As far as publicity goes, The Whisperers is a dream come true. There is something so intriguing about the idea of a 20th-century playwright finishing a play started in the 18th century; it is almost a literary mystery come to life. When the half-written play is by Frances Sheridan, the mother of playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and the contemporary writer is actor Elizabeth (The Colleen Bawn) Kuti, conjuring up interest from punters and journalists becomes that much easier. But if you think The Whisperers is just a big publicity gimmick, think again. For a start, Frances Sheridan was a well-known writer in her own right; the play fragment, The Trip to Bath was her third work for the stage, and her novels are still read today. As for Kuti, she got started on the project while researching a PhD on 18th-century women playwrights and has a couple of play-scripts under her belt herself. Theoretically at least, The Whisperers sports all the right credentials and deserves to be looked at as more than just a theatrical curiosity.
Elizabeth Kuti is quite clear about why she decided to add the final two acts to Frances Sheridan's play. "I read the first three acts of The Trip to Bath and was just very taken with it. I was also taken with the possibilities of a play that had never been performed and which was left at a cliffhanging moment. Because I had read the biography about her and had done my own research into the reception of her first two plays, I also realised that Frances Sheridan very much represented what I was interested in.
"She was hugely successful as a novelist but although she had a big success with her first play, her second play was severely criticised for being coarse and scatological. She sent A Trip to Bath to Garrick (manager at the famous Drury Lane theatre), he didn't want to do it, and her career as a playwright really came to an end. That was something I really wanted to look at; how women writers survived as novelists whereas their drama was suppressed or not published. Well, that was originally why it interested me, but I actually wanted to finish it because I thought the writing was really fresh. I loved the idea of these characters suspended for 200 years, unable to finish their story."
They're a set of characters that probably didn't take too kindly to being abandoned in the first place. Bundled into one boarding house in Bath, there is Lord Stewkly and Lady Filmot, two cynics with titles and no money who pit their wits and romantic ploys against Edward Bull and Lucy Tryfort who have money aplenty, no lineage and a great deal of idealistic love for each other. Add into the mix such glorious characters as the snobbish fraud, Lady Bell Aircastle, Lucy's sense-mangling mother, Mrs Tryfort, and the boarding house gossip, Mrs Surface, and the possibilities for confusion, collusion and corruption become endless.
As a fragment, it is infuriating - the characters are halted at a dance, quite literally all dressed up with nowhere to go - but Kuti's ending provides all the satisfaction that a good Restoration comedy should. No mere literary pastiche, a marvellous twist in the tale manages to both tie up the loose ends and present an interesting mirror that reflects as much of contemporary life as it does of 18th-century concerns.
"I think the original was also very socially astute," she points out. "It's about a society in a big state of flux, a society that is changing its social and political order. It's very much concerned with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the city as opposed to the older ruling class. In these days of the Celtic Tiger" - she grimaces as she trots out the hackneyed phrase - "people are concerned with that and with how individuals fit in. Coming from a British background, it reminded me of the 1980s when the emphasis shifted to the city and suddenly all the power was in the hands of a new class of people."
Although she has lived in Ireland for over five years, Kuti was born and brought up in Kent in England. At a risk of sounding "awful and precocious", she claims she always knew she wanted to act. "At the age of three I wanted to join the circus but I think even then I realised I wasn't really physically endowed to be a trapeze artist. Theatre was a substitute." She suggests that perhaps it was her "normal happy childhood" that first started her creating drama: "I always loved the idea of pretending to be someone else - I wanted to be other, more interesting people. Making up plays with my friends was always an extension of that game of `let's pretend'. For me, it's just lasted a bit longer than most people."
After school she was encouraged to go to Oxford to read English, rather than drama school, something she regrets "sometimes". Still, acting was a constant from when she joined a youth theatre at the age of 11, to her MA in text and performance at RADA and Kings College, London. After completing that degree she worked as the box office manager at the Man in the Moon pub theatre in London, a job that did nothing for her confidence in her own mathematical abilities but put her on the path that led eventually to Dublin and The Whisperers.
`I used to have huge discussions with the writer in residence, Phil Wilmot. His argument was that women couldn't or at least didn't write plays and I'd say `well, there's Caryl Churchill' and then I wouldn't be able to find other women. I got very interested in the whole issue as I was just beginning to write plays myself. It made me come to Ireland because I thought that I could research the area." Her original plan was to look at why there were so many strong women in Irish literature but so few women writers, but her interest soon shifted to 18th-century women playwrights - and to Frances Sheridan. Finishing The Trip to Bath and turning it into The Whisperers was she says "surprisingly easy".
She got some friends to read the fragment aloud, plotted the story structure of contemporary plays and looked at the common idiolect for each character. "Then I just started writing. It was really such fun to write and I'm usually quite a morbid kind of playwright. This, though, felt like it wrote itself; it really felt like it wanted to finish its own story."
This instinctive feel for the play was one reason why she chose to complete the play in a Restoration rather than a contemporary idiom: "It could have been very exciting to have an 18th-century first half and a completely 20th century second half . . . but it just didn't feel right, it just felt like the play wanted to go in the direction it did." The other reason was slightly more ideological: "I had a sense of Frances Sheridan and I suppose I felt quite sympathetic towards her. I actually felt that I was very much championing her work . . . I did it very much in a spirit of not wanting to tread on her toes. I think that was maybe why I didn't want to add a 20th century ending: I wanted to restore it." This desire to champion the cause of Frances Sheridan becomes all the more understandable when you learn that many elements from Frances's unfinished work turn up in her son's later, much-lauded plays - Sheridan's famous Mrs Malaprop takes whole lines from her predecessor, Mrs Tryout in The Trip to Bath, while Mrs Surface's name and other images pop up in The School for Scandal.
"At the time I was writing the play I was very involved with the whole issue of gender in relation to writing, and I thought it was a very telling example. The son, a well known playwright whose works are part of the canon and are regularly performed and then this ghostly writer, his mother, whose plays have been disregarded and who is remembered only as a novelist."
It is even more fitting that Rough Magic is the company staging The Whisperers - the company's last production was The School for Scandal, in which Liz appeared, . "Yes," she muses, happily, "they're almost the perfect theatre company."
Rough Magic's The Whisperers is at the Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick on April 12th-17th and tours to the Hawk's Well Theatre, Sligo (April 20th-24th); the Town Hall Theatre, Galway (April 27th- May 1st); Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork (May 4th-8th), and the Civic Theatre, Tallaght Dublin, (May 11th-22nd, preview May 10th)