When Conor McPherson was about 10 years old, he went to see his cousin, the actor Garrett Keogh, in a play in Dublin. Although his memory of the night is vague now, he remembers believing wholly in the imaginary world that he saw on stage. The actor playing a rich man must surely have been a millionaire; the actress who cried must have been really upset. When the show ended, Keogh took the young McPherson backstage to meet the cast. The millionaire was standing in his underpants drinking a can of coke. The distraught actress was joking happily with the crew. This was a world of cardboard and papiermache. The revelation lit up the boy's imagination, and he has remained fascinated with the theatre ever since.
Now, 19 years later, at the age of 29, McPherson is riding a wave of popular and critical acclaim. He's been touted as the Irish heir to Chekhov. His play The Weir has played to packed houses in London and on Broadway. His first film was the most successful independent movie ever to be produced in this country. What is unusual about McPherson is that his success has been recognised both at the box office and among academics. Unusual, too, is the way he has successfully combined a career in film and on the stage, without either taking dominance.
"There's hardly any writer for the stage that can combine film and theatre," says Ian Rickson, artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre, who collaborated with McPherson on the London productions of his plays. "Very often film gobbles up writers. Conor has a single-mindedness and a focus that allows him to successfully navigate his way between the two."
With Saltwater, his directorial film debut, released yesterday, it seems McPherson has added another string to his bow. The movie's producer, Rob Walpole, says McPherson made the transition from directing theatre productions in UCD Dramsoc to big budgets and celluloid quite seamlessly.
He's a very intuitive person and he learns very quickly, says Walpole. "It's not that I had to teach him anything. He just watches what's going on and figures it out. It didn't feel like making a film with a firsttime director. All he had to pick up was the technical stuff of making a film, which is really the kind of easy part. Anyway, making a good film is not really about how a camera works, or who does what job, it's really just about telling a good story."
McPherson's talent for storytelling is something that has been much commented on. The ability to tell a good yarn may be neglected in some of our contemporary theatre, but not in the work of McPherson. For theatre critic and professor of English Literature at Trinity College, Nicholas Grene, it is his aptitude for the cracking good sceal that marks out McPherson.
"I think that the strength of his work is the sense of the presence of the storyteller, and the storyteller's potential for direct contact with the audience through telling a story. It's a technique that was really pioneered by Brian Friel in Faith Healer. The monologue, which McPherson often uses, may be a self-limiting device, but it can also be utterly theatrical," says Grene. But earlier works, such as This Lime Tree Bower, have found their critics because of this reliance on the monologue form. Even his forthcoming play, Port Authority, is structured as three separate monologues by three separate characters. For some, such as Karen Fricker, editor of Irish Theatre magazine, McPherson's monologues are essentially untheatrical and constitute stories rather than drama proper. But Ian Rickson doesn't accept this analysis, arguing that the strength of McPherson's writing makes for great theatre.
"I think that's a very conservative analysis," says Rickson. "It's a reactionary criticism. When the writing is strong enough, as it is with Conor, there is great drama. I think he's a distinctively dramatic writer. He makes the idiomatic dramatic."
What is certain is that McPherson has taken Irish drama away from its habitual obsessions with nationality, history and identity. While his first film work was, as McPherson says, a deliberate attempt to make a genre movie in Ireland where the setting didn't really matter, the same could be said of his theatre work. In a play such as Dublin Carol, which is at the Gate Theatre during this year's Dublin Theatre Festival, there are no IRA men, no horses, and no religion. Making no great claims to unravel and interpret the national Zeitgeist, McPherson says his play is just a story to entertain people.
Yet, anyone who sees a McPherson work will know that there is an awful lot more going on than just entertainment. While there is great humour and fun in the work, there always also seems to be an interest in the complexity of ethical choice, a philosophical interest in morality and its difficulty. Such concerns may not be surprising for an MA graduate in philosophy at UCD, whose thesis, Logical Constraint and Practi- cal Reasoning, discusses the philosophy of ethical utilitarianism, and, as the head of the UCD philosophy department, Prof Dermot Moran, sees it, this philosophical training is evident in his creative work.
"I know that there's a lot of philosophical discussion in Conor's work," says Moran. "He's very interested in the complexity of ethical and moral choice, and I think he kind of loves the exuberance of philosophical rhetoric. In I Went Down I noticed that there were a lot of philosophical themes, even if they weren't being done in philosophical jargon. I think he's suspicious of the language of absolute rights and of the language of morality. But his characters speak in philosophical ways. You'd know he was a philosophy graduate, kind of like Woody Allen."
But McPherson conceives his theatre in much more down-to-earth terms. For him it all comes back to the simple act of story telling, of a character trying to overcome some adversity in the search for community and happiness, in the search for love.
"I'm usually writing about the same things all the time," says McPherson, "people who are looking to connect with other people. And maybe feeling guilty that their own selfishness is getting in the way. People that are looking for some kind of salvation. Dublin Carol is really just about the difficulty of someone accepting the community around them, and allowing themselves to be part of it, and allowing themselves just to be happy."
In plays of straightforward, even traditional naturalism, where the characters sound as real as possible, McPherson presents us with a world as morally complex as our own. His is a theatre that matches the puzzling and imperfect reality of our everyday lives with a dramatic image, full of the sympathy and compassion that is the mark of the best drama. This is a theatre with a healing function, of which McPherson is not unaware.
"I think all stories have a healing function, because what they say is that you're not alone," says McPherson. "If a play or a production of a play works, what it does is it defines the community. Because at the beginning of the night everyone goes in and they're all separate people, and the actors are separate to the audience. But by the end of the night, if the thing has worked, everybody comes out feeling that they're all on the same team. You feel human, and that it's OK to be human. It's trying to give you a sympathetic view of people that you may even consider your enemies."
In this drama, the frailty and imperfection of the human is given room to be itself. This is the world of the lonely and alcoholic, a place of moral ambivalence and laughter, despite everything. McPherson's characters speak in a distinctly Dublin idiom, groping towards some kind of expression through their inarticulacy. Like the US playwright David Mamet, McPherson has made the tongue-tied eloquent.
"There's an awful lot of inarticulacy in my plays; very often the most inarticulate character is the one that people are being drawn to, more and more. Brendan, the barman in The Weir, he hardly says a thing, and yet people are just drawn to his plight. So I think I'm trying to distil exactly what it is that people are trying to say. So all those ums and aghs and pauses in the plays are just looking for, I suppose, the poetry of inarticulacy."
In the theatre of McPherson, the ordinary becomes extraordinary again. That actor drinking his can of coke becomes again a millionaire. The crying actress has tears that are wholly credible. This is a place where even papiermache can make a fragile house. A place for the imagination to speak.
Dublin Carol opens at the Gate Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival on Tuesday. Saltwater is on general release.