Considering the soaring profile of Bundoran-born playwright Frank McGuinness, the man was a little glum when I visited him in his house out in Booterstown this week. Behind the occasional alarming, wildcat bursts of laughter, and the open-heart statements of emotion in his pounding, lyrical Donegal accent, it was plain he was wired and exhausted after a month in London rehearsing his new play, Mutabilitie - his first original play at the National Theatre, and Trevor Nunn's first production there since he took over as artistic director.
"I'm a homebird," says McGuinness, "and I find London for two weeks at a time extremely difficult, and the last few weeks were desperately hard work. The last act had to be restructured, it was running too long," - it now runs for hours 55 minutes - "but Jesus, does Trevor Nunn work! You're full-out from 11 in the morning till 11 at night. You're sitting around, but your head's going all the time."
It all comes on top of a hectic 15 months of producing adaptations for the London stage: McGuinness's sell-out version of Electra at the Donmar Warehouse which closed last night; another sell-out earlier this year with Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle, this time by Theatre de Complicite at the National's 850-seater Olivier theatre; and his version of Ibsen's A Dolls House, which went to Broadway and won a handful of Tony Awards. Then there was the delicate job of nipping and tucking Brian Friel's Dancing At Lughnasa for a film (now in post-production) starring Meryl Streep and Michael Gambon. And finally, after a decade of countless drafts, the strange beast of Mutabilitie. McGuinness has lashed himself to the mast of Anglo-Irish history before - the first World War dead of Ulster in Observe The Sons... , Bloody Sunday victims in Carthaginians, even the Beirut hostages in Someone Who'll Watch Over Me.
But Mutabilitie harks back further, to 1598 and a backdrop of famine, war and the systematic destruction of Irish culture under Elizabeth I and the Protestant Reformation. The poet Edmund Spenser, then Sheriff of Cork, is holed up in his Kilcolman castle (where he wrote much of the Faerie Queen, and recommended, in his View Of The Present State Of Ireland that Irish nationalism should be uprooted by sword), and eventually torched out the destitute, murderous, suspicious, all-but-defeated Irish (represented here by the rearranged legendary court of Mad Sweeney and his warrior queen Maeve, and the file, or bard).
Add to that the utterly fictitious arrival of William Shakespeare, a bedraggled loonish figure, whose Catholic leanings are taken as a miraculous sign by the Irish. Clearly it is a convoluted humanistic metaphor - in the impassioned McGuinness style - for the Moebius triangle of today's Anglo-Irish relations. "It is a five-act play in Elizabethan mode, and it's not going to be easy for English audiences from a historical point of view, but also that these writers are part of Irish tradition too. I'm asserting my right to create images of them, which are every bit as valid as anything an English writer can create."
The play is a conundrum for any critic, but what about some of the reviews, which have been lukewarm to say the least? "I've heard they're not particularly hot, but the play fights its corner, and the audiences seem to be coping well enough. Some critics have made an effort but it is not a comfortable play. One worried at the end that Spenser's child would grow up learning Gaelic - I nearly had a conniption when I read that."
Apart from that final adoption of the English child by the Irish, it seems a gloomy work. "There's a tiny glitter of hope, a spark of humanity that can't be entirely extinguished, but yes, it acknowledges that we're living in dangerous times. And ongoing events, particularly the breaking of the ceasefire, certainly fed into it. I've enormous faith in Tony Blair, but he has to deal with dangerous fire, and it's going to be very hard to reduce all that, let alone remove the war we've lived with for 27, 28 years - and 400 years before that, as the file cries out in the play . . . "
But what can a play ever do? "Well, nothing practically. Nobody laid down a gun after seeing The Plough And The Stars or The Silver Tassie, but theatre can tell a story. I remember Maggie O'Kane reporting from Sarajevo, and saying how so many people came to her to make sure that they told their story, with this profound hope that if the world would only hear it, it would all end."
"Also for me, theatre can register your conscious commitment to the historical reality of your country and the responsibility you bear to that future. And I can say that I got involved, not in the narrowly reduced sense of that phrase, but I don't think you can let what's happening to your country pass by without saying `I notice it, I see it'."
The part-magical Shakespeare character, both English and Catholic, comes across as a curiously central key. "Yes, he's a mass of tearing contradictions, which means he can play all the parts - it's a crucial part of his imaginative make-up, which he resolves by writing a humanist, humanitarian theatre, the essence of which is to live and give life. It's his moral and artistic code."
Would he say this character is closest to himself? "No, no, as Michael Billington said in the Guardian, `using Shakespeare to assuage my artistic guilt'! In the voice of the immortal Victoria Wood, I may be mad but I'm not stupid. I mean, I deliberately put three writers in there." But there is also the passionate homosexuality of the character, a strand which consistently crops up in Observe The Sons, Dido in Carthaginians, etc. "If there is to be a new relationship between the islands - and the metaphor we've usually looked at is between man and woman - maybe we should be looking at different images of peace and communication, and this is a perfectly valid way of presenting imagery of a new way forward . . .
"I think there has been a tentativeness with showing a gay relationship on the stage, and I'd like to think in the history of Irish theatre, I had some little influence in that. Particularly in - my God! - Innocence, when there was roaring in the theatre. It was quite scary at the time. Even in Observe The Sons, the first time, around 12 years ago, people weren't comfortable with this possibility between brave men - it shows you what they know about soldiers . . . "
Remarkably enough, McGuinness still keeps up his work as an external examiner with the University of Ulster, and as a lecturer in literature at UCD. Surely he can afford to give it up? "Well, A Doll's House and the revival of Observe The Sons were an exception financially - but it's not something that you can remotely rely on. I mean, Mutabilitie is going on in a small studio space, and it's a five-act play with a cast of 15, so it's not going to be a commercial hit. No, teaching to a large degree has subsidised the writing. That may have changed in the last three years, but the next three years, hmmm, there could be very little coming in."
What about the Tony Award? "It's not like cinema awards where you can name your price afterwards - there's no money in the theatre I can tell you that, except for something that's massively successful."
Meanwhile, old habits die hard. He still writes with pen on foolscap. "I can type reasonably quickly with one finger but I've got a reliable friend who does it for me. Word processors must be very handy, but I'm not great with gadgets - they tend to break down when I touch them. I only got a TV three years ago, and I've a washing machine and a dryer in there which I've never used, I always use the launderette . . . "
Considering that he doesn't take commissions for original plays, what impetus pushed Mutabilitie out at last - on top of all the other work? "I think I used grief actually, I took on an immense amount of work after my parents died - within 10 months of each other - because that was my way of coping with the sorrow, until it absolutely hit me.
"Always, always, always on the opening night of a new play, I used to ring my mother, and she'd be telling me to catch myself on, and this was the very first time I couldn't, it nearly killed me . . . " His eyes visibly moisten. "I couldn't hear her voice, and in a weird way, it really hammered it home, like a final stage of mourning."
While he talks of a new play at the Abbey (about Ireland's treatment of Jewish refugees during the last war), or at least another Ibsen adaptation before Patrick Mason leaves, McGuinness is now resolutely taking a break.
"I just want to go easy for a while. There's nothing on the cards, and I'm not taking anything else on. My father's memorial cards arrived today, so it's still a shock to the system. I think I need to spend a short time adjusting and seeing if I can cope. Also just to get things into proportion. I mean, a play is only a play, there's a life to be lived as well . . .
Mutabilitie runs in rep until March at the British National Theatre, London (phone 0044 171 928 2033).