Actor Jack Lowden returns to cinema he helped save

Slow Horses star Lowden was in Edinburgh for the premiere of the screen version of The Fifth Step

It's exactly three years since Slow Horses star Jack Lowden picked up a Bafta Scotland award for his role as the poet Siegfried Sassoon in the film Benediction. He used the moment to appeal to the industry about the future of Edinburgh Filmhouse.

The cinema – along with the Belmont in Aberdeen and Edinburgh Film Festival – had closed abruptly just a month before when its parent company went into administration.

"We in this room have no cause without these cinemas," he told an audience in Glasgow.

"The stories we choose to tell, and the issues we choose to give voice to, remain untold and unheard without independent cinemas."

Director Finn den Hertog, writer David Ireland, and Jack Lowden attended the global premiere of The Fifth Step in Edinburgh on Tuesday

On Tuesday night, he returned to the cinema, of which he is now a patron, for the premiere of the screen version of The Fifth Step.

Originally presented last year in Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow by the National Theatre of Scotland, the latest recording by National Theatre Live was filmed during a sell-out run in London.

Written by Glasgow-based writer David Ireland, it stars Martin Freeman as a long-term member of Alcoholics Anonymous who becomes a sponsor to a newcomer, played by Lowden.

"It's something I've never done before and I think the fact that it's the National Theatre of Scotland and National Theatre Live and it's here, it's a great sort of synchronicity of brilliant organisations coming together," writer Ireland said.

Writer David Ireland says Jack Lowden (right) plays a younger version of him, and Martin Freeman an older version

Ireland wrote the part of Luka for Lowden.

Best known for stage plays like Ulster American (another Edinburgh festival hit which transferred to the West End and starred Woody Harrelson and Andy Serkis) and Cypress Avenue, Ireland drew on his own experiences as a young man in Edinburgh.

"I gave up drinking when I was 23 and became a Christian," he said.

"I started AA meetings in Edinburgh and, like Luka, I replaced drinking with films and going to the cinema. I'd come here to the Filmhouse to see films like O Brother Where Art Thou and Billy Elliot."

"So it's a weird sensation for me to be sitting here watching Jack play a younger version of me, and Martin Freeman an older version."

Both stage productions were directed by Finn den Hertog, who says he was "blown away" by the first draft.

"It was like nothing else I'd read," he said.

"It was great to mould a play around an actor and to see the way the response changed according to where it was."

"In Scotland, Luka was always the hero and the villain was the English sponsor. In London, it was the opposite. The well-meaning sponsor and the Scottish psychopath."

The one thing the play doesn't lose in translation is the dark humour at his heart.

According to Jack Lowden, it's "purposefully very shocking and funny".

"That's what I love to go to the theatre for, I get quite bored unless a show is one of those two things."

He describes The Fifth Step as "the most wonderful experience I have had on stage".

It's also his first stage appearance with the National Theatre of Scotland since 2011 when he appeared in their show Black Watch, shortly after graduating from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS).

In The Fifth Step, Jack Lowden is a newcomer to Alcoholics Anonymous who finds a sponsor in Martin Freeman's character

Last week he returned to receive an honorary doctorate from the RCS.

"It was a bit bizarre to be back where you trained but it was a lovely honour and to be given the chance to speak to the current students was the best bit because I know exactly what it feels like to be sat there."

The Fifth Step will release to cinemas from 27 November presented by Neal Street Productions, Playful Productions and National Theatre of Scotland in association with Nica Burns.