Ursula Rani Sarma's plays are cinematic, other-worldly and, usually written at the last minute, she tells Peter Crawley
In the beginning was the word. "I've just been given the finger!" says Ursula Rani Sarma, peering through the window of a Dublin café. The word was made flesh. "Thanks very much," she deadpans. Her eyebrows arch incredulously towards the offending couple, on the other side of the street, who amble off.
It would be easy to see this as another rude awakening for the 25-year-old playwright from Co Clare; the sort of unexpected exposure to urban grittiness that Rani Sarma might see as the thief of youth and innocence.
"As the world slowly presents itself to you, I feel it is a shock," she says a week later. "I can almost remember the key points that suddenly made me kind of . . . not disappointed with the world but kind of . . . disappointed with people's ability for negative action and negative thoughts."
Such moments have sparked her curiosity, her creativity and her career. The one-finger-saluting couple are not a case-in-point, however. In fact they work for her. The two larking actors will appear in the belated Dublin première of Blue, Rani Sarma's third play, which she is directing for Project and her own Djinn Theatre Company.
A prolific writer, Rani Sarma is usually associated with the "Cork school", a style of theatre in which dense action is articulated while words become physical. If Disco Pigs made Enda Walsh the school's headmaster, then Rani Sarma is a star pupil.
She is under commission from two national theatres - Ireland's and Britain's - as well as the Traverse Theatre, in Edinburgh. She has just completed a year's residency at Paines Plough, the respected new-writing theatre in London, and written two radio plays. Her work has been performed in Cork, Limerick, Galway, Edinburgh and London. But, until now, never Dublin. "I crossed the water very quickly," says Rani Sarma, a compulsive writer. Here's how it works.
"I get approached from a theatre company, and they say we really liked your last piece, we think your voice would suit our company. I'm usually given eight months for a first draft, and I usually do most of my work in the eighth month.
"It's a gift and a curse in some ways. Sometimes you're so frustrated with yourself; you sit and wait and it won't come. You know that your deadline is in three months' time. Then it's always at the oddest of times; you've been out for the night and you come home exhausted at two o'clock in the morning. And you're like, now? Now you're in my head?" Her tone is that of an exasperated parent arguing with an unreasonable child. "Great." But what follows is pure exhilaration. "When it's ready to be delivered it literally rushes out. I don't feel the time passing. I could be there for an hour or six. I love that process."
Set on an isolated headland in the west of Ireland as three friends approach the end of their school days, Blue moves briskly between scenes of naturalistic dialogue and interweaving poetic monologues. It charts a desire for escape and the thrill of transgression. The sea suggests both; the teenage trio enact a clandestine ritual of leaping from a cliff edge and plunging deep into the ocean.
"I like setting them at that age," says Rani Sarma, who was 21 when she wrote the play. "Where you could almost mistake them for adults or, as an adult, almost mistake them for children." The lines are similarly blurred in Blue's prose, realism melting into lyricism. "I'm looking out over the Atlantic and she's like tinfoil," says one character, "with lace at her ankles in waves on the shore." It is an articulacy one doesn't usually associate with adolescence.
"I just thought, why not give them the ability to relate and give them the entire dictionary? I know that some people feel that my voice comes through very strongly in those parts. But one of the most frustrating things for that age group is that there is so much they want to say, but [they have\] a constant worry about saying the wrong thing in front of others. They have a fascinating energy that I don't think any other age group has. But they don't know where to channel it."
Her more recent work deals with very different themes and worlds. "I'm more interested in characters who can't say what they feel at the moment. Now I'm focusing on how lyrical you can be in the simplicity of language. I'm fascinated by how much can be delivered in a single sentence. You can end someone's world or make someone's day in a sentence."
At full speed, her own sentences are urgent, fluent and unpunctuated. Sometimes they convey more information than her lungs can accommodate and eventually - gasp - the words buckle in a breath, under the express train of her thought. When I call her at home in Co Clare, however, she sounds so relaxed she could be a different person. It is as though she takes her rhythm from her surroundings, be it the kinetic swirl of the city or the unfathomable tranquillity of the ocean.
"This is me in Lahinch," she says. "I went down to the sea last night and swam from the beach. There was nobody else there. I find those experiences very positive in terms of writing, because it just slows everything down."
Growing up, Rami Sarma experienced "a bizarre juxtaposition" of cultures. She recalls attending mass every Sunday morning, then coming home to MTV. The nearest cinema was 20 miles away. "City kids are appalled at that notion."
Is she content that critics have called her writing style cinematic? "I suppose so. But also I'm a very impatient person. I like to jump in and do what you need to do. There's a time to pause and set something up beautifully, but at the same time with Blue and Touched [her previous play\] I was writing about an age group that can't really sit still anyway and echoing that in the scene structure - constant movement."
For the similarly peripatetic Rani Sarma the journey to adulthood could be as sudden as a cliff drop or as gradual as coastal erosion. "Going to Cork to college I was very aware of the urban-versus-rural divide. Growing up, we had so much space and there were so few dangers. The biggest danger when I was a child was the terror in parents that you would get too near the sea and you would drown." So the power of the sea instilled a deep respect. "You don't go out of your depth."
It is hard to imagine Rani Sarma out of her depth. She says she would rather step down from a commission than contort her vision for the sake of somebody in a theatre company. "Otherwise, why have they bothered coming to me?" And she discusses her success - from prestigious associations and awards to writing a film adaptation of Blue on her own terms - with more pragmatism than pride. When she talks about the culture shock of moving to a city from a small village, however - "that feeling of, oh my God, people take drugs in club toilets?" - it seems that different places can still overwhelm her.
"I feel very Irish when I'm abroad," she admits. "Except most people think that I'm Spanish when they meet me. It takes about 10 minutes to explain."
The youngest of three children, Rani Sarma was born of an Indian father and an Irish mother. Her father died when she was two. "While we always felt a loss hugely in the family, there was also a sense that my father was very much part of the family, and we were all constantly reminded of that and introduced to Indian culture and literature from a very young age - and to the fact that we were something different, that my father's religion was something different to the Irish Catholic society that we were surrounded by."
Her earliest memories, though, are of her grandfather, Jim O'Loughlin, reading stories to her and, as she puts it, enchanting her with words. "You'd be lying there, listening to a story, and you could be transported anywhere," she says. "I loved that."
She also remembers discovering her father's poetry collection and becoming intoxicated by the lyricism of Rabindranath Tagore. "His use of language has a beautifullyrical quality that almost acts the way a painkiller would numb a headache. That sensation of drifting away; almost hypnotic but also so moving."
Perhaps it is fitting that a fantasy for escape recurs in her early plays. "I'll never be able to come home ever again," dreams Danny in Blue. "I'd be an exile in a foreign land, destined never to touch the earth of Ireland . . . I'd say the water over there would be warm as toast."
Rani Sarma says: "I've been lucky enough to be exposed to another culture so young in my life, and I've always been aware of there being 'another': another world, another life or an entire other dimension. There are so many other worlds and stories and lives out there that I'm going to . . . " She stops to reach for the right word, then hits on it: " . . . steal!"
Blue is at Project Cube from October 6th to 18th as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, before touring until November 8th