If you were to come up with a list of the Scottish playwrights least likely to write a musical about William Wallace, Rob Drummond’s name might be somewhere near the top. Musicals about icons of Scottish history have no more been his thing than plays about bagpipes and Highland cows.

Drummond is the enterprising dramatist and performer who got the audience to help invent a play every night in Mr Write; who asked someone to turn a gun on him in Bullet Catch, and staged a real-time speed-dating event in In Fidelity. He upturned the murky world of light entertainment in Quiz Show, and he trained with the Scottish Wrestling Alliance to perform Wrestling.

It was all marvellously unexpected stuff, but nothing to suggest he would turn his attention to the hero most famously portrayed by Mel Gibson in Braveheart. “Hitchcock once said that having a style is just self-plagiarism,” Drummond says. “Maybe I’m bored and I want to try something completely different.”

Drummond’s collaborator, Dave Hook, is an only marginally less surprising candidate for this subject, though Wallace is not the first time his work has asked questions about cultural identity. The rapper, poet, songwriter and producer is the man behind hip-hop collective Stanley Odd, a band who took a sound cultivated in inner-city New York and gave it a defiantly Scottish spin.

“Yes, in the past I have written pieces of music that overtly discussed Scottish nationhood, culture and society,” says Hook. “But more than anything, I have always been interested in stories and storytelling – and the opportunity to question how we see a story.”

Perhaps their William Wallace musical is no less likely than the time Drummond adapted The Broons and gave the DC Thomson comic strip a note of existential doubt. “I’m not a theatre snob – I enjoy giving an audience a really great time,” says the playwright. “And this is going to be an hour of theatre with jokes, history, fun characters and incredibly original great new music. There’s nothing not to like about it.”

Not that their show – produced by Raw Material at Glasgow’s lunchtime theatre A Play, a Pie and a Pint – is entirely starry eyed about the 13th-century Scottish warrior. Yes, it will rehearse the tale of how this knight defeated the English in the Battle of Stirling Bridge, and was executed in 1305 by Edward I of England. But it will also ask questions about where the man and the myth diverge.

“I’m interested in what it means to be Scottish and whether national identity in any country does more harm than good,” says Drummond, who, like Hook, voted yes to independence. “At the same time, what we have at the beginning of the play is something we all have in common. We know what William Wallace means, we know the feeling of being proud to be Scottish … If you’ve got a point of reference that the whole room can access in the first five minutes, then you can play with the audience.”

Drummond and Hook are not the first to combine hip-hop and history – the example of Hamilton being hard to ignore. Independently, both resolved not to see that global hit before embarking on this project for fear of being influenced. But, like Lin-Manuel Miranda, they recognise the theatrical potential of hip-hop as a storytelling form.

“Hip-hop is folk music with caps instead of cardigans,” says Hook, who stars in Orla O’Loughlin’s production alongside Patricia Panther and Manasa Tagica. “That’s a flippant statement but it’s making the point that folk music is a vehicle to tell a story, and hip-hop has that lineage as well.”

Drummond takes up the theme: “Folk music is about passing down history. But it’s unreliable because of course the next guy is going to add a verse and make it his own. Part of this play is about gently poking the audience, and saying, ‘Is your national hero even real? What was he like?’ We don’t know that much. It was all passed down through folk music.’”

By giving hip-hop a Scottish voice and, in this case, bringing it into the world of William Wallace, Hook believes he is staying true to the genre’s political roots. Hip-hop, he argues, has never blandly replicated itself, but always adapted to new circumstances: “Hip-hop is a black American art form but it is about local stories. It represents place, space and origins. For it then to become global was not a homogenisation but a revitalisation of local culture.”

It also adds a kick to a piece of theatre. “Hip-hop is all about wordplay,” says Hook. “That playfulness is infused throughout the whole show.”

• Wallace is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, 1-6 September; and The Traverse, Edinburgh, 9-13 September