In a rehearsal room up stairs and down corridors at the Abbey Theatre, where large windows that run the length of the space are intermittently spattered with rain and the rumble of the Luas provides the bass notes, the third act of Bán is playing out.
It’s a Thursday morning in September, and things are coming together. Overseeing proceedings are a collection of crew, the director Claire O’Reilly, who pads across the floor in thick woollen socks once a group warm-up is complete, and the play’s writer, Carys D Coburn, who hangs back.
At noon a few days later, Coburn is sitting in the empty bar of the theatre’s Peacock stage, in the Abbey basement, a notebook in front of them, ready to talk. Bán, which is running as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, is a reworking of The House of Bernarda Alba, by the Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca. Sisters and daughters mourn their father, suffocatingly surveilled by their mother. Secrets, denial and delusion abound.
Describing the play for the Abbey’s website, Coburn wrote, “Bán isn’t simply mapping Franco’s Spain on to de Valera’s Ireland – Catholic fascism = Catholic fascism = duh. It’s speaking to anyone anywhen who denial kept alive but who then wished it hadn’t.”
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Their adaptation propels the original somewhere else. “What I think is fun is [to] not settle for the game of dot-joining but to push further and go, what, in the spirit of this play, feels close to home and speaks to the Ireland I live in,” they say about writing the play.
Twelve years into a career that already spans multiple award-winning productions, Coburn is viewed as a prodigious talent whose work can be playful and devastating, full-on and sparse, charming and confronting, sometimes all at the same time.
How did they begin? Coburn says the “cute answer” is that they wrote their first play at the age of 18 and that it went well.
That piece, Boys and Girls, was drawn from “the strange late-aughts/early-2010s moment when all of my friends who were girls were constantly reading pop-feminist essays on the internet about microaggressions, and then all my friends who were boys were doing masc-culture stuff where the sensibility was, ‘We can be ironically sexist, because the battle is already won,’ and just what a strange confluence or cultural cleavage that was.
“It was a weird little play about a group of late teenagers being cruel to each other at a party. There was a lot of fun with language and point of view. That sort of set the tone for the next few plays I would write.”
That year “Emmet Kirwan had written Dublin Oldschool. I remember going to see that and thinking, ‘Playwriting is over: Emmet has written the play. We’re done. Pack it up.’
“I’m marking it as a sign of personal growth that I saw it again two years later and thought, There are other things to say. But I did have that moment where that was everything I wanted from theatre.”
(Coburn also read Terminus, by Mark O’Rowe, and felt, “I will never recover.”)
Boys and Girls went on to win the Fishamble new-writing award at Dublin Fringe Festival, and to run at the 1st Irish theatre festival in New York.
But the “embarrassing answer” to how they began to write, they say, is being a “huge book-dweeb child”. When they were 13 or 14, and their mother, the playwright Veronica Coburn, was on commission, they lived overseas together, and “I wrote a big unreadable fantasy novel because I wasn’t in school. I just had all this time when I was learning in a self-directed way, with the textbooks I would need when I’d come home.”
Later their friend Leah Minto, the actor, asked Coburn if they would write a play. The request was “like some people’s experience of putting on noise-cancelling headphones, where it just gave me this momentum to move forward in a straight line and finish something. Because I didn’t have to say everything I was feeling or thinking, I could just write what the characters say, and we’ll get there.”
Coburn was also around the spoken-word scene in Dublin at a time when emerging talent was pinballing through live poetry nights, generating work and ideas in a city pummelled by the recession.
Coburn’s early work was dense with verse. “I think some people who knew me in my 20s are, like, ‘Why did you stop writing the poem plays?’” they say. “And there are one or two answers, one of which is that they were a good fit for my sensibility but not for my politics.
“A lot of emphasis on language can lead to a lot of emphasis on interiority and self, and beyond a certain point I think I was more interested in groups of people and communities rather than selves.”
What also happened to a key part of that scene was the death of the artist Paul Curran, in 2018. Curran had a huge impact on many of his creative peers, including David Balfe, who created a spectacular album in his memory as For Those I Love.
“I think it took the heart out of a particular moment,” says Coburn of Curran’s death. “There’s a lot of people who really miss him, mourn him. And, for me, that style of writing, I was doing it in dialogue. When I didn’t have nights to go to any more where I could talk about what that practice was, it didn’t feel as rich any more, which in a personal sense mirrors the fact that I was interested in writing more about community at precisely the moment when I lost one.”
Before that, Coburn had stepped in at the last minute to work with Claire O’Reilly on Love+, which ran at Dublin Fringe Festival in 2015. The play, which won the Spirit of the Fringe award, was the beginning of Malaprop, the vibrant theatre company that is now in its 10th year.
It was followed by BlackCatfishMuskateer, Citysong, Everything Not Saved (which they devised with Malaprop), Absent the Wrong and Hothouse, the last two winning best-production awards at Dublin Fringe, in 2022 and 2023. (The New York Times praised Hothouse as “alluringly strange and spangly” when it ran at the Irish Arts Center in New York.)
Absent the Wrong, which was in part a response to the publication of the report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, in January 2021, was an important turn. Coburn sees it as a sister play to Bán. The former was “a big piece about adoption and, I suppose, Ireland’s history of mixed-race people in so-called care institutions”. Their mother – “who is an adoptee” – directed it.
“At the time a really pressing question with that piece that emerged from speaking to adoption-rights activists – some of whom were queer and have very interesting radical critiques of the family model – was how do you articulate the injury that is being done to adoptees who are being denied their birth information without sentimentalising or romanticising or naturalising blood relations?
“Historically there has been a strain of thought there where you valorise the struggle by saying the relationship with the birth mother is an irreplaceable one, and so it is an unhealable wound to be separated from your natal family.
“There are very many people who have good reason to dispute that – which is, ‘I don’t feel like I was permanently f**ked up by this. I feel like the much more consequential wound there was how I was treated, how I have to move through the world not knowing these things about myself that other people have access to.’”
Bán “has emerged from my larger project of reckoning with Ireland’s history on race and so-called care institutions, but this is very much a play that’s shadowed by those things rather than exploring them directly, because they” – the family in the play – “are a family with something to lose,” says Coburn. “They are in the precarious middle-class position of being able to hold on to the polite fiction of the family the way it’s ‘supposed’ to work.”
One of the epigraphs on Coburn’s script for Bán is a quote from Sophie Lewis’s influential text Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. “Sophie Lewis has been a huge thinker for me the last few years ... Can we be real to one another and be family?” asks Coburn.
“One of the things the play is charting is how often the answer is no, that our preconceived ideas of what a mother is – or how a mother is supposed to be, or how a sister is or how a sister is supposed to be – very often hold us at a distance from one another.”
Perhaps Coburn’s prowess is really in addressing the space between what we say and what we know, what we’re told and how we live, and not just how to bridge that gap but how to present it. This is among the biggest challenges for any writer. Once again, Coburn is going for it.
Bán previews on the Peacock stage of the Abbey, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, from Tuesday, September 30th. It opens on Monday, October 6th, then runs until Saturday, November 8th
