In Celtic tiger Ireland, opting in is as hard as opting out. It was all too much for Nicholas Kelly, so he went abroad to write about a generation seduced by success. Not that he realised his play was about home, he tells Sara Keating
Sitting in the bar of one of Dublin's trendiest hotels, Nicholas Kelly looks distinctly uncomfortable. Wearing a smart jacket, well-cut jeans and small red-rimmed glasses, he should fit right in, but there's something about his pose that draws away from the comfort of the leather couches. As the latest commentator on Celtic tiger Ireland, Kelly seems uneasy in the world his new play describes.
Directed by Gerard Stembridge, and with a cast that includes Stephen Brennan and Leigh Arnold, The Grown-Ups is billed as a work about a generation seduced by success. It is the story of a happy, aspirational thirtysomething couple whose lives are thrown into chaos when a scandal develops around somebody close to them. They are forced into a series of choices, not only about the kind of lives they want to have but also about the kind of people they want to be.
There is a sense that the play's title refers not only to the characters but also to Kelly, who is as honest about the frustrations in his development as a writer as he is about his attitude to contemporary Dublin. After a frustrating whirlwind tour of London agents at the beginning of his career, "when the Irish writer was the trendy thing", Kelly settled down in Dublin to a series of youth drama commissions and to being Project arts centre's writer-in-residence, and that is when the seeds for The Grown-Ups were sown. Yet it wasn't until he left Dublin for Liverpool, a year and a half ago, that the script began to come together.
Fittingly, he was trying to lose all sense of the capital. "One of the decisions that I made early on, before I left, was to consciously eliminate anything - place names, people's names - so that the play wouldn't be set in Dublin. I made a deliberate decision not to write about Ireland. When the Abbey started coming up with the marketing campaigns and tag line and buzz stuff, well, I had never really thought about it as some Celtic tiger thing. It has almost taken me by surprise."
Kelly's decision not to write about Dublin reflects an attitude to modern-day Ireland. "There's a hallmark of really good Irish writing which really grasps idiom and style, and I'm not necessarily very good at that, at capturing the rhythm of how people speak. So I said, I'm going to try and write in a neutral idiom. All that rhythm has got flattened out. I used to find it hilarious how more and more people started talking like characters in Friends. Dublin could be any Americanised cosmopolitan city in any place other than America." That the city in The Grown-Ups is unnamed is precisely the point: Dublin these days could be nearly any other city in the world.
Even so, Kelly says his play reflects the capitalist culture that he sees engulfing the capital, from place names to social trends and the problems that accompany them. "I find the names for trendy places in Dublin very funny, so I made up a whole bunch of trendy cafes and bars that could almost be real places. There's a bar called Arcadia, a restaurant called Crumb and an organic place called Melon.
"You can really get a handle on this kind of culture when you look at advertising. There's a billboard for broadband at the moment, and its slogan is 'Always settle for more'. Then there were the awful ads for the Dundrum shopping centre at Christmas, with the tag line 'Shall I buy it now or shall I wait until someone buys it for me for Christmas?'
"I don't know if it's ever been different, but it seems so much more in-your-face, as if you're never going to be happy unless you have more. That's an impossible pursuit, and there must come a day when it catches up with you."
It's no coincidence that one of the characters in The Grown-Ups works in advertising. Kelly wanted to reflect "that sense of a shiny culture that's taken over, a homogenised sense where everything needs to be about surface, about style". But the facade hides a darker aspect of contemporary Irish life, "a constant conflict between living a rational life, getting up on the ladder, and a self-destructive sense of abandonment".
It's "no coincidence that there's a simultaneous obsession with an aspirational culture and the supposed binge-drinking nightmare at the moment. They're exactly the same thing . . . There's a sense of chaos rampaging, and there's no connection being made that maybe it's because everyone is being forced into these lifestyles."
This chaos is reflected in the play as "a sense of malaise, of violence and excessive consumption". This malaise, says Kelly, is diagnosed as "Bostonitis", a play on Mary Harney's assertion that, spiritually, Ireland is closer to Boston than it is to Berlin. One of the ideas that The Grown-Ups explores is "the possibility of opting in and opting out" of such a materialistic culture. Kelly believes the potential for opting out is slim. "If you attempt to ally yourself with some kind of countercultural position - not necessarily socialism, but if you're not bothered with this corporate business aesthetic and trying to 'better yourself' - there's nothing else. I think it really happens when you hit 30, when you think you have to get serious now, you have to get the mortgage. I have no problem with someone who wants to develop their career and buy a house, that's fine by me, but if you're not interested in doing it there's a tacit marginalisation going on, and that's a dangerous kind of culture.
"What confuses me is that I keep hearing that everybody's doing so well, but so many people seem to be leaving Dublin; they can't afford to live here. Everything is coming down to the bottom line, and I think it's horrific. I'm not an economist, and I can't offer any kind of different position, but what I don't understand in a social sense is that it's like this is the only thing that you can become.
"I have come to the stage in my life where I know that writing is what I want to do. I earn enough money to get by if I was allowed to, but when I was in Dublin before I left I lived in a dingy bedsit for three years, and it drags you down. The only option if you want a better life is to apply for a job in Google or something, and I don't want that.
"I'm happy having enough to get by with, but I feel like I'm not permitted to do that. It's wrapped up in economic policy and the kind of lifestyle that's being promoted every day, because that lifestyle is the engine of the economy. What if you don't want to live that kind of lifestyle? It's almost Thatcherite - 'Only losers take the bus' - like if you don't have a car by the time you're 30 you're not a member of society."
The Grown-Ups reflects these attitudes as much as they have affected Kelly's own lifestyle, the play hanging on a central question: "If you choose to opt out of that culture, how do you remain sane? But if you're forced to opt in, how do you remain sane?"
Kelly, at least, has answered that question for himself, and opting out has let him grow up as a writer, as well as enabling him to use his frustrations creatively. And if his emigration has been a rite of passage, so has writing The Grown-Ups. "I would have left Dublin foaming at the mouth about it," he says. "Now I find it hilarious."
The Grown-Ups is at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, until March 11th