Simon Stephens is just home from a funeral. He’s still jacketed as he joins the videocall from London, where he’s in his deliciously busy, book-lined office. The exceedingly prolific and awarded British-Irish playwright is considering things. The funeral was of a close friend of 25 years, the artist Alastair Mackinven, who died from cancer at the age of 53.
Years ago they were in an art-punk band together, Country Teasers, which “achieved more legacy than it had resonance in its actual life”. Franz Ferdinand and Pavement “talk about how important we were”.
“These things are often healing, aren’t they, funerals?” Stephens says. Mackinven’s death was òne of the first among his peers. “We’ve reached this moment. It’s like, oh, it’s us now, is it? It’s nice to see old friends, though, and remember some of the things we did. That was good.”
We’re here to talk Men’s Business. Stephens’s new play is an English-language version of Männersache, by the German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz, that is having its world premiere at Glass Mask, in Dublin; the company is a small fish making a significant splash in Irish theatre.
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Stephens loves Kroetz, who was also an actor (“he’s described as the German Sam Shepard”), for his “startlingly flinty naturalism” and the “extraordinary toughness to his writing”.
His play Through the Leaves “resonated with audiences in the more hipster corners of European theatre. I was fascinated by it.” So Stephens asked a friend, an academic named Bettina Auerswald, for a literal translation, so he could make a new version.
“And she found this play Männersache, an earlier version of what became Through the Leaves, which is even tougher and less sentimental and has an almost psychotic brutality to it. I just loved it for its nuance, its toughness, the strangeness of its ending. There’s a kind of deranged musicality to it.”
It’s hard to produce now. “English theatre in the pandemic aftermath has become more gentle, more populist, built more around celebrity casting and uplifting stories. The type of work that always excited me about theatre as an art form – that asks difficult questions, creates a liveness that has an intensity – is disappearing from English theatre.”
Last year Stephens saw Glass Mask’s production of his play Country Music in Dublin and thought, “These guys are doing what I’ve always wanted to do. This is why I make theatre. I never really wanted to make theatre to win Tony awards. I’m proud of Curious Incident,” he says, referring to his hit stage adaptation of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which won Tony and Olivier best-play awards, but prizes weren’t why he wrote it.
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“I wanted to make the kind of theatre Glass Mask were making. They’re at the start of their work, and they’re punk, they’re flinty, they’re unapologetic. They’ve got this space, and it’s not a gargantuan Broadway house, but there’s a realness to the space.”
Glass Mask is an intimate cafe venue. “I thought their production of Country Music was really brilliant and rigorous and honest. I was excited by that fearlessness. I wanted to give them Men’s Business because I think they’d get the spirit.
“It’s the same world Wim Wenders was born out of, Fassbinder, Werner Herzog. For me, artists in Germany in the late 1960s were using art to make sense of the catastrophe of their parents’ generation, and the Third Reich. The work didn’t necessarily directly address that. It was in the metabolism of the work.
“You have to ask yourself, what is theatre for? I think the function of theatre is different in Germany to anywhere else in Europe, and it resonates. You can historicise it back several centuries to the unification of Germany, or the nature of the federal state, but I go back to that 1968 generation.
“For me the function of theatre in Germany is rooted there. It’s Peter Handke, it’s [Peter] Stein, all these guys using theatre to ask difficult questions.
“I don’t know about the historical nature of theatre in Ireland, but in England after the second World War, theatre was a place for celebration and entertainment. I’m not knocking that. I love a great night out. But I also think it can be a place where difficult questions are asked.
“My favourite type of music is difficult music. There was an edge to the work [Country Teasers] made. We were doing something very different from Oasis or Pulp. There’s an edge to the type of theatre I’ve always cherished. And I find that edge more in Germany than in other places.”
It’s no surprise that Stephens is one of the most-performed English-language writers in Germany.
“I was 54 yesterday, and I never thought I’d live in a time when Germany would move back towards fascism. But that’s what’s happening, in Germany, in America. Elon Musk, I think there’s something unapologetically fascist about his thinking, and he’s encroaching into English politics with his advocacy of Nigel Farage.
“It’s not a time for theatre to reach into sentimentality and celebrity casting. It’s a time for theatre to get difficult and gnarly and fearless, and Glass Mask are as exciting makers of theatre of that form as I’ve come across anywhere in Europe. I’m a big champion.”
Men’s Business is billed as “a love story set in the back room of a butcher’s job with a brutal bastard of a dog howling in the yard next door”. Rex Ryan – Glass Mask’s founder and artistic director – and Lauren Farrell perform, directed by Ross Gaynor. Stephens says it’s darkly funny, sexy and brutal.
