f you were in Edinburgh during the 1977 festival there were two shows you couldn’t miss. One was the revue Beyond a Joke starring a young unknown called Rowan Atkinson. The other, down at the old Calton Studios, was a three-hander called Writer’s Cramp. The exuberant comedy by first-time playwright John Byrne was one of those word-of-mouth hits that only the fringe could produce. The tiny venue was so packed that critic Michael Coveney had to crouch under a canvas chair occupied by a friend of the mother of actor Bill Paterson. “I have always retained a soft spot, and a bad back, for this wonderfully entertaining and freeform spoof revue,” he later wrote. At another performance, the audience were asked to shove along so Sean Connery could sit beside his friend Billy Connolly. The Scotsman newspaper gave it a Fringe First award. Director Robin Lefevre said he’d never seen notices like it. All this, as Byrne remembers, for a ticket price of just 50p. “When I’m writing, if I don’t laugh inwardly or outwardly, it gets tossed out,” says the 81-year-old, who has returned to the play for a female-centred reworking called Tennis Elbow. “I keep going until I’m on the floor.” Predating the Spinal Tap-style mockumentaries of the 80s, Writer’s Cramp introduced the Nitshill Writing Circle as it celebrates its mentor Francis Seneca McDade. Despite the circle’s enthusiasm, McDade is a mediocrity who has failed with equal aplomb in all the arts. With public-school bravado, he has turned from poetry to painting, journalism and literature, learning nothing from his flops. He is perennially broke. The play was a send-up of the high-culture values of BBC arts broadcasts and the pretensions of a bourgeois establishment. “John was in tune with the zeitgeist,” says Paterson, who played McDade. “All the references to Scottish-isms were in the memory of the audience. Rock’n’roll, the attempt to be hip in the 50s … it was marinated in those cultural references that were spot on.” Byrne had got to know the actors in his capacity as a stage designer. He was responsible for the pop-up book set for 7:84’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil. He’d handed Paterson an early draft of the play, known then as A Literary Bent, which in turn led to a radio commission from Marilyn Imrie. This half-hour version inspired Byrne to write it for the stage with a slimmed-down cast of three. “The three of us knew this was exceptional,” says Alex Norton, who played half a dozen characters. “It was the most creative thing I’ve ever worked on. We played it straight. This was going to be a tribute, a homage to McDade and, of course, the joke is he’s terrible. Playing it straight was one of the things that made it work.” John Bett, the original narrator, agrees: “We were almost offended when they laughed and looked rather surprised they should treat our hero in such a fashion.” “As the Nitshill Writing Circle and the Busby Sketch Club, we were presenting the work of a genius,” says Paterson, who has joined our Zoom conversation sitting next to a period railway sign from Nitshill railway station. He has also dug out a copy of the original programme, which pretended to be the circle’s newsletter. He reads aloud: “The play based on the life of McDade has run into some difficulties in rehearsal. According to reliable sources, the actors taking part have been evicted from the rehearsal room at the clinic, Causeyside Street, Paisley, because of what was described as ‘a right carry on …’” Paterson adds: “You get that in the programme before the show starts. That’s why people were on their knees when it began.” The play transferred to the Bush theatre, London, and then in 1980 to Hampstead theatre. It delighted audiences in Dublin and confounded them in the Netherlands. “In Amsterdam one night, they didn’t come back after the interval,” Bett laughs. “It led to Brexit in many ways,” Paterson quips. Now, as part of the Sound Stage audio collaboration between Pitlochry Festival theatre and the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, Byrne has reworked Writer’s Cramp as Tennis Elbow, a gender-swapped version in which Kirsty Stuart’s Pamela Crichton-Capers is the deluded artist. “I always wanted to do the distaff side, and I chose another minor ailment for the title,” says the playwright. Taking on Bett’s role as the narrator, Maureen Beattie relishes the challenge of a text that Byrne describes as “one-eighth you’re listening to and seven-eighths that’s ballast”. “You get on a surfboard and the language takes you along,” says Beattie. “Because what John writes is so multilayered, you need physical strength to carry the thoughts from the beginning of that sentence through to the end. It’s glorious to have it aired because it’s unlike anything I’ve ever been involved in.” Tennis Elbow is available online from the Pitlochry Festival theatre and Edinburgh Lyceum from 30 April to 8 May.