To Leinster Cricket Club in Rathmines on a tolerably sunny midsummer evening. Mark O’Rowe is rehearsing a top-flight cast – Robert Sheehan, Cathy Belton, Catherine Walker, Stephen Brennan among them – for the upcoming premiere of his knotted, fraught new play, Reunion, at Galway International Arts Festival. It’s a revealing process. As I arrive, the conversation hangs on whether Sheehan’s character will put on his coat. O’Rowe, directing his own work, thinks not. Keeping it off will “differentiate him from everyone else”. Such are the tweaks that turn text into living drama.
You could reasonably believe the writer has spent some time away from the stage. It has been six years since the premiere of his acclaimed The Approach at Project Arts Centre, in Dublin. But O’Rowe, a busy, fluent talker with a sandpapery sense of humour, is eager to dismiss the notion that he has been lurking in a cave.
“Every single person says, ‘Why haven’t you written a play in so long?’” he says with a laugh. “I adapted Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Abbey last year. So I am writing and adapting. I’ve done a lot of TV stuff. Usually, if you haven’t written the play in a while it’s because you’re trying to scratch a living. Simple as that. It’s not like I didn’t have any ideas.”
That seems a fair defence. The journey from millennial enfant terrible (I exaggerate) to distinguished elder statesman (he’s really not that old) has allowed him few moments to stop and smell the vegetation. O’Rowe, raised in Tallaght, broke through in the late 1990s with flinty, violent plays such as From Both Hips and Howie the Rookie.
He deviated into film with John Crowley’s crime romp Intermission and – arguably the project that launched Andrew Garfield – the same director’s searing drama Boy A. He returned to the stage with hits such as Our Few and Evil Days in 2014 and The Approach in 2018. “I have to make a living. If I had the money I would just write plays,” he says.
The current production rumbles with prestige. Reunion, produced by Landmark Productions for the Galway festival, makes use of the time-honoured technique of cramming a swarm of squabbling relatives into an enclosed space. In this case, siblings, children and partners face off in the materfamilias’s house on a remote island off the west coast. You would have trouble locating consistent threads through O’Rowe’s work, but he has always had a gift for finding poetic rhythms in demotic speech. That is present in the playscript. Suppressed secrets ooze amid a barrage of tersely framed insults.
“The last play was The Approach,” he says. “It was three scenes of conversation. There was very little movement. It could almost have been a radio play. It had a good life. But I got tired looking at the same image all the time. I said to myself: the next play, for directorial reasons, I want to be full of life and movement. The reason it’s set on an island in a house is that it’s very hard to come up with a situation where you can get a bunch of people together and they can’t just leave.”
He mentions Chekhov and the older Irish “big house” plays. You also get a bit of that in the films of Ingmar Bergman.
“Definitely. People often ask me, ‘Do you map out plays first or do you play it by instinct?’ I have no system really.”
Belton plays the mother. Walker is her sister. Brennan is an older hanger-on. Talented young actors such as Venetia Bowe and Desmond Eastwood flesh out the next generation. I naively assume that performers would fight to be in a Mark O’Rowe play. All those meaty conflicts. All that emotional violence. He doesn’t exactly agree.
“I have been turned down several times by actors who are chasing the career – who are sometimes on the cusp of something very big,” he says.
That surprises me a little. If he will allow me to butter him up, he is pretty well known.
“Well, let me tell you this. There is theatre ... and then there’s film,” he says. “It’s about acknowledgment, being seen, money. There is no money in theatre. It’s a calling for me. It’s not something I do for money.”
[ The plays of Mark O’Rowe: a blend of base subject and artistic poetryOpens in new window ]
It is fun to set the current version of O’Rowe – a bit creased round the edges but otherwise admirably unchanged – from the version who arrived in the premillennial years. That also takes in a discussion of how the wider culture has altered. There was then, of course, talk about how he emerged from a working-class suburb. Profiles noted that he was a fan of kung-fu films before finding revelation in the work of David Mamet. “He seemed very immediate,” he told the New York Times. “It wasn’t like Shakespeare. It was just, like, three-word sentences.”
And there was, when considering the violence, a great deal of wearying comparison to Quentin Tarantino (something that did a disservice to both the Irish playwright and the American film-maker). The 2003 premiere of Crestfall at a prominent Dublin theatre generated the memorable headline “Bestiality at the Gate”. O’Rowe properly notes that he wasn’t alone in his concerns. Young British playwrights were also testing the extremes.