“The cafe is great. I love the moment they clear the plates, close the curtain, drop the lights. You don’t anticipate acting at that level, or art of that toughness, and the counterpoint between the rather lovely world and then art of the highest calibre is really surprising but really thrilling.”
Stephens will return to Dublin to see Men’s Business after London rehearsals for Vanya, his acclaimed radical spin on Chekhov starring the Irish actor Andrew Scott, which opens off Broadway, in New York, in March.
Scott is a reminder of what Stephens jokingly calls his own “questionable Irishness”.
“My mum and uncles were Irish, born and raised in Belfast. I was born in Stockport, south Manchester, but raised with the kind of apocryphal story that I’m from an Irish family and I’ve got Irish blood, and the Irishness is important.
“Maybe it had the importance of an exile to my mum, and to my grandmother, who lived in England for the last four decades of her life. My grandmother, especially, talked often about going back to Belfast. I don’t know if she ever would have done, but it was a story.
“You know, so much of our sense of self is defined by the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. And the story my family told themselves about who they are was definitely that it was an Irish family. And some fragment of myself, sense of self, was part of that.”
So Stephens was Irish before he ever came here.
“My uncle sent me an amazing photograph from 1923 of my grandmother as a child, outside this house with her sisters. It’s a terraced house, and there was seven of them raised there. There’s something very moving about it. Just to see all these girls.”
Stephens’s mother, born Carol Porter, died in 2023. She was raised on Sunnyside Street. His grandmother was Georgina Miller – “the Irish name. Porter was my Cumbrian grandfather’s name.”
Stephens first went to Belfast in 2014, when the Lyric produced his play Punk Rock (“a beautiful production”, he says). “I went to that house where my grandmother was born, and the house where my mother was born. It was a really tender thing, to go into this little regular house in Belfast and imagine my mum born there, growing up there as a child.
“It’s strange. There’s something of a time loop going there as an adult and imagining my mother as a child there. I’ve worked a lot with the wondrous Andrew Scott. When he met my mum, his glee: ‘I knew you were Irish!’” Stephens roars laughing. “But he recognised it somewhere, the soul of the rhythm of my words, I don’t know.”
He’s still involved in a band, writing lyrics for LiY – it’s short for Live into Yours – “celebrating the possibility of an intergalactic optimism”. They released an album, Songs for Telescope, on Spotify and are developing it into a piece of theatre for Sounds from a Safe Harbour, this September’s festival in Cork curated by Bryce and Aaron Dessner of The National, Cillian Murphy, Enda Walsh and the festival’s director, Mary Hickson.
Stephens is bamboozlingly prolific. He reckons he has written about 50 plays, including versions and adaptations. “I really should stop now,” he says, jokingly. “I don’t think the world needs any more.”
He’s also professor of scriptwriting at Manchester Metropolitan University and is married with three children; however, he manages it all.
“I’m working on 17 things at the moment.” He means it literally. He pulls up his work document and lists some current projects: a television series with Thomas Vinterberg, an adaptation of an Amor Towles novel, a musical adaptation, with Guy Garvey, of Kes, about six original plays, a play opening in Tokyo, a version of Three Sisters, an adaptation of Wings of Desire and a collaboration with the choreographer Imogen Knight.
Asked how he fits it all in, he’s almost stumped. “I guess it’s what I do. Writing for me is as elemental as breathing. And it’s, like, when I breathe, Andrew Scott speaks. There is something about his Irishness that articulates part of my soul. It’s not like I’m trying to work really hard. It’s just the work is fundamental to me.”
Stephens comes back to his friend Alastair Mackinven. “I was very encouraged by Alastair in how he made his art. I think I make my theatre in the same way. I’m not embarrassed talking about Alastair today, or his legacy or what I learned from him. We might have looked like a couple of 50-year-old punks, but there was something elemental or spiritual to Alastair about the application of paint to canvas. I think there’s similarly something ancient about the application of language to the performing space and theatre.”
Only some of these things may come to fruition “but there’s a kind of restless hunger about the possibility of making theatre that helps us make sense of what it is to be alive, and be alive now. It is about the possibility of something wondrous at a time which can feel overwhelmingly difficult for us optimists.
“I’m an optimist by nature – as a teacher, as a parent. It’s not been a great month for us optimists. But I keep going. All we can do is keep going. All we can do is keep writing. All we can do is keep making sense of the world through the stories we tell about it.”
Men’s Business is at Glass Mask Theatre, at the Bestseller Cafe on Dawson Street, Dublin, until Saturday, March 1st
