For all the intensity of his plays, Frank McGuinness has never lost sight of the comic. After all, this is the man who, when asked had he ever considered that Yeatsian question "Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?" in relation to Carthaginians, his elegy to Bloody Sunday, replied quick as a flash without a trace of arrogance: "Not in the slightest. You don't think I'm as stupid as Yeats, do you?"
The directness and honesty of his vision, of the man himself, has influenced everything he has ever done. If there is one thing which is liable to send him off in a rage, it is hypocrisy. The recent controversy surrounding athlete Sonia O'Sullivan is another example of this. McGuinness is almost speechless when trying to express his fury at the outrageous attack.
"I'll tell you what I think of Sonia O'Sullivan and what sort of example she gives to Irish women and Irish people in general. I remember going up to the funerals following the Omagh bombings. There were three buried in Buncrana. On the day of those burials, the worst day of my life, Sonia O'Sullivan went and won a gold medal for Ireland. "I think she has given so much to this country and to hear her being insulted . . . I don't understand this business about single mothers or married mothers. Surely you're all mothers."
In a dramatic career now spanning almost 20 years, McGuinness, a committed academic who began his literary life as a poet, has produced an exciting body of work which consistently spotlights the isolation of the individual. "I've always felt an outsider," he says, more as an observation than declaration of status. "If there is a link in these plays, it's probably loneliness."
He has always taken risks, frequently attempted the impossible, has achieved memorable theatre as well as some interesting failures. Central to his success is an ear which seldom falters - he hears his characters. In McGuinness's plays, the players don't make speeches, they trade verbal hand-grenades, but most of all they speak to each other. Just as he as a dramatist walks in and out of time, he also plays with history; fact and invention are constantly juxtaposed. A small detail can become a play and he mentions Mary and Lizzie, which was born out of his discovering that two Irish sisters called Burns, both lovers of Frederick Engels, "had been written out of history". McGuinness set out to cancel the injustice. The play had been commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It opened in the Pit at the Barbican in 1988 and, as he says somewhat bemusedly, was not particularly well received. "The audience hated it," he says with a smile, "but then picture it, the curtain opens and the stage is populated by these mad half-dressed Irish women in trees, well . . ." His hands held skywards convey more than words could.
Still, by that time, McGuinness was already well established as an award-winning major playwright. Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, which had premiered at the Abbey Theatre in 1985 and went on to win many awards, including the London Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright, confirmed the gifts evident in his debut, The Factory Girls, a well-paced narrative featuring five working women of varying ages. It was written in 1982 and in it McGuinness makes tremendous use of the local Donegal dialects he was born into. He knows the taste of praise and has earned his place in the West End and on Broadway. Someone Who'll Watch Over Me (1992), based on the plight of the Beirut hostages, added to the international reputation of the author of Observe the Sons, but he has also had his share of condemnation. It is easy to think of McGuinness as the darling of the critics. He howls with laughter. "I've been far more damned than praised." Admittedly few critics were receptive to Innocence in 1985, his play about the life of the artist Caravaggio, in which the artist became a poet for the sake of dramatic convention - it caused an uproar - yet he concedes "It did well enough."
Few writers are as self-critical. McGuinness is neither touchy nor defensive about his work. He says of his two adaptations of Lorca to date: "I didn't get them right, I didn't get the music." One extremely original play which he did not get quite right is The Bread Man. "I should have looked at it again and cut it back. I was told it wasn't ready. It wasn't right. Maybe I'll go back to it, but I don't plan to at the moment. I'd need the belief in it, and I don't have it." But he does have tremendous confidence in the energy of his writing and faith in his reading of character. His imagination is fairly wild. There are many jokes in these plays and he has a good sense of the ridiculous. Admitting it took him time to appreciate Shakespeare, he loves Chekhov and, as expected, Ibsen. In 1988, McGuinness, who in general does not really like commissions, accepted one while trapped at Heathrow waiting for a delayed flight. Michael Colgan, director of the Gate, approached and asked, or rather demanded, a new version of Ibsen's epic picaresque Peer Gynt. As it is written in verse, the work imposed an additional discipline beyond faithfulness to the text. McGuinness had enormous fun. Peer Gynt is a Walter Mittyish figure, or as McGuinness has put it, he is "liar, blackguard, louse, drunk, violent, then shockingly, pitifully tender, mad as a tree, good occasionally to his mother, cracked about women, afraid of men . . . crazed with ambition, sick from failure; this creature I wouldn't let into my house."
His political awareness has liberated rather than confined his work. He wrote Behold the Sons of Ulster Marching on the Somme while in Coleraine and is as grateful to that play for what it taught him about Ulster unionism and the cultural complexities of Protestantism as he is to its critical success. Words and ideas control him as much as he controls them. His hyperactivity has served him well. In addition to his plays and teaching, he has published two volumes of poetry. Booterstown was published in 1994; the new collection, The Sea with No Ships, is about to be published. His hair is wild, still reddish and, with his seaman's weathering, raw, blotchy skin and washed, blue-green eyes, he looks older than he is. But then he always has. Most of the biographical notes prefacing his plays describe him as being born in Buncrana in 1956: it seems appropriate to check the date. As if reading my mind, he says, "It's actually 1953, but you can say 56." He walks off to fetch some tea, head thrown back, short strides, an actor's walk. Years ago as a postgraduate member of UCD Dramsoc, he was an impressively haughty Bolingbroke in Richard II, a part he played with immense and highly effective impatience.
