Ursula Rani Sarma tells Sara Keatinghow writing her latest play, which premieres at the Midsummer Festival, made her fall back in love with theatre
URSULA RANI SARMA seems remarkably self-possessed on the morning of the premiere of her latest play The Magic Treeat the Midsummer Festival in Cork.
"I'm exhausted," she admits, "but exhilarated. I wouldn't exactly call it nerves - although I'll be nervous later on - but I'm excited. This is the first play that I've written out of commission in seven years, the first play that I've written in ages just because I wanted to, just because I had to get it out there."
Having spent the last seven years writing continuously for companies as prestigious as the Royal National Theatre in London and New York's Origin Theatre, the 30-year-old-Irish playwright has become an expert on the infrastructures - the grants, the commissions, the residencies - that enable a contemporary playwright's career. Lately, however, she has become slightly disillusioned with the theatre world, in which writing has come to be seen more as a job than a creative passion.
"I wrote my first play when I was still in college, in 1999," she explains, "and then it went to Edinburgh, and attracted some attention. Every play I've written since then has been under commission. I was working with companies, having these long dramaturgical relationships, writing drafts and redrafts, and I have to say I have mixed feelings about the whole process.
"Increasingly, there's this belief that there's a blueprint for a well-made play, and so an awful lot of plays begin to look the same. It all started to make me quite cynical about theatre, about writing. You see sometimes the flaws are the elements that make it shine. Just because a play is polished does not mean that it will move you."
The Magic Treewas a direct response to this impending sense of frustration, she says. "I got to this point where I had written four plays back to back, and I began to even wonder if I had anything to say, so I took a break and went travelling, to Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand. And when I was away I had this idea for the play.
"I came back and sat down and I wrote it, not for anyone, not for any theatre, but myself. I think this play was my attempt to fall back in love with theatre," she continues.
"When I started working in theatre as a student, I was writing and directing. I'd just write a play and within nine months it was up, it was over, but when you start working for companies - I mean I was so lucky to get those commissions - but it's a different process. You finish a draft of one play and while you're waiting for feedback you're working on a redraft of another play, so it might take three years to write a play, and then you have to wait another year for it to be programmed. So that immediate reward that the theatre can have had vanished for me - the sense of that intense creative bubble you get when you're working on a show with actors, director, designers, watching the play come to life.
"AND THERE'S JUST not enough kickback for you to work in theatre if you don't love it. I mean, unless you're getting the passionate burning feeling in your chest then you might as well move into a different area, and I had already started writing screenplays for the BBC and Film4. But I needed to find a reason to stay in theatre and that's The Magic Tree."
Opening at the Granary Theatre in Cork as part of the 2008 Midsummer Festival, with a subsequent tour to the Edinburgh Fringe and then Limerick and the Dublin Fringe, The Magic Treealso provided Sarma with a welcome chance to stage her work in Ireland again. Although now based in Dublin, Sarma commutes regularly between New York and London, where she lived for three years.
She confesses that the travelling suits her - "I'm quite a restless person" - but she also admits she isn't "really sure what my place is in Irish theatre. Basically, the companies that have been fostering and nurturing me are abroad.
"I don't know if that's because there is better support in England for new writing - and I'm so happy that my work has found a home in these places, but all that work has sort of kept me away from forging relationships with Irish companies and I'd love to do that in the future."
It is something that the half-Indian Co Clare-born Sarma relates to her personal history, "my dual-heritage" as she calls it, "but it is something that I see in my work as well - a search for home and identity. And I guess it comes from that question I sometimes ask myself: whether or not I can ever be fully Irish, or perceived as Irish, with a name like Rani Sarma. But it also has to do with how people are always pigeon-holed: they look at you as a woman, then as a playwright. Then you become 'an Irish female playwright' instead of just an artist.
"But more than my own place," she continues, "I'm not sure what the place for female playwrights is in Irish theatre at all. People ask 'where are the women playwrights?' But they are there - there are so many of them, I mean, I have a play under commission for the first Irish Theatre Festival taking place in New York later this year, and three out of the five writers commissioned are women. There are women writing, loads of them. They are just not being programmed.
"But, you know, there's no point in complaining," Sarma concludes. "As an active member of the theatre community, I should challenge that, and maybe I will.
"I'm certainly interested in staging Irish female writers' work with my own company, Djinn. I mean, I'm not a radical feminist by any means, but I do think the balance should be redressed."
For now, however, The Magic Treedemands Sarma's full attention.
Later on, she stands poised and glamorous, greeting guests in the theatre foyer before the show begins, the nerves stifled by a smile. This, after all, is the joy of the theatre, the live event.
The Magic Tree runs at the Granary Theatre, Cork until Sat. Then at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in the Assembly Rooms, Aug 1 to 25; Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick, Sept 8 to 13; Project Arts Centre, Dublin, as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival, Sept 16 to 20
