress wife and the couple have two wonderful kids.

But you suggest, that may never have happened if he’d taken a maddie and run off to Vegas and married this rather fragile creature?

“Well, it’s funny you should say that,” he says, laughing. (It’s easy to laugh after a long period of time.)

“We did take a mad road trip to Vegas one time and it very nearly happened.

“Thankfully, that wee voice in my head appeared to tell me it was not quite right.”

This American lady must have been a helluva good actress to be able to convince she was worth running off with to the Elvis Chapel?

“What she had done was get out of small town America and reinvent herself, just as so many Hollywood stars had done in the past.

“She had changed her name and moved on from her past life.”

He adds; “But yes, I glad it worked out the way it has.

Indeed. He can now focus on writing and looking after the kids while his wife is currently filming BBC drama Shetland.

But what did Kirsty say when he said he was writing a play about a former lover?

“Here’s the thing; Kirsty has a great memory and as an actor I read my lines of new plays with her. Her memory is so good she remembers all the lines.

“ But because this piece is so autobiographical, I didn’t need her to run lines with me.

“As a result, when she came to see South Bend for the first time she had no idea what she was about to see.”

He adds, laughing; “I think she was mortified. But I did explain that you’re a very different person in your twenties.

“And I tell myself folk have done worse.”

*South Bend, The Tron Theatre, until Saturday.