“There was a bit of a movement around that at the time,” he says. “Particularly Sarah Kane or Mark Ravenhill with Shopping and Fucking, and stuff like that.”
I feel an unavoidable journalistic cliche marching over the hill. I can’t be the first to facetiously throw the word “mellowed” in his direction. He is now married with a family. He lives with middle-age responsibilities. Here he is fronting Galway International Arts Festival. I sense his amusement at the line the argument is taking.
“Have I mellowed?” he says, smiling. “The plays were fantastical and violent and sexual and everything else. I need to say this without judging other people who might still like that stuff, but, at this stage in my life, I can’t go back any more. Everything has to be new to me. There’s no point in doing the same thing again.”
He sees his 2007 piece Terminus – perhaps most avant-garde of his plays – as a notable turning point.
“I think after Terminus that’s what happened to me. I tried similar plays and I just got bored. You feel, This is the same stuff. So you’re waiting for something to really hook your attention. It might just be something you can’t quite let go of – and that you need to express. I am very, very, very proud of my early work. But that was a young man’s work, and I am an older man now. If that’s mellowing, then maybe I have mellowed. I would much rather mellow and evolve than stay kicking over the same thing.”
[ Mark O’Rowe on the power to shock – and feelOpens in new window ]
So, about the class thing. I can’t remember a time when we weren’t fretting about theatre being too bourgeois. Nobody sane believes the Angry Young Men in the 1950s or the Marxist fringe in the 1970s sorted that out for all time. Indeed, there are worries that it is harder than ever for working-class actors to get by in the current viper economy. Does O’Rowe think we have gone backwards or forwards?
“There are very few places for people to stage a play,” he says. “It’s a very small pond. It’s changed. I came in around the end of the days of the playwright. The playwright was king. Now you have something called ‘theatre-making’. Some of those can be great. I wouldn’t dismiss the form. But, like every other form, there are people who are good at it and people who are not good at it. I can think of a million contradictions. As in anything, there are people who will take advantage of the system to get ahead.”
He makes an uncertain face.
“Also there’s a particular culture at the moment that I don’t quite understand. I’m sure you’re very aware of that as well – in the arts and in cinema. We’re all swimming in it.”
An oversensitivity?
“Yeah – all that kind of stuff. And I don’t have an answer on that. Because I’m an old man baffled by that.”
Would those early plays get staged now?
“They get staged around the world. They are still popular – the better-known ones. If I was to write those kinds of things now? The plays have to have something to them. A working-class play doesn’t deserve to get on because it’s working-class. It only deserves to get on if it’s a good thing.”
O’Rowe talks a lot about how hard it is to make a living writing for theatre. Happily, he has, over the past few decades, had much interest from film and television producers. The Delinquent Season, his feature debut as director, featuring Cillian Murphy and Andrew Scott, emerged in 2018. He essentially acted as showrunner on the Sky series Temple, from 2019.
“You have someone like Aaron Sorkin doing 22 episodes a year of The West Wing,” he says, sighing. “I did 7½ episodes of a show. And I don’t want that stress. I don’t want that life. I don’t want to go there. I would rather have less money and write plays.”
Somewhere in there he contributed to the small-screen phenomenon of the age. O’Rowe is, alongside Alice Birch and the author herself, credited as one of adapters of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People. Few will need to be reminded how that television series captivated the attention of millions during the first, uncertain weeks of lockdown in 2020. He has, as an honest fellow, admitted in earlier interviews that he didn’t feel at the core of the creative process.
“It’s worse than that,” he says, amused. “I wrote one of 12 episodes.” Birch “wrote 11 episodes” with Rooney “and I wrote one. But every time [Birch’s] name is mentioned, mine gets mentioned as well. If the tables were turned, I’d be so pissed off about that! I just hate it for her sake. I’d love for her to own the thing lock, stock and barrel. If you look at my stuff and you look at Normal People, you can see they are worlds apart.”
O’Rowe is nothing if not an original. There are common threads through the work, but he has survived, through the application of sharp thinking and nimble footwork. And, yes, maybe by mellowing. Not that Reunion doesn’t have its jagged edges.
“It’s great that it’s a play about a bunch of Dubliners who go to Galway,” he says. “Because we are a bunch of Dubliners going down to do the same in Galway. Ha ha!”
Be warned.
Reunion is at the Black Box Theatre from July 12th to 27th, as part of Galway International Arts Festival
This article was amended on July 16th, 2024, to clarify Sally Rooney’s involvement in adapting Normal People for television
