John Breen's new stunt-filled romcom play - middle-class, white and straight - is a technically ambitious blend of comedy and aerialism writes Peter Crawley
What is the link between sex and bungee jumping, other than the safety requirements? The answer, to judge by John Breen's new play, Falling out of Love, is the gravity of the situation. "Trying to make somebody love you who doesn't is like falling off a building and grasping the air to stop your fall," says Breen shortly after attending the first preview of his third play as author.
A romantic comedy, for lack of a better description, which centres on three relationships in various states of disrepair, Falling out of Lovehas a deliberate, unapologetic slightness to it. Its action begins and concludes on the rooftop of a Dublin city apartment block - "we see the cityscape beyond and below, the Spire in the distance" - where Barry, recently separated from Audrey, attempts to bungee jump from the rooftop in a mad attempt to win her back, literally leaping into the lives of the couples who live below. If the gesture seems cartoonish, there may be a good reason. "I often looked at Wile E Coyote," continues Breen, "and that moment where he runs off the cliff and looks at the audience. I thought, I'd f***ing love to do that onstage. It's marrying those two ideas that generated the play."
For this reason the play manages to read, at once, as both thematically simple and technically complex. As the three couples unravel - slowly in the case of Edward and Fiona, abruptly in the case of Ciara and David, and with a plummet in the case of Barry and Audrey - the conceit of the apartment seems more romcom schematic than a vertical cross-section of society. All couples are Irish, white and straight, for instance. ("I write about what I know and what I love," Breen says.) There are few other plays, however, that feature such stage directions as "The red sofa from Ciara and David's apartment falls past the window", or indeed, "Barry falls past the window screaming". Added to separate events staged simultaneously in the same space - two apartments are essentially superimposed on the one set - and the piece comes off like an extreme sports version of an Alan Ayckbourn farce.
"That's part of the ambition though," says Breen, who did not compromise his ideas despite the added complexity of touring the production to various venues. It's no accident, either, that he handed the play to Mikel Murfi to direct, who, on paper, seems like the perfect director for anything that involves both comedy and aerialism. "I obviously spoke to people as I was going about the logistics," continues Breen. "First of all, it's very expensive. And then there's the safety aspect. There's only so many people that do this sort of thing. We had to get a company, AFX/Kirby's, and one of their guys is touring with the show. Everyone knows that they're in good hands. I suppose it's worth the comedy bang that we get from it."
For all Breen's emphasis on comedy, and his reputation as the author of Alone it Stands- a small play he wrote eight years ago about the unlikely Munster victory against the All Blacks in 1978, which has since become one of the most enduringly popular plays in Irish theatre - the principal engine of Falling out of Loveis agony.
"I think being broken-hearted is one of the most vivid experiences a human being can have," he says. "I'm happily married with kids now but I've had my romantic misadventures in the past. And although it's one of the most painful experiences you can have, it is an extraordinarily vivid experience. I think you're never more alive than when you're broken-hearted, because every nerve-ending is exposed." And who has not known the lightning-rod-of-emotion phenomenon - when even the radiowaves conspire against you? "It's God's jukebox sort of thing," Breen says. "Every song on the radio speaks directly to you."
WHAT IS MORE significant about Breen's play, though, is that it is a contemporary urban comedy, set in Dublin, which makes sexual relationships and intimate discussion its principal focus. Coming so soon after Rough Magic's much-maligned production of Christian O'Reilly's not-hugely-dissimilar Is This About Sex?, and a growing emphasis in Irish theatre on middle-class behaviour - from Nicholas Kelly's The Grown-Upsto the forthcoming Ross O'Carroll-Kelly play, The Last Days of The Celtic Tiger- this hardly seems coincidental. For all its flaws, O'Reilly's play at least got the question right, and there is something revealing about Irish theatre's recent shift towards personal politics, a focus on couples rather than families, and a movement away from the kitchen towards the bedroom.
