FORTY years ago this month, an incendiary new play was performed at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre Club. Co-written by playwright Tom McGrath and convicted killer Jimmy Boyle, The Hard Man is based on Boyle’s own story and ends with Gorbals-born gangster, Johnny Byrne, serving life for murder, staging a dirty protest and being battered black and blue by prison officers in the “cages” – the infamous segregation unit – at Inverness Prison. But he remains utterly defiant.

Having been revived occasionally since then, the work is coming back to the Traverse as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF). Neither a film nor a fully-staged version, it will take the form of a script-reading. And the lead role of Byrne – the violent, articulate, self-aware underworld enforcer – is being taken by none other than actor Kate Dickie.

When we meet at Glasgow’s CCA, Dickie tells me she was “immediately intrigued” when offered the role by Niall Greig Fulton, programmer of the film festival’s retrospective strand, The Future Is History. “I had read The Hard Man years ago and I remember it had a real impact on me,” says the actor. “Niall gave me a copy and I read it and I was like, ‘Wow, this is so pertinent today’. It’s sad how pertinent it still is, of just how maligned the working class and the poor are, and how circumstances can, in a lot of ways, simply not help.”

Dickie, 46, is one of Scotland’s pre-eminent actors. Her awards-laden career includes a truly diverse array of characters in an equally diverting range of films – Red Road, Filth, The Witch, For Those In Peril, Donkeys, Prometheus, Prevenge. On TV, she has appeared in everything from Tinsel Town to Game Of Thrones, but she has also taken part in a long list of stage productions, including The Entertainer and the National Theatre of Scotland’s Aalst.

The decision to cast her as Byrne in next month’s Tam Dean Burn-directed reading is an imaginative one and entirely in keeping with the career choices of an actor to whom the words “fearless” and “frank” have frequently been applied.

“What interests me about characters is what makes them behave in the way they do,” says Dickie. “Johnny Byrne is the perpetrator of the gang in the play but the way I see it, the reason for what he does is to do with his father disappearing one day. Byrne looks out the window, his father’s car is gone. The family goes into the poorhouse: he gets mocked for being poor and wearing trampy clothes. For me, that’s the ‘click’ into him. He doesn’t have ambition outwith his life. He didn’t think, ‘I can get out of this’; he decides he’s going to be the best gangster, and he’s never going to be poor, or be mocked, again.

“I also started researching girl gangs, and looking at women and violence,” she adds. “In girl gangs you get a lot of initiation. There’s a lot of grooming, actually, and a lot of sexual exploitation.”

When Tom McGrath was researching the play four long decades ago, he worked with Boyle for several months in Barlinnie’s Special Unit, where Boyle then was, and discussed his life in detail. McGrath later said that Boyle was a “man with a question mark over his head: I had to dramatise that question mark”. The play set out to look at an individual’s culpability, but at society’s, too.

It also examined “the Scottish alpha male and how he functioned”, says Niall Greig Fulton, who decided to “switch the gender of the Hard Man” because: “The questions of identity that that raises – it brings so much to the table instantly. I think that, coupled with Kate Dickie’s performance, is going to make this absolutely unmissable.”

Meanwhile, director Tam Dean Burn describes Dickie as “a great actor”, and says: “We know that she’ll inhabit [the role] fantastically.”

It would be hugely interesting if The Hardman could be turned into a film, with Byrne being played by a female actor – Dickie would be fascinating in the role. Is the world ready, I ask, for a film about a female gangster for whom violence, delivered with razors and hammers and fists, is a way of life, and who stages a dirty protest in her prison cage?

“I really think it is,” Dickie says without hesitation, “because traditionally women are cast as the nurturers in society. They give birth and traditionally look after the family and tend to the house and all that.

“These kind of expectations about women still very much exist. We might be heading towards a more equal society, but there’s everyday sexism and misogyny that goes on, even in small expectations [of women]. Women are whole, rounded people, like men, and they have many different aspects and have different upbringings, violent upbringings, and hardships, and I just think we do women an injustice not to show these possibilities or these actual realities.

“So I think the world is [ready] – or, if it isn’t, then it should be. There is that thing about women being nurturers, and society is more shocked as a whole if a violent act, or a murder, has been committed by a woman. There seems to be more disbelief about that.”

A few years ago, in Nicolas Winding Refn’s bloody, Bangkok-set Only God Forgives, Kristin Scott Thomas played against type as the icy, foul-mouthed boss of a powerful criminal group, who dominates her drug-smuggler son, played by Ryan Gosling. It’s a riveting performance, but it’s hard to avoid the thought that Dickie channelling Johnny Byrne would top even that.

“I would love [to do that role]”, she says. “There’s a lot of things to look at in those areas I was talking about. Characters tend to fascinate me; why I say yes to roles, or have interest in roles, is their background, and what shaped them, and what makes them – why they’re unhappy or why they’re angry or why they’re happy. The retrospective programme [at the film festival] is all about identity, after all.

“I get attracted to – I guess people see it as darkness; for me it’s about reasons for behaviour,” Dickie says on the subject matter of her preferred film roles. “I just think so much about people with things going on under the surface that you never know about. Or that you would write someone off as being – ‘oh, they’re horrible, you know, or really nasty, or they’re really defensive’. I’m always thinking, ‘Why? why? why?’ What has happened to them, why are they so nasty?

“That normally comes – for me, anyway – out of some insecurity or deep unhappiness or frustration. In the roles, I just get attracted by something that feels important. [The Hard Man] is that sort of thing. Byrne was so loved by his mum, but his environment was what it was. And I kept thinking, how would it feel to be abandoned, rejected by your father?”

