‘I’m not a wrestler but I love a team sport,’ Nat McCleary tells me over a scratchy Zoom connection from a café in Portobello. Suitably enough for a writer whose debut theatre production (about a female wrestling team) unfolds against the ruddy backdrop of the Highland Games circuit, she’s been camping all weekend. Now, she’s low on bandwidth and sleep, but still full of energy. ‘I’m an avid footballer,’ she goes on. ‘I mean, don’t get me started, I hate the amount of money that’s in the game now. . . but at its core, I love football, the team aspect of it. Wrestling is a bit different because it’s an individual sport but you still have to compete as part of a group.’

Raised in Coatbridge by a Jamaican father and Scottish mother, McCleary played to a high level for Airdrie FC but had to quit when her theatre career took off. Still, Thrown is inspired partly by real-life locker-room discussions on gender and sexuality, and more so by the obligations of co-operation and respect that team sports place on their participants. The National Theatre Of Scotland production, directed by Johnny McKnight, tells the story of a crew of mismatched women (and one non-binary trainer) thrown together (geddit?) when they join a fledgling wrestling outfit.

As the narrative builds to a crunch match at the Highland Games, hidden fissures of character and background are revealed. In a touching climax, two lifelong companions (Adiza Shardow’s everywoman Jo and Chloe-Ann Tylor’s scrappy Chantelle) realise in bitter tears that their friendship might have reached the end of the line.

It’s clear from the play’s press night in Dunoon (another humid, rainy affair this CO2-fuelled El Niño summer) that Jo is partly a biographical construct. A half-Jamaican Scot raised in a white neighbourhood, her equilibrium is shattered by the arrival of wealthy, confident African-Scot Imogen (a bantery Efè Agwele). Back home from living in London, she introduces Jo to ideas like white privilege and gives her castor oil for her hair; white, working-class Chantelle is jealous of the new connection and it doesn’t take long for accusations of racism to start flying around.

McCleary, like Jo, didn’t see another mixed-race person until her mid-twenties when she moved to London. As a child, she recalls, ‘I used to colour myself in pink. I only reached for the brown crayons when I was drawing my dad.’ There’s a comparable moment midway through the play when Jo recalls her pre-teen horror at having dark nipples.

Then again, this isn’t just a work about race, and traces of writerly identity can be found in all the other characters too, particularly in trainer Pamela (a powerful turn from Lesley Hart). Having set the team up, Pamela attempts to hold it together with lots of new-age mantras on ‘internal validation’. But they’re in too much of a bind themself (literally: they’re flattening their chest and grappling with gender identity) to offer emotional consistency. McCleary says that she, like Pamela, leans into the ‘androgynous part of myself. I feel comfortable there. I think part of my wrestle is the constant sense that I ought to define and label myself. I just don’t see the benefit.’ Later on, we talk about how the well-intentioned profusion of new gender labels, intended to solve these pressures, might inadvertently increase them for some.

In the end, the task of peacekeeping falls to the loveable Helen (tiny, exponentially assertive Maureen Carr). She finds her mojo listening to Ludacris’ ‘Move Bitch’ and keeps the team in line with the practical slogans of an older generation, learned during a long and ultimately unsatisfying marriage.

On first appearance, this character might seem like light relief, perhaps even patronisingly portrayed. But by the end, Helen is the heroine, shouting down the warring clans of youngsters and helping Pamela with their last-chance-saloon fertility treatment. ‘She’s partly rooted in an experience I had with someone of an older generation who surprised me with their openness around my grappling with gender and sexuality,’ McCleary recalls. ‘But she also embodies a certain childlike curiosity that I worry we’re losing in our culture.’

As you might have inferred, there’s a lot going on in Thrown, including some ingeniously teed-up debates around the intersecting scales of class, wealth, racial identity, age, and gender that many Scottish women have to balance themselves across and between. Crammed into a tight hour-and-a-half, scenes move with a clattering speed worthy of TikTok. The cast bubbles with an energy to match the lines, and there’s a neat mirroring of the online culture Chantelle wants to conquer as an influencer in the production’s pace and jumpiness.

However, if this play is against anything, it is the absolutism of social-media politics. ‘There’s a reason I’m not on there,’ McCleary confides. ‘Rather than it being a platform for curiosity and connection it’s become a platform for opinion. We have a culture now where no one is listening because everyone is speaking.’ Indeed, what saves McCleary’s debut from a dogmatic tone is her evident disinterest in quick-fix answers. ‘I get it; people are sick of hearing about intersectionality. But I think the exhaustion comes when the aim is to convince the other. And this play is not about that. It’s about asking, how can we find a way through all this stuff with respect and empathy, if not with agreement?’

Thrown, Traverse Theatre, 3–27 August, times vary.