"I think we're in the same territory," concedes Breen. (O'Reilly read Breen's play during its three-year development.) "But when I wrote Charlie" - Breen's second play, about Charles Haughey - "Sebastian Barry had just feckin' written Hinterland!So maybe there is an ether out there that some playwrights are connected to. And coincidentally, this kind of stuff comes up . . . But I think Is This About Sex?was about identity. And this play is very much about the experience. It's a bitter-sweet treatise on the experience of falling out of love." There is, however, a similar aversion in it to the lure of black comedy.
"This could get very sinister very quickly," Audrey says early in the play, a note that echoes through the discovery that Barry has not set up his bungee equipment correctly, with near-fatal consequences; the suggestion is aired that he has done this on purpose. Was Breen interested in darker exploration? "No," he says, before the question is even finished. "No, no. Absolutely not. Okay. There's this whole thing about suicide. And that came up during one of the readings. I just felt that I had to eliminate that as a possibility, that Barry would consider doing that to the woman he loved. Because that just pushes the play in a whole different way. I suppose I wanted it to be a celebration of good people falling out of love. Just people like you or I who are trying to live good lives and having their hearts broken. I wanted it to be a positive experience and a celebration. And I didn't want it to be a black comedy. I wanted it to be a romantic comedy."
AS A GENRE though, the romcom seems more the provenance of film than theatre; the stage tends to lean more towards black than white. Breen's play, from its sparkling setting to its stunt work and its complicated transitions from outdoor to indoor spaces, seems alert to this. "If this was a movie we'd end up together," announces one character, and Breen admits that, in the play's conclusion, he had to back away from one contrivance too many. Would it have worked as easily as a film script? "No," he says, "because I write for bodies. I don't just write dialogue. I write for the audience in a theatre. And I know the chemistry. I just know what makes the air crackle in a theatre. The same thing that works in a film wouldn't work on stage. Playing with time and space on film is not interesting. It's just kind of mundane. If you filmed the bungee jump, again it's very ordinary. But put it on the stage and it's exciting and exhilarating for an audience. You've got to come up with different engines. Here it's thrilling because of the way the bodies move in space."
NOT FOR THE first time in our conversation, Breen makes a reference to Alone it Stands, tracing a similarity in its construction and comic momentum to his new work. That play, which is currently undertaking yet another tour - its first without Breen directing - was a phenomenal beginning to a writer's career. It may also be difficult to get away from its success.
"Oh it is," says Breen without hesitation. "To be honest it is. I never get tired of working on it. I still love directing it. I didn't direct the current production of it because I had other commitments. I love watching it. But, you know, when I meet people and they find out who I am, that's what they want to talk about. And I did that play eight years ago. Sometimes you feel like Neil Young and everyone wants you to play The Needle and the Damage Done. It is hard to get away from. But that's not such a bad thing. It's been a fantastic gift and a wonderful thing to have a connection with.
I just hope that when people see this [ play] they'll feel it's a worthy successor. That they won't be disappointed." Even if John Breen has not exactly fallen out of love with Alone It Stands, it's hard not to feel for the guy. After that whirlwind romance and long-term relationship comes the difficult process of letting go and moving on. The joke isn't lost on him. Indeed, he sees this play as a comedy of recognition.
"I think it's a play that couples can go and see and discover that they're laughing at themselves. Because we've all behaved like that. It's a celebration, though. If you go into the play in love with someone, you might leave the play a little bit more in love with them." Or it could give you other ideas, I suggest, before Breen finds a third alternative.
"It could start a bungee jumping craze," he says hopefully.
Falling out of Love opens in the Civic Theatre, Tallaght tonight and runs until Sat. It tours to Theatre Royal, Waterford (Nov 12-13); The Mill Theatre, Dundrum (Nov 16-17); Travellers Friend, Castlebar (Nov 19-20) and LIT Millennium Theatre, Limerick (Nov 22-23)
