It’s an unusually muggy afternoon when I meet Moira Buffini in a Dublin city-centre hotel. Visiting from her home in London, she wears a blue blouse, dark jeans and a necklace that, at intervals during our conversation, she will cling to, as if communing with a faraway consciousness. Perhaps she is. A renowned playwright and screenwriter, Buffini (59) has built a career accessing the inner lives of characters real and imagined. From Georgian sex workers (Harlots, 2017–2019), to archaeological excavations (The Dig, 2021), to a tete-a-tete between Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Thatcher (Handbagged, 2010), her work has covered much ground. The one thing she said she’d never do is write a novel.
“I’ve always been a bit scared of prose, to tell you the truth,” she says. “It’s a mixture of being really scared and being really snooty about it.”
And yet, here we are, to talk about her debut, Songlight, the first in The Torch Trilogy, which sold to publisher Faber last March for an “unprecedented sum”.
“There was this crazy bidding war – it went mad,” says Buffini. “So, I’m thrilled. I could not be more thrilled. I thought it might be a quiet little piece of feminist scifi.”
Inspired by the likes of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Hunger Games, and John Wyndham’s 1955 cold war novel The Chrysalids, Songlight imagines a society thousands of years in the future in which a form of telepathy called Songlight has emerged. In many parts of Buffini’s imagined world, Songlight is revered, but in a closed-off enclave called Brightland, it is seen as a curse, and those gifted with it are hunted down and persecuted.
“I always loved stories about telepaths, and I don’t really know why,” says Buffini. “I had a very vivid imagination when I was a child. You imagine things so fully – you’re fully invested in a world that isn’t there. And I just thought: those people that I imagine that aren’t there ... what if they were?”
The book centres upon two woman friends united by Songlight. It came from Buffini’s desire to write a story in which girls are the heroes.
“When my daughter was growing up, there was only The Hunger Games. […] And I thought, why is that the only story where girls save the world?”
When it comes to the feminist project, she feels “the struggle goes on”. It’s important to her that boys and girls alike read books such as this.
“The novel’s about boys as well. The boys in the book are really precious to me. I’m a mother of a son and it’s not like I want to be combative, particularly. But the struggle goes on.”
‘Autocrats, whether they’re right wing, whether they’re left wing, whoever the hell they are, once you’ve voted one in, you’re stuck with them’
Buffini’s imagined future looks in many ways like a dark past. The world is at war. Women are forced to be first, second or third wives to tortured male soldiers. Government propaganda is rife, and the masses perish while a select few prosper.
“The past and the future to me, they’re kind of my Brechtian magpie toolbox – you steal,” Buffini says. “This is entirely about things that are going on in the world now and you’re just looking at it through the prism of the future.”
For example, she was thinking about the danger of autocracy.
“Autocrats, whether they’re right wing, whether they’re left wing, whoever the hell they are, once you’ve voted one in, you’re stuck with them. And that’s what I find so frightening about the situation at the moment – the thought that we might get these ... these ... I’m trying to find a word that isn’t an expletive!”
By “the situation”, does she mean the election in the United States?
“Yeah. You know, and the government we’ve had in the UK. [The book] has come from that. There were a few years there ... I mean they’ve f**ked it up so royally. It’s just been so fabulous watching them f**k it up. [But] it’s about the danger of dictators.”
It’s also about the danger of complacency around issues that affect the climate. Songlight depicts a world still reeling from the ecological destruction our current generation wrought upon it. Is there a degree of apathy towards the climate crisis nowadays – does it feel like a quiet problem?
“I think it’s a quiet problem because there’s an underlying fear in us all that is so great that if you are actually to look at it, it’s overwhelming. So, we push it away. It’s the greatest crisis that we’ve ever faced and we’re behaving as if it’s a quiet problem. That’s the really scary thing.”
At the same time, it’s incredibly difficult to write about.
“I’ve tried to write about it twice before, failed twice. I think both of the pieces of work [in which] I’ve tried to address it have been my worst failures.”
These failures, as she sees it, were her 2021 play, Manor, which critics panned, and her contribution to the multi-authored Greenland (2011), which she believes fell short of what was required. In Songlight, what’s been effective has been to take the “long view” – looking at the world thousands of years hence.
