Novelist Colm Tóibín has written his first play, about a major event in Irish theatre history, but it was no easy task, he tells Arminta Wallace.
'I gave an interview recently," says Colm Tóibín thoughtfully, "in which I said I could make a chair more easily than write a play." What, then, is he doing writing the play called Beauty in a Broken Place, which opens at the Peacock Theatre next week? Well, he says simply, he was invited to. In 2002, Tóibín published Lady Gregory's Toothbrush, an exquisite historical essay which, as part of its quirky overview of the life of the dauntless doyenne of Irish theatre, focused on certain episodes in the early history of the Abbey. He was invited to give a talk on the topic at the Peacock - and then, in due course, to write a play on the same period of the theatre's history.
"They initially asked for a two-hander with just Yeats and Lady Gregory," he says. "And I think I said that I could write that sort of play, but that I would personally - if I were in the audience - throw stones at it." At which point most writers and theatres would possibly have shaken hands and gone their separate ways. Happily, both sides persisted, and the result is a mischievous and moving dramatisation of the riots which greeted the appearance of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey in 1926.
"All I've done is written a script for the actors in what is an intrinsically good drama," Tóibín insists. Culturally, he says, the riots constituted a key moment in Irish intellectual history - a test of how the new State would respond to the idea of freedom of speech. Dramatically, of course, riots are something of a gift to the aspiring playwright. "It seemed to me you could put a riot on the stage as easily as you could put most things on - have people shouting and howling and all the rest of it. So I could see how it could be done. The trouble was that I had no idea, really, how to do it."
Having spent most of last summer finishing his most recent novel, the highly-acclaimed The Master, on the life of Henry James, he realised with dismay that he didn't have a great deal of time to study the gentle arts of playwrighting. "The play was to be ready by the end of August - and I was still racking my brains trying to work out how to start. I know how to start a novel, of course. You just start." Writing a play, it turned out, began in much the same way. "George O'Brien, who teaches at Georgetown University, suggested to me that O'Casey himself could narrate the story, which I hadn't thought of. Once I got that, I had a way in. All I had to do was sit down and tell the story. But I had forgotten to ask how long a play actually is. So I rang Loughlin Deegan, who has written two plays and works for Rough Magic, and said, 'Loughlin, how long is a play?' And he said, 'Well, a play's about 95 pages'. I said, 'Great. Thanks'."
The opening scene of Beauty in a Broken Place features Lady Gregory advising Sean O'Casey to allow his characters to triumph. Tóibín appears to have taken her advice to heart, for the central trio of Yeats, O'Casey and Lady Gregory emerge from the play with startling vividness. You might say the playwright had a head start on this score, since they were larger-than-life characters in real life as well; but do characters in a play take on momentum in the writing, the way characters in a novel do? "You have to find a separate voice for each one of them," says Tóibín. "For O'Casey, for instance, I couldn't work from his autobiographies because they're written in a style which is now dramatically impossible - full of word-play, full of jokiness. I didn't want that. I wanted him to be slightly melancholy, rueful, sometimes angry and sometimes funny."
To achieve this mixture of emotions, he says, he drew on his own personal feelings at the time. "While I was writing the first draft of the play there was a conference in Virginia about the future of Ireland. The idea of Ireland had ceased to interest me very much just then. Public meetings about what the future was going to be like? Ugh. I felt very uninvolved in that particular debate. So I used that emotion for O'Casey, as he contemplated the whole business of the Free State, the way in which 1916 should be remembered, and all that. He was tired of it. He just wanted to go to England and get away from it. So I used that emotion for him."
The voice of Lady Gregory, he says, was "really easy". As for Yeats, Tóibín's portrait of Yeats may surprise those who come to the play expecting to see the endearingly dotty creator of 'The Wild Swans at Coole'. "The Roy Foster books change everything for Yeats," says Tóibín. "Instead of this dreamy poet we have this committee man, this determined individual, this finisher of things - this finisher of people. It's a lovely, dramatic idea: that Yeats constantly moves from being dreamy, from missing the point of things, to being more like an arrow about to hit the mark. That makes Yeats very interesting."
The baddies are, if anything, more interesting still. Led by Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, whose husband had been killed while trying to prevent looting during the 1916 Rising, this was no right-wing rabble, but a group of people incensed by what they saw as O'Casey's irreverent mockery of those who fought for Irish freedom. "Mrs Sheehy Skeffington began as Public Enemy Number One," says Tóibín. "Someone who wanted to stop a play - well, everybody hates someone who wants to stop a play. But when you start to look at what she actually said about the way in which we should remember our dead, she changed to being someone who has enormous dignity and enormous grief. And she affects O'Casey very deeply. There's an amazing moment when they have their big confrontation, and O'Casey, having planned what he's going to say to demolish their case, listens to her speak and then just sits down without saying anything."
Having delivered his script to the theatre - only slightly after the deadline - Tóibín thought the worst was over. In the life of a play, however, the delivery of the script is only something of the order of the opening act. "If they had said, 'Look, you know, you can't write plays - go away, we're sorry we asked you', I would have said 'OK, no problem'. But they were very nice. They said, 'Yeah - that's fine'. And then they put me through a wringer."
The wringer consisted of monthly meetings with the Abbey's literary manager Jocelyn Clarke, then with director Niall Henry. There were some exhilarating moments, such as the first time he heard the actors read his lines aloud, chuckling at the jokes and having fun with the accents - and some excruciating ones. "There were a few scenes where I said, 'Look, let's not even discuss that scene - I'll just rewrite it completely from beginning to end'."
The long process of tweaking and adjusting is now over, and, as opening night approaches, Tóibín says he feels a sort of retrospective sympathy for all the playwrights whose opening nights he has attended in the past. "I had asked an American friend of mine who is mainly a novelist, but has written plays, 'Well, how do you write a play?' He said, in a very jokey, deadpan way, 'A play? Oh, it's very easy. If you're a novelist, it's very easy - it's just the dialogue'. And it's absolutely true that in a novel you have to worry all the time about the next sentence, but in a play you only have to find the next voice. But obviously there's another ingredient and the other ingredient is entirely mysterious.
"And," he adds, after a momentary pause, "most novelists can't do it. There are very few examples of people who write five novels and then write a play - and I may discover that this in fact is the case with me also." He squirms in his chair, then laughs. "So, you know, it could be Boucicault, 1: me, nil. In which case I'll just have to go back to the day job." Which, presumably, won't have anything to do with carpentry.
Colm Tóibín's Beauty in a Broken Place, directed by Niall Henry, designedby Jamie Vartan and lit by Paul Keogan, opens at the Peacock Theatre on August 16th