SCOTTISH actor Tam Dean Burn was desperate to talk to fellow Scot and author Luke Sutherland. Only he had lost his mobile phone with his number on it.

“I was on a number 55 bus in Clerkenwell and who should come down the stairs but Luke,” he reports. It was, he says, just a number of coincidences connected with his one-man play, Venus As a Boy, which he brings to Liverpool’s Unity Theatre for three nights from Thursday.

Burn had met Sutherland when he read at the launch of his Whitbread-nominated first novel Jelly Roll about a jazz band touring the Scottish highlands.

Now he was given a proof copy of Sutherland’s latest book which just happened to be Venus As a Boy.

It was a strange book about a boy from Orkney who finds he has the ability to give amazing sexual love to anyone, man or woman.

He sets out on a journey to London looking for true love but ending up as a male prostitute and eventually finding his body turning to gold.

Burn realised this could make a great stage drama but, given the nature of the book, found problems in getting backing. Eventually, the National Theatre of Scotland Workshop – “which does things out of the ordinary” – took it up and Dean did the adaptation.

He wanted his stage tour to make the same journey as the main character in the book, from Orkney to London. But was Orkney ready for a play about the power of sex?

He opened at the Gable End Theatre in the island of Hoy, home to just 400 people (the theatre was a legacy of wartime when troops were stationed there).

“They loved it,” he says. “The thing is there is something in it for everybody. Women often cry and I had an 86-year-old woman coming up later to say how much she enjoyed it.”

In the event, he did three different venues in the area to great success and took it to Edinburgh, Glasgow and eventually London. Liverpool – where it is being staged as part of the Homotopia gay festival – is “a sort of extra. There is no direct connection with the book.”

Travelling with him on the tour and providing live music for the play is the author himself, Luke Sutherland. “He is a musician as well as a writer and was initially just going to do one show at the St. Magnus Festival which is really a music festival. But he was up for the tour and he has stayed with me, playing violin and guitar and is now an essential part of it.”

But for all its oddness, Burn suggests it is a play that anyone can enjoy. And as for his leading character’s body turning gold, he has a theory. “It might be jaundice,” he says. “But who is to say what is right or wrong?”

* VENUS as a Boy is at the Unity Theatre, Liverpool, from Thursday for three nights.