Three great poets in a 19th-century Dublin pub are at the centre of Daniel Reardon's new play. He talks to Catherine Foleyin a setting which invokes the spirit of their time.

Daniel Reardon paces the floor like an expectant father. Rehearsals of his new play, Bleeding Poets, which opens in Dublin's New Theatre later this week, are underway.

"I'm at once terrified and overjoyed," he says, looking nervously out of the window of his 18th-century home. He lives right outside the gates of Dublin Castle on Palace Street with his family and a turtle named Turlough.

This is where the Quaker charity, the Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers' Society, was based from 1790 until the early 1990s. There are echoes of the faded, elegant past all around: grey walls, a large empty grate, pearl-white skies outside. The spirits of the dead are about to be invoked. We sit in the high-ceilinged drawing room, where the poor once queued for a bed, to speak about depressed poets. Our talk could be a tightrope walk between the tragic and the comic.

"You're thrilled and terrified at the same time because you just don't know how it's going to work," says Reardon of his play. "It's an imponderable, and you just have to trust in the gods and the brilliance of the cast."

He's been shut out of rehearsals, "politely", he says. "I would like to be more hands-on. It's difficult to stand back, but it's necessary for the author to stand back because it just slows things up, asking questions."

His play is set in a Dublin pub in 1847 where "mad, unhinged American" Edgar Allan Poe, "Dublin eccentric, again alcoholic and opium-addicted" James Clarence Mangan and "windy though brilliant Cork man", poet and priest Francis Sylvester Mahony meet for the first time and talk in turn about life, poetry, poverty and misfortune.

The three poets are all united in "their passion and their love for poetry", Reardon says. "Poetry for them is their life force, their raison d'être, the reason they get up in the morning and do the things they do. This is what unites them."

A published poet himself, this is clearly territory Reardon understands well.

In the room where we sit, the Quakers' original safe, a great weighty piece of ironwork, stands ajar in the wall. It's where the dead poets will stand if they come. And as the morning slips away, their spirits arrive. They stand by the safe away from us, muttering into their glasses, swapping verses in Latin and Greek. Reardon is easy with the spirits who watch him, at home with their ghosts.

"They all flourished contemporaneously in the first half of the 19th century, but they never met," he says. "The fiction is having the three poets meeting in the Bleeding Horse in Camden Street on this November day in 1847, the worst year of the Famine."

But in reality they never met, he reiterates. "Poe never came to Ireland. As a young boy, he was educated for a short time in London, and Mahony spent most of his life outside of Ireland. "It's questionable whether Poe knew about Mahony, but he certainly knew of Mangan."

Arthur Riordan will play the Cork priest, Michael James Ford will play Poe and Mark O'Regan will play Mangan. Trevor Knight is directing and has also composed original music for the play.

"This will be the first time, as far as I know, that Mangan's poems have been set to music," says Reardon.

It is two years since the cast first came together to read the play.

Reardon has been attracted to the pathos in the story of Poe's misery ever since he was a child in Manhattan. Poe, he says, was "a very attractive character, especially if you were young, a schoolboy. His whole lifestyle of danger as an alcoholic, opium-addicted manic depressive had everything, and just the tragedy of his life as well. His wife died. He had a very, very difficult existence trying to make a living as a writer. He was one of the first people who actually tried to make a living as a writer."

And Mangan's life story was equally tragic. "He left school at 15. He was put out to work. His father was a disaster. His mother died, and he was the eldest. They had to pay the bills. He worked as a scrivener from the age of 15, but he read everything. He was a voracious reader, had great gifts for languages and was a brilliant scholar in his own right. His original verses are so moving, so sad, and so mournful and lyrical - they are remarkable," says Reardon, who became aware of Mangan's work after reading Brendan Kennelly's claim in The Penguin Book of Irish Verse that he was the most exciting poet of the 19th century and the greatest Irish poet before Yeats.

"Up until then, Mangan was considered just for My Dark Rosaleen, a second-rate political bombast," Reardon says.

The Cork poet, Mahony, who wrote The Bells of Shandon, was an equally tragic figure, he says. He led "a lonely life and he travelled around incessantly. He was all over the world . . . there's this enormous, fascinating amount of biographical material about this extraordinary man, who was immensely scholarly and gifted linguistically, with Latin and Greek, Italian, French, German."

The three men "are connected in their addictions, their lifestyles, their passion for poetry. Even in their misery they are connected, and they realised that poetry is, for them, their only redemption. It's their salvation and damnation, their succour and scourge." Ironically, their misery has furnished Reardon with great comic possibilities.

"This is the best of both worlds," he says. "We've got a play about poets, about lonely, depressive, agonised poets coming together in a public house in Dublin, a place of witty badinage, exchanging ideas and their feelings about poetry, and then the collaborative aspect of putting on a play about poets is heaven."

All three characters speak "in a very distinctive, a very highly charged idiom", Reardon adds, citing Poe, who talks like Clint Eastwood, and Mary, the barmaid, who speaks in a stylised, flowery Dublin language. "It's the extremities of their personalities that are cause for, I think, great humour and great fun."

Does Reardon, who came to Ireland in 1970, hear chuckling in the corner? He doesn't even look over at the dark maw of the open safe.

He arrived as a postgraduate student from Fordham University in New York to study at Trinity College Dublin. For somebody from New York, he recalls, "the pubs had great charm. I thought I was in heaven. You'd meet great people there. We had great chats."

His links with Ireland go further back. As a child he had come here on holiday. "I had cousins in Cavan. My mother had very strong connections and I had visited Ireland numerous times as a kid. There was a great grá." His paternal grandfather was from Cork.

He began to attend weekly poetry readings that were "intoxicating in every way", he remembers, recalling Pearse Hutchinson and Michael Hartnett in particular. Dublin had these "extraordinary little bursts of creative endeavour that seemed to spark and galvanise".

Poetry, Reardon believes, "is the purest and highest art form - it just concentrates everything about creativity that we have. It involves every kind of creative expression. So I came here and I was on a complete high, which I don't know that I've come down from that. I'm still fairly enamoured of the whole Dublin scene, although you do get sad sometimes for the things that are gone. But it's still very exciting, alive, vibrant, intellectually, spiritually."

Bleeding Poets, by Daniel Reardon, previews at the New Theatre, Temple Bar, Dublin 2, from tonight, opens on Thursday and runs until Mar 22