'The perfect work is always in the future, like a beautiful dream'

THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:Conor McPherson

TONLEGEE ROAD IN north Dublin, is a windswept artery running between the coast and the knotted motorways that will sweep you on to the airport or Ikea. Notwithstanding the solid, no-nonsense, semi-detached houses that patrol its perimeter like unblinking sentries, it seems a pretty uninspiring playground for the imagination.

“All the kids kept getting knocked down all the time,” recalls playwright and film-maker Conor McPherson of his traffic-laden childhood stomping-ground. It is a remark peppered with the roguish unpredictability that pervades many of his observations.

We are drinking ice-cold water from a utilitarian jug in the beige marble foyer of McPherson’s local hotel, the anonymous, sanitised setting vaguely evocative of limbo. Outside, beyond the peeling paint and decorative ironwork of the hotel doorway, Dún Laoghaire, that gracious seaside port, is unfurling its spires under a tentative sun.

McPherson’s new manor is a far cry from Tonlegee Road (the name derived from a brutal Anglicisation of toin le gaoith/wind to your back). The monochrome suburban cradle, however, did nothing to douse the creativity of this delicately humorous individual, who has, at the tender age of 39, amassed an extensive body of work as a writer and director in theatre and film.

After a doggedly unhappy time at school ("I think I was exceptional in that I really hated it and couldn't get the hang of it for a long time"), McPherson found himself at UCD, studying English and philosophy. "I chose philosophy because it didn't seem to be about anything," he says. "Later, I matured and really got into it." The putative playwright had, however, in his final year of secondary school (Chanel College in Coolock), also discovered Arthur Miller's play, Death of a Salesman, and had seen a possible future model for himself in Miller's ingenious craftsmanship.

Four years of writing and directing for his fellow students at UCD honed McPherson’s craft, and since leaving the campus his work has followed an almost unbroken trajectory. In their unfettered ascent, the plays have been collecting nominations and awards.

This startling oeuvre, which has ignited both Broadway and London's West End and seen productions all over the world, includes The Seafarer, Port Authority, Dublin Carol, The Weir(Olivier Award, Evening Standard Award, Critics' Circle Award) and Shining City(nominated for a Tony Award).

Alongside his stellar career in theatre has been his work in film, which started out with a screenplay for the vividly funny I Went Downand now includes writer/director credits for Salt Waterand the recently completed The Eclipse.

The Eclipse, which will receive its Irish premiere on RTÉ1 on St Patrick's night before going on general release in the US later this month, is a tender, measured and satisfyingly ambiguous piece of work, both love story and ghost story. A mysterious, touching film, it seems, despite its ostensibly bleak subject matter (the loss of a spouse), to reflect McPherson's hard-won personal happiness, while retaining the trademark fascination with the unknown, the unknowable, which has always pervaded his work. Ghosts walk through McPherson's plays with the nonchalance of scene-shifters: in The Seafarer, the Devil turns up at a card game in a three-piece suit; in The Weir, memories of death silence the living.

The Eclipseis based on a short story, Table Manners, from a collection, Tales From Rainwater Pond, by the writer, actor and musician Billy Roche, an inspirational figure for McPherson. Roche's prowess as a storyteller has informed the younger writer's work, and McPherson slips easily into Wexford idiom to quote a couple of lines from Roche's play, The Cavalcaders, in which a bunch of guys are trying to write a song.

"What will we write about?" says one. "Look out the window," says the other, "there's a whole universe to write about." As Roche finished his stories for the collection, he would send them to McPherson, but despite McPherson's commitment to work with Roche, the realisation of The Eclipsewas slow, taking four years from start to finish. McPherson describes their collaboration as "a car crash of two writers". He would visit Roche in his Wexford home and sit beside him at the keyboard. "Do you want me to type, Billy?" he'd ask. "No, I don't," Roche would reply, "now where's the L?"

The biggest problem in getting The Eclipseoff the ground, however, was not Roche's imperfect mastery of the keyboard, but money. "No one would give us the money to make it," says McPherson. "I'm a good bet in theatre, people tend to go and see the plays, but . . .".

He goes on to describe the reluctance of investors to give money to a writer who they know will insist on having control over his material, a writer who will not just write the screenplay but direct it and, what’s more, cast it with the actors he feels best serve his script, rather than the producers’ latest offerings from the garrulous drawer of fame. And then, to add insult to injury, the man they have invested in is probably just going to head back to theatre anyway.

Ultimately, the film was made by way of a collaboration between RTÉ and the Irish Film Board, with the assistance of the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland. This investment has already produced results: the film, which is set in Cobh, recently picked up three Iftas, while the superb Ciarán Hinds won the best actor award at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival. Hinds’s eloquent portrayal of Michael Farr, a man on the cusp of love who is haunted by the ghost of his recently deceased wife and the spectral appearances of his devastated father-in-law, is both sombre and uplifting. McPherson’s tautly lyrical film, inspired in part by Kubrick, uses wide, encompassing shots that allow scenes to play like moments of intimate, subtle, dark theatre.

The effect of this naturalism juxtaposed with great horror-flick shocks will doubtless further cement McPherson’s reputation, but it was his wife, painter and composer Fionnuala Ní Chiosáin, who stopped Roche and her husband in their tracks midway through the process and provided them with the key to the film’s metaphysical dimension. In the original text, Michael Farr was a married man, working voluntarily at a local literary festival, who becomes obsessed with a visiting poet. Ní Chiosáin suggested the Farr character should be a widower, “allowing the sympathy to flow towards him”, according to the delighted McPherson, “and also, he’s fucking haunted!”