In person, he looks dishevelled. This is a man with no interest in clothes, his habitual nervyness has an additional edge as he has just come from the rehearsal room. Dolly West's Kitchen, his new play, is the first he has set directly in Buncrana. Yet he is wary of describing it as autobiographical. "All of my work draws on bits from my life, my interests and so on, but nothing is autobiographical. Still, this one is about a Donegal family and there are things in it . . ."
The time-scale is that of the second World War and the themes are familiar ones for him: family and war. But it's also about a family at war with itself. Each of the characters is arriving at a sense of understanding. One of the family, Justin, now a soldier and the youngest, belated child of Rima, a lovingly matriarchal figure, accepts his homosexuality after she shows him the way. "He's the one who makes the longest journey, but they are all making journeys here. I wanted to write about women's sexuality, to look at what is married love, to look at obsessive love."
Homosexuality is another theme he has previously explored and does again this time. "I hate the coyness, the lack of honesty, the misrepresentation. It is as if a gay man is not capable of courage, which is wrong. A gay man has to always prove himself." Does he feel his sensitivity and understanding of others, particularly women, comes from being marginalised as gay? "Yes, there are people who seem to feel it is right to deny a person the ability to feel unless it is heterosexual feeling."
McGuinness's life suits him. He seems as content as it is possible for a lively, creative individual, with voices in his head, to be. He would have liked children once, but accepts he will have none. There are no lamentations, no speeches. Lives are difficult, his characters are tested. Kindly though not voyeuristic, it is obvious that human situations most interest him. Somehow he manages to be both jumpy and relaxed, he speaks in bursts - intensely measured, near-paragraph sentences. He is extremely funny, expansive, almost theatrical at times, and is brilliant company, favouring big gestures and passionate pronouncements. Never having enjoyed sport in his youth, he has now become obsessed with one and is a committed spectator. "I love women's tennis," he says, as if confessing to a secret weakness. It is also a love he bequeaths to Michael, a character in Someone Who'll Watch Over Me and, while admitting to disappointment over the retirement of Steffi Graf at 30, he says as if to put this tragedy into perspective, "Now, I was a Martina fan. There was the complete champion. She was so athletic, but then so was Graf."
One minute he seems prepared to tear his hair out over the outcome of a wrong call in a match, the next he gives a precise, detailed analysis of the problems facing The Faerie Queen and why Spenser destroyed himself. It is a subject McGuinness has examined in Mutabilitie, "an unabashedly literary play" which has its Irish premiere next year.
McGuinness the playwright was effectively born on attending a writers' workshop in Galway. There he met Patrick Mason, the director who had so influenced his reading of Shakespeare as a playwright. He did not come from a theatre background. The family was not literary.
"My father was a breadman and my mother worked in the local shirt factory. I always had this thing about shirts. I know it's daft, but I love them and tend to give them as presents." There were three children - "my brother, my sister and myself. I'm the eldest. We were working class." Initially very average at school, he then discovered ambition and became very academic and driven.
"I was determined to go to university and I knew I had no hope unless I got a grant, so I had to do well. There was a teacher who gave me no hope. He felt my economic background was against me. I'll never forgive him for that." The young McGuinness was ill at ease with himself and his surroundings. For a man who is by nature romantic, there is no nostalgia forthcoming. He does not become lyrical about the Donegal of his youth. Beautiful though it is, Donegal suffers the dilemma of being of the North and of the South and yet belonging to neither.
Dublin for him was exotic. "I arrived in 1971 at 18 and was terrified." But being there provided him with the two conditions he has always needed and continues to need, "freedom and chains". He took a degree in English at UCD and became particularly interested in old and middle English and also studied old Norse.
He taught for several years at Maynooth before returning to the staff of University College, Dublin's Anglo-Irish department, three years ago.
The McGuinness who returned is far calmer. Previously a solid if volatile teacher, he has now become an often inspired lecturer. "I grew up, I matured." He calmed down.
Aside from the great voice with its musical Donegal accent, his speech booms out and then falls to a whisper. McGuinness's mind has a grace and a lightness which provides quite a contrast to his robust appearance. There is so much colour in his work: he creates word pictures and says painting is very important to him, probably more important as a source than literature.
He mentions his liking for the shades of light and darkness and names a number of painters, including Gwen O'Dowd, Mary Lohan, Sean MacSweeney and Camille Souter.
The reference to the mosaics of Ravenna, which is included in his new play, is not by chance. The deaths of his parents within 10 months of each other between 1996 and 1997 were separated by a third death, that of his agent. "These are deep griefs. I only now feel I have come out of mourning and this play is possibly the result of that."
He loved his parents and speaks of the way his mother influenced his writing, and of the way she had of making unexpected observations. The character of Rima, the presiding genius of Dolly West's Kitchen, owes her wisdom to her. Referring to his now 21-year-old relationship with a fellow academic who is based in Coleraine, McGuinness says you have to work at something to keep it going at a distance of 100 miles." It seems to work well. Travelling for McGuinness means having to leave his cat, Spook, behind. Like any pet lover, he has no time for those who dismiss such bonds.
"I love my cat, I have no problem saying that. This is the cat who has terrified most of the dogs in Booterstown," he adds with paternal pride. I remember my father, he used to say `Our Frank is very keen on animals', and that's how I'd like to be remembered. He was kind to animals, he loved dogs."
Dolly West's Kitchen opens next Wednesday at the Abbey Theatre
