Owen McCafferty doesn't like talking about his writing, but Karen Fricker tracked him down to discuss his directing début.
The subject has finally agreed to speak. Eighteen months ago, when his play Closing Time was at the 2002 Dublin Theatre Festival, I tried to interview the playwright Owen McCafferty for this newspaper. The response was polite but firm: he won't talk. Reportedly uninterested in explaining his work, and not a seeker of limelight, McCafferty refused all requests for interview. In the end, the article about Closing Time included others' views of McCafferty's work, and stacked up some impressive quotes: "A Belfast Eugene O'Neill"; "One of our greatest writers." Since then, McCafferty's stock has maintained a steady rise - his most recent play, Scenes from the Big Picture, was hailed as "superlative" when it opened at London's Royal National Theatre last April. But still he's continued to avoid interviews.
What a surprise, then, when Belfast's Prime Cut Productions sent out smoke signals that McCafferty might meet - but less surprising when it emerges that the topic for discussion is not McCafferty's writing but that of the great English playwright Harold Pinter, whose play Ashes to Ashes McCafferty is directing as part of a Prime Cut double bill which opens at the Lyric Theatre on April 7th.
I arrive at Stranmillis bar, and am soon joined by McCafferty, a burly man with a slightly sheepish air and a clear fear of coming across as pretentious. Warmed up, though, he starts to articulate what has drawn him to directing a play for the first time: "I have been writing plays for 12 years - 12 plays in 12 years - and nearly all of them original rather than adaptations. That sort of takes its toll. You have to have a life again to gain more material. Whenever Prime Cut asked me, it came at the right time, and when I read the play it seemed like the kind of thing I'd like to direct . . . This is going to sound banal, but Pinter writes plays for the stage that only make sense on the stage."
Ashes to Ashes was first produced at the Royal Court Theatre in 1996, directed by Pinter and starring Stephen Rea and Lindsay Duncan as a couple engaged in an intense psychological struggle: under his interrogation, she gradually reveals her past involvement in events of genocide and terror. Dublin's Gate Theatre presented the Irish premiere of Ashes to Ashes as part of its 1997 Pinter Festival, and the 45-minute-long play has been successfully revived on the West End and Broadway since.
Jackie Doyle, Prime Cut's artistic director, has had her eye on Ashes to Ashes for years, and finally found a good companion piece for it in Neil LaBute's 2002 play The Mercy Seat, in which an adulterous couple consider using the World Trade Centre bombings to fake one of their deaths. "Both plays treat issues of atrocity and genocide through the exploration of male-female relationships," says Doyle, "so there are a lot of ways they are interesting together."
Does McCafferty see Pinter as a political writer, in the sense that relationships are about power and thus about interpersonal politics? "I am a bit dubious about the notion that everything we do is in some way politicised. I think probably part of what I am trying to do when I write is to say that politics are an aspect of our lives, but it's not the complete picture . . . There are things that are more important to us - the debris and the consequences of political acts that have failed and that we carry around with us."
Slowly, we're ending up in the conversation I've been angling for all along - about McCafferty's work as a writer. "We all have life experiences. We all fundamentally understand that we're on our own in the world and that it's a bleak and a dark place . . . Well, not exactly that." He pauses. "Well, yes, that, actually." He laughs, darkly. "We all know what grief and pain are, and we have certain stories to tell, and have gone down certain paths. So unless someone writes something that is completely unrecognisable - which would be bad art in any case - you don't have to explain everything."
The grief and pain that McCafferty treats in his plays often has to do in some way with the Troubles, but McCafferty clearly has problems with being taken as a spokesman for the North: "I don't see that I write about Belfast. I see that I set things in Belfast and that's different. I don't think I'm ever writing a state of the nation thing, ever."
But Mojo-Mickybo, his first major success, is about two boys whose friendship can't continue because one is Catholic and the other Protestant - isn't that about the North? "That play is about the absurdity of sectarianism. In order to make it more absurd I used innocent children. But what I mean is that sectarianism isn't unique to here, necessarily." Of his recent plays, Scenes from the Big Picture distances itself the most from Northern political strife, and McCafferty seems pleased at the way it was received: "The point was that it could have as easily been Leeds as Belfast, and people got that." McCafferty's plays and adaptations have been produced by nearly all the major Northern theatre companies but he reacts equivocally to the notion that he's part of a Northern theatre community.
"That community may exist, but I don't think I'd like to be a part of a community like that no matter where I live. While it's good to talk about art, I don't think it's good to talk about it too often . . . Here, I don't think it's worked. We have not fully developed here artistically. We are not mature enough. We still snigger about the fact that we call ourselves artists. There is something embarrassing about that." The locus of McCafferty's professional energies over the past few years has been England, particularly the Royal National Theatre, which has produced his last two plays and for which he is currently writing another; he is also finishing a stage adaptation of the 1960s film Days of Wine and Roses for Scamp, Sam Mendes's production company.
This might indicate that he's slipping out of the hands of Republic and Northern Ireland theatre companies, but local producers are quick to stress their admiration for and interest in his work: "Tinderbox have worked with Owen twice before, and both sides are interested in doing so again," says that company's artistic director, Mick Duke. "I don't think Owen's lost to Ireland; I just think he's a busy man." Like Duke, the Lyric's artistic director Paula McFetridge is keen to produce McCafferty's work, but points to limitations in the commissioning scheme.
There seems little likelihood, at least, that McCafferty will move away from the North: a family man and a native of Belfast, he seems as settled in his life as he's going to be, even if he continues to lack the language to describe his chosen profession.
"I don't know what it is that I do. I think that's one of the reasons I don't like doing interviews. All I can say is, I do it. And that often after I've written a play I'm surprised at how I've done it . . . I'm 43 now. There's nothing else in the world I'm going to do."
The Mercy Seat and Ashes to Ashes run at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast from April 7th