Conall Morrison fastens his gaze on a patch of sunlight on the wall, his customary rushes of eloquence subdued by my scratching pen. This "director who writes" enjoys being interviewed even less than he likes reading his own work, and on this occasion is demonstrating his listening skills: I find myself making rambling speeches. This is a crammed summer for the 32-year-old Associate Director at the Abbey. He follows As The Beast Sleeps, which opens tonight at The Peacock, with a production of Boucicault's musical melodrama, The Colleen Bawn, at The Abbey in August. In the same month he's bringing his adaptation of Tarry Flynn, for which he won the ESB/Irish Times award for Best Director, to the Royal National Theatre in London. In the autumn he'll be initiated into the risky business of international musicals: he has been invited by producer Cameron Mackintosh to direct a revamped version of Mar- tin Guerre, opening in November at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. "I'm both excited and nervous about the whole year," he says, taking a deep breath. "While it's happening I just want to dive in. But I know I'm going to have to husband my energies." That could prove to be difficult, since Morrison tends to work at full tilt. In rehearsals of Tarry Flynn last year, I watched him fling himself into the fray, arms aloft, conducting the shifting chorus of actors and dancers with huge swooping movements, mouthing the words as they chanted: "Mother of Christ/Star of the sea . . ." The mood in the studio that day was of barely restrained exuberance, which spilled confidently, one week later, on to the Abbey stage.
Rehearsals for As The Beast Sleeps have been demanding in a different way. A few days before the first preview, Morrison talks about the emotional intensity of Gary Mitchell's bleak play, and the commitment of its Northern Irish cast. Like In A Little World Of Our Own, Mitchell's last, award-winning play, the new work explores the responses of life-long UDA members to the changed political climate in the North, this time in the context of friendship rather than families. As we get to know these frustrated, fearful characters who have been moulded by sectarianism, the play challenges us to follow the psychological shifts that make the eruption of violence seem inevitable. "These are not natural villains," Morrison says, "but they're all involved in the horrific beating of another human being, and that act will taint their lives."
What emerges most strongly is the fear of change, including the impending loss of their livelihood. An entire black economy based on low-level criminal activity among loyalist gangs is falling apart. The characters are chronically inarticulate; they distrust language, and the people, especially politicians, who have mastered it. "They are lost," Morrison says. "All the old certainties are eroded. They are being told that their way of life must come to an end and they feel betrayed." The timing of the play's premiere, two weeks after the vote on the Belfast Agreement, is "salutory and instructive", he says. "We were careful that it didn't become a hostage to fortune, so there are no references to the agreement or the referendum, but it's incredibly relevant to what's happening today." Born in Armagh, Morrison lived in Edinburgh and Liverpool, where he studied drama, before moving to Dublin a few years ago. Commenting on Southern attitudes to the Troubles, he says that the referendum vote in the Republic was "suspiciously enthusiastic. There was so little active debate, so little soul-searching. The message seems to be: `now, that's great, you nutters up there in the North will stop shooting each other. Why can't you just love each other?' "But it's not that simple. The redecorating that takes place in the play's opening scene is a metaphor for the whole province: it's being re-upholstered but the rot is going to seep through. It's not over yet. There are going to be days like those that Gary Mitchell is describing. There are going to have to be flare-ups. Let's just hope that these violent reactions will be the death throes, the endgame."
THE forces that propel an individual towards violence have been addressed by Morrison in his own writing also. His play, Hard To Believe, directed by him and first performed at Andrew's Lane Theatre three years ago, is a richly textured, multi-layered monologue, suffused with rage and pain. It portrays a profoundly damaged man (Foster) who is so distrustful of the debased language and competing public discourses in the North that he becomes "a fabricator", cynically manipulating the media in the service of British counter-terrorist operations. Reviewing his life, Foster rails against his grandfather's non-conformist bigotry, his father's conversion to Catholicism and his mother's conventional piety, while yearning for some kind of spiritual enlightenment. "The capacity for faith, that tiny candle flame, is blown out by the huge gusts of aggression from the big institutions," Morrison says. "The fragile potential we have to genuinely explore our core beliefs is stamped out in the North by the ongoing ideological warfare." Everything in Foster's life is poisoned, except perhaps the snatches of music that are threaded through the shifting perspectives and memories: Schubert, Bach, Ravel. These seem to offer the glimpses of transcendence which finally elude him. Music is enormously important to Morrison, who is keen to test the "under-explored possibilities" of musical theatre. Tarry Flynn was a first step; his production of Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn will feature live music performed by pianist Conor Linehan, with choreography by David Bolger, who collaborated with Morrison on Tarry and will work on Martin Guerre. He also dreams of a dramatisation of Schubert's magnificent song cycle, Winterreise.
Working on The Colleen Bawn is a shift in tone, to say the least, from As The Beast Sleeps; Morrison laughs at the idea that he appears to be alternating between studies of the psychology of violence and heart-warming song-and-dance vehicles. In fact he is egregiously open to all genres and forms of theatre, whether physical, visual, text-based or a "happy synthesis" of all three; nothing is ruled out. "It's all part of the same chain. There are so many weapons in the theatrical armoury. What matters is the politics of the imagination. You can throw total theatre at any topic and make it come alive.
`AT first I thought that Colleen Bawn was just a dreadful parade of stereotypes, perfect for the tourist coachloads to lap up," he says. "But it's not just saccharine stage-Irishry. Boucicault wrote absolute masterpieces of playwriting, wonderful stage engines. "This is a clever, spoken opera, really. It's very heightened, all in primary colours and created through music. But it could be read as a satire on our cultural industries, on all the ersatz Irishry. It's both tongue in cheek - a glorious send-up - and also a touching celebration of human emotion."
The ideal Abbey summer production, in fact . . . While Morrison likes to refer in mock-heroic, actorly tones to "the national theatahh", his quiet pride in his association with it is obvious. He is appreciative of the opportunities given to him by Patrick Mason, whom he is tipped to succeed as Artistic Director. In addition to the new Irish writing to which the Abbey is committed, he has ambitions to direct more Shakespeare, which he has done in Edinburgh and Liverpool, and more recently in an open-air production of Macbeth at Kilkenny Castle for Bickerstaffe Theatre. "It's the challenge of the classics I want to embrace, rather than the safety. Engagement with this core of the canon is what keeps theatre alive, and we need to nourish that."
What about nourishing his own roots, as a writer? He doesn't see an enormous split between his directing and his writing; they are mutually enriching. "But directing is easier," he admits. "Writing is the real gift and it's very punishing. Adaptations offer a middle way - they're easier than digging out your soul with a blunt knife." His adaptation of Tarry Flynn is a distillation of Kavanagh's notebooks and poetry as well as the sprawling, autobiographical novel, and it renders the "spirit-shocking wonder" of the poet's vision into theatrical form. Revisiting this production for its London outing, does Morrison think that it might be too soft-centred, too upbeat? Its deliberately kitsch tone and surreal comedy give it an effective contemporary spin, but does it miss the darker aspects - the pain and frustration - of Kavanagh's experience? "The piece will keep evolving, of course," Morrison says, after a long pause, "and I see it as a journey towards that pain. But I was always concentrating on the imaginative vision. It's a dramatisation of the joy of the imaginative life. Of course, living in that is not enough; reality wins out and Tarry has to leave. But in the meantime, it's a celebration."
As The Beast Sleeps opens tonight at The Peacock. The Colleen Bawn opens at The Abbey in August. Hard To Believe is published in a collection of contemporary Irish plays, Far From The Land (Methuen, £9.99 in UK).