When it came to shooting the film, Roche, whom McPherson believes to be underrated in this country, generously allowed McPherson free rein, his one wish being that the film should not, like so many other Irish films, attempt to imitate an American one. An Irish film, said Roche, should look like an Irish film in the way that French film is recognisably French. This is a salient aspiration and one which McPherson lives up to, with the help of the almost gothic beauty that can still be found in Cobh, where the film was shot.

McPherson – engaging, warm, convivial, compact, and smiling from the depths of his dusty rattan armchair, the ice rattling in his water glass – seems a relaxed and entirely likable man. He describes his lifestyle with Ní Chiosáin as "a privilege": their walks together, their home (which contains his office and her studio), her compositions (she has written extensively for McPherson, including the score for The Eclipseand music for his recent adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's The Birdsat Dublin's Gate Theatre). "I am in a lovely relationship with my wife," he says with complete ease.

HIS EQUILIBRIUM IS palpable and cherished, but it is an equilibrium that has been hard to find. Almost 10 years ago now, in February 2001, McPherson, about to enter his thirties, was already an experienced hand at success and his play, Port Authority,had just opened in London. The morning after the first night he felt a searing pain in his abdomen, and his father, who had come to London to see the play, called the doctor. McPherson was taken swiftly to St Thomas's Hospital, where he remained for the next nine weeks, more than three of those in intensive care. He had pancreatitis, an inflammation of the pancreas that can be fatal, the result of years of alcohol abuse. McPherson, "the life and soul of the party" at that time, had almost drunk himself to death. I ask him why.

He hesitates before answering. I know this territory must be tediously familiar for him. Every time McPherson offers the world a piece of work, some bloody journalist with a cup of cold coffee in their mitt asks him to spill the hops on his alcoholism.

Forget it, I say, let’s talk about something else.

"I was 29," he offers. "I didn't know anyone else who was in my situation. I was in a relationship that was breaking down. I seemed to have freedom, but it was impossible to live without drinking. I was very lonely. I didn't want to cause trouble. I didn't want to admit there was something wrong. Like a lot of Irish drinkers, I was drinking so as to get to that normalplace." He talks about the skewed culture of drink in this country. "In Ireland," he says, incredulously, "of the 10 people sitting around a table, the guy with the Ballygowan is the alcoholic; the guy drinking six pints can hold his drink."

On leaving St Thomas’s, he was told: “If you drink again, you die.” Not drinking hasn’t always been easy – “you can’t just switch the day off, switch yourself off”.

His relationship with Ní Chiosáin, whom he met when he was still drinking, through their mutual friend, director Paddy Breathnach, continued to develop after his hospitalisation. “I wasn’t a good bet,” he says, “but she truly believed in me.” But why was he drinking so heavily in the first place, I ask. Anxiety? “Yes” he answers, “anxiety.”

And what was the source of unease for this clever suburban boy, son of a washing-up-liquid manufacturer (who, after the collapse of his business in the 1980s, retrained as a lecturer in accounting) and of a mother born into a trader’s family on Moore Street (a mother with whom he sold shoes on a stall by the side of the Ilac centre to support his play-making and his philosophy in college)? Why did that young man, already a great success with audiences enraptured by his work, drink himself into intensive care? “A really deep terror of being alive,” he answers. “An existential fear, a fear of responsibility.”

And what drives him to continue, to keep writing? What moves him now, beyond gratitude for the life he has made with Ní Chiosáin and the peace he has made with himself? His answer is complex, but seems to boil down to a continuing sense of wonder at our very existence. McPherson writes about the longing in human beings for eternity; we are, he says, “part of eternity, we have lost and won the battle”.

“The mystery of existence,” he adds, “is totally inspiring and really emotional – fear, joy, the pursuit of happiness. That intensity of emotion is what people want, though maybe they don’t even know they want it.” McPherson, although unsentimental about his work (“the more you make it real, the more you damage it”), does seem to believe that sometimes, in theatre, that intensity is present, that emotion palpable.

I think of my own experience of sitting in a darkened theatre when that sense of reflected consciousness has brought an audience not just to its feet but beyond its expectations: at Tom Murphy's The Gigli Concert, Sebastian Barry's The Steward of Christendom, Brian Friel's Faith Healer, McPherson's The Weir.

But whatever about those rare moments of connection, theatre, McPherson concludes, is a tough, bruising business. “You’ve got to write the play, convince someone to put it on – exactly the way you envisage it – and then, then you have to persuade people to come and see it.”

Is that why you like to direct your own work, I ask, so that it is “exactly as you envisage”? “You’re just taking one big potential problem out of the mix,” McPherson replies, “which is not to say that there aren’t good directors. There are, but not many.”

ON HIS SUCCESS, and despite having had the relatively rare experience of numerous theatre managements agreeing to his terms and allowing him to direct his work, he adds: “Everything I do I feel is really flawed, imperfect. Always the perfect work is in the future, like a beautiful dream.”

We stand to leave. Exiting the hotel, we enter the watery sunlight together. So, I ask, what next? “I’ve been doing plays for 20 years now,” he replies. “I’m interested in consciously taking a step back and seeing what evolves. I’m trying to steer clear of the next thing I should do and just get into the writing unfettered.”

He heads home with the low sun at his back, the cosmos winking over his shoulder.

BORN

Coolock, north Dublin, 1971

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

Plays: The Seafarer, Port Authority, Dublin Carol, The Weir, Shining City, The Birds.

Films: I Went Down, Salt Water.

LATEST OFFERING FROM HIS LITERARY LARDER

Co-writer and director of The Eclipse, a moving, metaphysical meditation on loss. The Irish premiere of the film will be screened on RTÉ1 on St Patrick's night, before going on general release in the US later this month.