`It didn't start with a concept. It started with ideas for scenes, ideas for characters, scraps of dialogue. That's where it all began, and any plays I've written that's where they all begin. They don't begin conceptually."
Debutant playwright Liam Heylin (36) is talking about Ding Dong, not the first play he ever wrote but the first to get a professional production, which opens tomorrow at the Half Moon Theatre in his adopted city of Cork.
A native of Waterford, Heylin first came to Cork almost 20 years ago when he completed a social science degree at UCC but after a master's in journalism in NIHE Dublin (now DCU), he found his metier - at least by day - working as a reporter.
A staff journalist with the Irish Examiner, for which he covers courts, Heylin admits he's always been drawn to drama rather than novels or poetry, principally because of his fascination with the way people speak and seek to express themselves. "I like to read beautifully polished prose and perfectly formed sentences, but when I go to write I feel what draws me is the jagged awkward ways that people speak rather than the exact ways that writers write," he says.
"I'm much more drawn to those peculiar kinds of rhythms that people use in their speech and the way they say things imperfectly and it being just an approximation of what they think."
Ding Dong, explains Heylin, is set around a family funeral in his native Waterford. It's a comedy but not a black one, he stresses, as it explores the relationships between six main characters gathered for the burial of the family patriarch.
"It doesn't have a graveside oration simply because it revolves around a funeral. It's a comedy in the sense of the quirky angles that some of the scenes take, at tangents to the main event, and the way the characters spark against each other."
He's reluctant to be drawn on influences but when proffered somebody like Martin McDonagh as a reference point, Heylin says his play wouldn't have the same heavily stylised Irishness and would have a more contemporary feel.
But back to the beginning, and if he doesn't begin conceptually but with scenes and characters and dialogue fermenting in his mind, how does Heylin know when Ding Dong or any of his other plays is finished and ready for release?
"I know the play is a play when it has the right feel to it and the right shape and a sense of the characters having been explored and having been allowed to sing and express themselves and knocked out a journey between them. That's when it's ready."
Directed by Oonagh Kearney, Ding Dong runs at the Half Moon Theatre at Cork Opera House on September 20th and 30th before transferring to the Briery Gap in Macroom for two nights on October 10th and 11th and Garter Lane Arts Centre in Waterford for two nights on October 12th and 13th.