She elaborates on the theme of prisons, and it turns out that her first professional play actually involved her working with some of the men in Barlinnie’s Special Unit. “It was with Irvine Allan’s company called Cat A, and we did a play called No Mean Fighter, which was based on [the Scottish Marxist] John Maclean”, she says.

“We went into the Special Unit and we worked with prisoners in there and got their stories, and talked to them about their wives; we got some female perspective when we were talking about, when men are in prison, how their wives and families are basically in prison thanks to this life they have … It’s something that has always interested me, as well as things like rehabilitation, and it feels like I’ve come round full circle with this reading of The Hard Man.”

Dickie was born in East Kilbride, though she never actually lived there. Her father was a dairy farmer-turned-professional gardener and the family moved to Couper Angus, then Ayr, then to an estate in Dumfries and Galloway. “I grew up having the run of that big estate. It was idyllic,” she says.

After she graduated, via the Scottish Youth Theatre, from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, she appeared in numerous TV and stage shows before making her feature film debut in 2006 in Andrea Arnold’s Glasgow-set Red Road.

Dickie is remarkable as Red Road’s Jackie, a CCTV operator hollowed out by grief after a bereavement; as the noted American film critic Roger Ebert observed: “We immediately sense that Jackie is harbouring a darkness and despair that isolates her from everyone else.” The New York Times said of her: “She is a haunted, haunting presence, keeping an almost terrifying intensity hidden just beneath her drab exterior.”

Dickie herself has long credited Arnold, insisting that the director “was the one who kept telling me: less acting. She taught me so much”. Her performance in Red Road earned her a clutch of nominations and awards, including Bafta Scotland Best Actress in a Scottish Film (an accolade she won again last year, for Couple In A Hole).

Subsequent films saw her working across various genres, from supernatural thrillers (Outcast, in which she starred with James Nesbitt), science fiction (Prometheus, directed by Ridley Scott) and crime comedy (Filth, adapted from Irvine Welsh’s bestseller). She played a heroin addict in Wasted and a grieving mother in Morag McKinnon’s Donkeys, a successor of sorts to Red Road. She had a brief role in Scott Graham’s excellent Shell, and was quietly brilliant both in Paul Wright’s For Those In Peril, and in the supernatural horror, The Witch, which was set in New England in 1630.

She has just finished a short film (one of many she has done over the years) called Natalie. Natalie, she explains in a video on the fundraising website Kickstarter, “grew up as a little boy and is now a confident woman. She lives with her husband and they’re really happy, and she’s accepting and happy with who she is”. The film sees her returning to her family to sort out “a few wee niggles from her past”.

Eight years ago, when Dickie was first approached about the role by writer/director Mikey Murray, the subject of transgenderism was not being discussed. “It wasn’t being taken seriously then,” she recalls, “and I was fascinated by this character and what she had come through.

“Eight years on, Mikey got some money and [the project] just started to fit in. I had a long discussion with Mikey about re-casting it because I felt that things had at least moved on a little about transgender issues and the way society is more educated, I guess, and more open, about it now. I felt it was a really important subject matter; he has written a beautiful film, with a beautiful cast.” The film was shot in Carnoustie, “and honestly, the locals gave up their beds, their houses, they gave up their time. The producer’s mum and her friend and Mikey’s mum all made food for the crew. It was such a labour of love”.

Dickie also has a role in Karen Gillan’s forthcoming directorial debut, The Party’s Just Beginning, in which her co-stars include Paul Higgins, her screen husband in Couple In A Hole.

An enthusiastic Twitter-user, Dickie recently revealed on the social media platform that she’d been working again with Alice Lowe, the director of the macabre, violent Prevenge, which came out earlier this year. “I do have some things coming up”, she concedes now, “but I’m not allowed to talk about it. All will be revealed soon.”

She talks about her new Glasgow flat (she tweeted a picture of her feet toasting in front of a coal fire with the words: “Our first fire of many in the new flat and I’m actually squealing with delight”). Dickie and her partner Kenny, technical manager at the CCA, have a 13-year-old daughter, Molly.

Dickie is an engaging and generous interviewee, full of praise for people she has worked with. She says enthusiastically that she would love to work with the Dardenne filmmaker brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, “and then there’s the Coen brothers, who I love”. She admits that she has yet to watch Breaking Bad, being slightly intimated by the prospect of ploughing through all 62 episodes. And though she has yet to watch La La Land in its entirety, she has seen its dazzling opening dance sequence on the freeway, and was blown away by it.

So, if she were cast away on a desert island, what are the eight films she’d take with her? “Oh my God,” she says, trying, as we all would, to narrow her favourite films down to just eight. “Tyrannosaur, and Orphans,” she begins. “Wait ‘til I think ... The Lives Of Others – God, I loved that film. I, Daniel Blake. London To Brighton. Rear Window, one of my favourite older ones. Thelma And Louise, a massive film for me. Wild At Heart. Ratcatcher. 45 Years. Shane Meadows’s films. Andrea Arnold’s films. Fight Club, American Beauty. There’s a film called Angry Indian Goddesses – have you seen it? Literally, there are so many great filmmakers out there, and there are so many great films that I need to watch as well”.

She’s still working on the list when with a laugh she recalls something that happened when she emerged from a screening of Ken Loach’s deeply moving I, Daniel Blake, at the Dinard Film Festival in Brittany.

“I was howling and sobbing, and when I came out an older couple wanted a selfie with me. I was like, ‘Oh God, not now, please …’ But they insisted. So this couple have a photo with me looking all teary and upset.” Ah, the price of fame.

The Hard Man shows on June 24 at the Traverse 1, Edinburgh at 8.15pm as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. The Sunday Herald is the festival’s media partner. The full programme will be announced next week www.edfilmfest.org.uk