Conor McPherson sits in the large bay window of a Dún Laoghaire hotel with his back to Dublin Bay. The lighthouse at the end of the pier looms behind him and, just visible in the distance, you can see the outline of Howth Head.
The playwright, who has lived in the south Dublin suburb for more than a decade, grew up across the bay in Raheny. Even though he has worked abroad for “long spells”, premiering most of his major works in London and New York, the city and its suburbs are the setting for his vast body of work for the stage.
“I have never actually lived anywhere else, and I don’t think I would ever want to,” he says. “I don’t think about where the plays are set when I am writing them, but they are of this place and from this place and for this place. They just are.”
McPherson's most recent play, The Night Alive, has its Irish premiere this week at the Dublin Theatre Festival, after stunning reviews in London and New York, where it won the New York Drama Critic's Circle Award for best new play in 2014. McPherson is well used to such accolades, but he is modest in bearing, soft-spoken, almost shy, despite almost two decades of unbroken critical and commercial success in Ireland and abroad, beginning with his 1995 play This Lime Tree Bower, which transferred to the Bush Theatre in 1996. Overnight, he became the "next big thing".
Minor roles
His precocious achievement was a surprise to the then 24-year-old who had finished school at 16 with dreams of being a musician. To pacify his parents, he went to college, studying arts at UCD, where he found his way to the DramSoc. He started off performing – "Death of a Salesman, The Playboy of the Western World, minor roles" – but he says he never managed to lose himself. "I was always observing myself, and that's almost the opposite of good acting," he says.
After reading David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, he started to write. "It was this totally unfettered male play. It was so rude and so musical and so clever and so much fun, and I wanted to do that. I just sort of fell into it, and maybe it was easier that way. There is less pressure if it's not working out, because you don't feel like you are failing at your dream."
His parents were slightly worried, he says. “I think the general consensus is that I was bright but lazy, and I suppose they feared – like any parent would – that I would squander whatever aptitude I had, but when I started making a living from writing I guess they thought I would be all right.”
His first few plays took shape in monologue form and explored the life of young men in Dublin, following their journey from excess (of alcohol, emotion) to some sort of redemption (sobriety, fatherhood). He put them on with friends in grungy alternative theatre spaces such as the International Bar while finishing a master’s in philosophy. His work was soon picked up by the festival circuit and celebrated by critics keen to embrace his distinctive voice.
This early work offered a new perspective on emerging global Ireland, echoing the concerns of other young writers – Mark O'Rowe, Enda Walsh – who were emerging on the contemporary scene. This was a new wave in Irish theatre.
As the young writers were wooed abroad to London, McPherson couldn’t believe his luck. “It was totally unlikely, completely against the odds. There was me, Martin McDonagh, Enda Walsh, Mark O’Rowe, young guys writing and getting their plays on and getting all this success.”
When The Weir opened at the Royal Court Theatre in 1997, it set a precedent for the production of McPherson's plays away from his home city. "I just thought, well if someone wants to put your plays on, that's where you go." It's the same motto he sticks to now: "Go where the love is."
McPherson has been criticised occasionally for this. “The thing about working in London, like I have always said, is that you generate more column inches, and if you want your production to have a life of more than four weeks you need to produce it abroad. It is a simple economic equation.”
Emotional desperation
Reflecting on his work since then – the small miracles of Shining City, or the Faustian The Seafarer – is a strange experience for the writer. "When I was young, I thought my best work in the future. But now that I have been writing for 20 years I don't know if I would have the guts now to write some of those plays. A play like Dublin Carol [which portrays the emotional desperation of a recovering alcoholic], well it is just so dark, so relentless."
Port Authority, which offered a window into the emotional and sexual life of three men of different ages, was similarly bleak in outlook, although it did offer more hope for redemption.
Not that the writer made a deliberate choice to engage with such harrowing material: the plays came from a period of personal darkness in McPherson’s own life, in which his own difficulties with alcohol came to a head. “The plays you write are the plays that you write,” he says. “Writing is a biological exercise, a by-product of living. It’s like going to the toilet. It’s beyond rational consciousness. A play just sort of pops out.
“Well, those are the good plays, anyway,” he continues. “If you think too much about it, think you have a good idea, something clever to say that no one has ever said before you, it’s probably not going to be a great play. Plays are quite stupid really. You are supposed to feel them in your bones. It’s truthfulness, not cleverness, that matters.”
The truth that defines his life now is that of parenthood. McPherson is never more animated than when talking about his five-year-old daughter. He always knew he wanted to be a father, he says, and laughs; he never knew he wanted to be a writer. He is an “incredibly hands-on” dad, and won’t commit to any work that will take him away from his family for long periods while his daughter is young.
He is delighted, then, to be rehearsing The Night Alive in Dublin. This is the third time he has returned to the work since its premiere in London's Drury Lane in 2013, but he relishes the opportunity to revisit it.
“I love rehearsals. It is social. It is psychoanalytical. It is visual. It is musical. It’s the same work, of course, but the dynamic changes every time you get a new group of people together to do it; even if it’s the same group of people sometimes.” He recounts examples of various changes the casts have made to various productions with glee. “It’s just silly stuff. The audience probably wouldn’t notice, but we would have had great fun with it.”
McPherson is aware that the Dublin premiere means it’s “probably more emotionally complicated” for him, but that won’t stop him getting on with the business of working, writing and rearing a child.
- The Night Alive runs at the Gaiety Theatre, September 24th-October 4th and at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, October 6th-31st. dublintheatrefestival.com
