MARK O'Rowe's new play, From Both Hips, kicks off with two women discussing whether or not a dog can return a human's love. A "professor" in the evening paper says they can't, but neither Adele nor Liz can really believe it. Adele's husband, Paul, is about to arrive home from hospital, having been accidentally shot in the hip by Willy, a reluctant Drug Squad detective, but this is almost completely forgotten. The question is: should dog owning friends be notified?
This set up is typical of O'Rowe's work, where tension is never far from the surface, but nor is humour. Yet the straight gag is not for him: he prefers comedy to come naturally, in the things people don't say, in the things they say at the most inappropriate of times, in the cadences of what they say at all.
O'Rowe's last play, Buzzin' To Bits, which was performed by the Dublin Youth Theatre, had the audience giggling continuously, even when the atmosphere on stage could be cut with a knife. When From Both Hips opens in the new Tallaght Theatre this Friday, it looks set to do the same.
Twenty six year old O'Rowe is new to the theatre world. His training consists of a year of electronics at St Mark's Community School "which wasn't for me at all. I only stayed that long because we had the craic in class". After a few years during which he wasn't happy doing anything, O'Rowe began to write.
"I originally wanted to do something in film, acting or ideally directing, as I'm a big Scorsese fan. But I decided the easiest way to start was to write something, because writing doesn't cost anything."
The Aspidistra Code was the result and it went on to win the Stage It/Young Playwrights competition at the Abbey in December 1995, catching writer and director Gerry Stembridge's eye. Stembridge has become something of a mentor to O'Rowe, commissioning him to write (in November 1996) he really came to the public eye with Sulk. He describes it as "a very, very nasty play about six kids hanging about outside the disco in the middle of a housing estate. These are the kids who don't get in."
As always, it was O'Rowe's dialogue, sharp, contemporary and credible, that stood out, as well as his ability to create a play that brought the best out of a young and inexperienced cast.
"I found it very easy to get hew they talk, because I live in Tallaght and I know a lot of young kids like that. I also find the language very interesting; you hear a new buzz word every month as you re walking around."
Such words belie the effort O'Rowe puts into achieving such believable and fluid dialogue. Although he cheerfully admits to only having seen, three or four plays before starting his writing career, he is exacting in his craft. He talks of writing 100 page long Buzzin' To Bits for DYT and in the absence of an agent, advising Mark on his career.
"I really had to persuade him to use Buzzin' To Bits as I had been commissioned to write Sulk for the Tallaght Youth Theatre and he wasn't too keen to do two plays in such a short space of time."
O'Rowe's persuasion paid off as, although it only ran for a week, pieces with no other purpose than to experiment with dialogue, allowing characters to emerge from how they spoke.
"A character will say something and it will occur to you that maybe this is a clue as to who they are and what direction they should take. I don't think I've ever started a play knowing who my characters are; that comes as I write."
His characters in From Both Hips, are a complex lot. Paul Bolger is ostensibly the victim; an innocent man coming home with a dodgy hip to a wife with depression and an eccentric and smothering sister in law. But Paul has only one thing on his mind and that is sly, vindictive revenge on Willy, the man who shot him, and on all people who "think they're it". But Willy is not a hard man detective but an ashamed one, terrified of losing his job and the respect of his family and it becomes clear that Paul is the one revelling in the heroics of "taking a bullet".
The women in the play: Paul's wife, sister in law and mistress, and Willy's wife Irene, have their own problems but are essentially the strong centre of the play, affected but unconvinced by the men's bluster, cohesive right to the shocking end.
"I SEE the success of Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson," O'Rowe says,
"and I think `I'm right behind you, I want to follow you'." He has been commissioned by the Abbey to write a play to be performed next year but thinks he'd also like to do a piece for a smaller venue, which he would direct himself.
"But then," he says ruefully, "I could start something and it would turn out to need a cast of 20 and explosions and kungfu fighters. You just never know."