“When you’re looking at an incredibly fragile state of recovery, and you’re looking at the extent of the damage, then it becomes possible to think about in a way that isn’t just nervous-breakdown-causingly frightening.”
Friendly and polite, Buffini can nonetheless hold forth impassioned soliloquies, her soft English accent belying the Irishness that lies beneath. Her mother, Susan Buffini, née Clay, was a nurse from Donegal; her father, John Buffini, a quantity surveyor from Dublin. But Moira knew her father only briefly. When she was four, he died tragically in a car crash.
“I remember him like a four-year-old,” she says. “They’re these sort of vivid, well-worn memories […] like brightly polished stone. But ever since he died, my work is full of missing dads, missing men, women bringing up children.”
‘I think I’ve had this love affair with Ireland, and for a long time, I just thought, no, it’s unrequited, Ireland doesn’t love me. Ireland thinks I’m English’
Buffini grew up in Cheshire, then north Wales. She has two sisters, Fiona (a director with whom she has worked on several occasions) and Nuala. At the time her father died, her mother was pregnant with Nuala.
“My mum was an enormously capable woman. She had to be strong. She said: ‘that’s when I found out how strong I was.’”
Buffini remembers her mother bringing them on “these mad holidays” across Spain in a car, or to Ireland, to see her family in Donegal. In the small town of her maternal relations, between Letterkenny and Lifford, she began to understand the layers of her identity.
“I always felt really Irish in England and then as soon as I came to Ireland, I felt really English,” she says. “I think I’ve had this love affair with Ireland, and for a long time, I just thought, no, it’s unrequited, Ireland doesn’t love me. Ireland thinks I’m English. And it wasn’t helped, during the worst years of the Troubles, by my cousins sort of having a go at us about how ignorant we were about Irish politics.”
She describes a sudden realisation “that all this was happening, and we were getting taught in school about the Tudors and about Empire. […] So, my cousins educated me about Irish history.”
Her education in theatre, meanwhile, came about because her mother worked at a hospital where Michael Elliot, then director of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, was a patient.
“He gave tickets to the renal unit to the first preview of every show,” Buffini says. “Right the way through our teens – the theatre opened when I was about 14 – we saw everything. I remember seeing Waiting for Godot and being blown away.”
Buffini would go on to join the National Youth Theatre, and later train as an actor at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. But it was writing that eventually captured her heart.
“Acting’s a bit of a drug, I think. It really suits you when you’re young. And writing, I think the rewards are slower to come, harder to get, but deeper at the end of the day.”
Buffini’s first play, Jordan, co-written with Anna Reynolds, won a Writers’ Guild award for the best Fringe play of 1992. From there she began to build a strong portfolio, earning the admiration of critics and theatregoers. But it was her 2002 play, Dinner, a tragicomedy involving a set of bourgeois guests at a dinner party, that really put her on the map. It premiered at The National Theatre, then transferred to the West End, and was nominated for an Olivier Award. (She would go on to win an Olivier in 2014 for Handbagged).
‘...well, you just write. That’s how you get good. You just do more of it. You just do it every day if you can. Even if it’s just an hour. Just do it every day’
“[Dinner] was the first money I ever earned. But it coincided with motherhood. I wrote it when my first baby was six months old. […] Then I got pregnant again straight away. I remember casting it and my son was three weeks old.”
She recalls standing with a double pram outside the theatre, as the likes of Kenneth Branagh walked in.
“I was just standing there […] going: oh, my son needs a feed, watching these famous people walk in to see my play. So, success was weird.”
But successful or otherwise, her approach to writing has remained the same.
“I work long hours. I [don’t] have to be in the right mood, and write nice sentences, and light a candle. It’s a job. I wake up, make a cup of tea, sit down and write all day.”
She’s currently at the early stages of writing an “Irish play” along with completing The Torch Trilogy and adapting it for screen (she’s working with Matt Charman of the production company, Binocular). When novice writers seek advice, she has a simple response.
“I just say, well, you just write. That’s how you get good. You just do more of it. You just do it every day if you can. Even if it’s just an hour. Just do it every day. It is the hours you put in. I swear it’s time. I swear. That’s the only magic.”
Songlight by Moira Buffini is published by Faber.
