When Michael Healey went to work as an actor during 1995's Blyth Festival in rural Ontario, Canada, he tapped into a piece of living history which, 20-odd years earlier, had caused a seismic shift in home-grown Canadian culture that still resonates today.

Healey's play, The Drawer Boy, was inspired by The Farm Show, an early 1970s experiment in verbatim theatre created collectively by an idealistic group of young theatre-makers high on the spirit of the 1960s counter-culture. After speaking to local farmers as well as veteran colleagues, Healey wrote a further modern classic for Canada to add to its increasingly confident canon. Yet The Drawer Boy is no simplistic homage to its inspiration. Its gentle set-up of a young actor on the doorstep of two fiftysomethings is a complex study of how the most intimate of mythologies helps us survive.

"I was already writing a play about people whose lives revolved around myth and ritual," says Healey in the run-up to The Drawer Boy's Scottish premiere at Glasgow's Tron Theatre. "But I didn't know where things would go. Then I got talking to some people who had some oblique connection to The Farm Show. They talked as if it had just happened last year rather than 25 years ago."

Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille, which instigated The Farm Show, was founded in 1968. It was one of the first companies to break free of the twin colonial strangleholds of America and Britain which dominated mainstream Canadian theatre at the time.

"We had some indigenous theatre," Healey recalls. "but not much. It was the early 1970s, and ideas of collectivism and documentary theatre were to the fore. It's probably overstating things to call The Farm Show revolutionary, but it gave theatre in Canada a focus."

There are very clear parallels with Theatre Passe Muraille's working methods elsewhere at the time. In England, Max Stafford-Clark's Joint Stock company was founded on ideas of collective creativity, while John McGrath's original 7:84 theatre company explored indigenous culture in a colonised country with The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil. Healey, though, is keen to emphasise the specific Canadian context of both The Drawer Boy and The Farm Show.

"Our country's only just over 100 years old," he says. "So we were creating our own tradition."

It's a tradition that has consistently found favour in Scotland, particularly at The Tron, where two plays by Canadian writer John Mighton have been produced. Mighton, too, has worked at Theatre Passe Muraille, and both Possible Worlds and Half Life tapped into a rich vein of Canadian sensibility. Going further back, The Tron presented several Scots translations of Quebecois writer Michel Tremblay, whose work was first seen in Scotland when Tarragon Theatre of Toronto produced his Albertine in Five Times at the 1986 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

The Farm Show's collectivist ideals of their time and some of its ideology can't help but look naïve.

"A lot of things at that time were hugely important," says Healey, "but some things were funny as well, like actors walking around pretending to be chickens, which I poke gentle fun at in The Drawer Boy. Miles, the actor in the play, is basically a version of me when I graduated from college. At that time I had this all-consuming belief that I could play any part, and had quite specific ideas about what a good night at the theatre could be. What he does in my play is exactly what happened in making The Farm Show - having to knock on some farmer's door and say what they wanted to do."

Today, The Farm Show is an integral part of the Canadian repertoire, to the extent that its original director, Paul Thompson, occasionally goes to see his original cast and, in true hippy fashion, hands over their share of royalty cash. The Drawer Boy taps into something similarly popular. "There's a weird alchemy about some plays," says Healey, who's looking forward to seeing the Toronto leg of the National Theatre of Scotland's world tour of Black Watch - another play in which a writer appears researching real-life material. "Some work in workshop form but not in a full production, whereas others just catch fire. I don't know why it is with my play, but maybe the humour in it allows audiences a way in to its deeper elements. It does feel like its part of a second generation of Canadian theatre. One of the things I wanted to do with The Drawer Boy is say that I'm only here because of the struggles of the 1970s. At that time there was a great resistance to the idea that we could tell our own stories. But people were doing The Farm Show on a shoestring for the love of it. We're more confident about telling our stories now. Without The Farm Show, theatre in Canada would be in a very different place."