Who's Abbie Spallen? A Newry playwright getting raves in New York, writes Arminta Wallace
Abbie Spallen doesn't like talking about herself. She'll chat happily about the book she's reading - "Peter Robb's A Death in Brazil; it's fantastic" - about her agent, about a terrific article on Shakespeare in the Guardian last week, about actors and directors she has worked with. Ask her about herself, though, and she hums, haws and talks about something else - which is perhaps one reason why, although her play Pumpgirl has just opened to rave reviews at Manhattan Theatre Club, in New York, Abbie Spallen isn't yet a household name in her native land.
Yet she's one of a number of young women writers from the North - among them Lisa McGee, Rosemary Jenkinson, Stella Feehilly and Lucy Caldwell - who are beginning to make waves on the literary ocean. "I don't know whether it's because of the end of the Troubles or whatever, but there seems to be something really brewing up north," Spallen says. "And I'm absolutely thrilled to be part of it."
She's not quite so thrilled to be huddled under a duvet in her home town of Newry, Co Down, trying to shake off a bad dose of flu. "It's probably all the travelling," she says. "I've just been to the States and back three times, and I've also been halfway up a mountain in Catalonia, doing a residency."
Spallen didn't just spring, fully formed, into the theatrical big time. She worked in Belfast for a decade, mostly at the Lyric Theatre, then moved to Dublin, where she spent another 10 years trying to keep body and soul together as a jobbing actor. "I did lots of telly," she says. "I did Ger in Love Is the Drug. A lot of 'best friend' acting. A lot of social workers. I did a great line in policewomen and prison guards. It's a uniform thing. I can look quite stern in a uniform."
She wrote Pumpgirl during a stint in Shay Healy's The Wire Men, at the Gaiety in 2005, and sent it off to, among others, the Bush Theatre in London. "I found out afterwards that they get about 1,500 scripts a year," she says. "And out of that they put on, like, one. It's probably better for first-time writers not to know this sort of stuff, because you'd only say, well, I won't waste the postage."
But her play was accepted, was staged in Edinburgh - where it was well received - won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, for young women playwrights, and eventually, with the help of an agent, Rose Cobbe, made its way to New York.
Pumpgirl's take on life in small-town Ireland is irreverent and uncompromising. The play has a cast of three: the eponymous heroine, a service-station attendant, who's infatuated by Hammy, a feckless and intellectually challenged racing driver, whose wife, Sinéad, is bored and miserable. Spallen's characters are more likely to namecheck Homer Simpson or The Matrix than Synge and Lady Gregory - "no bog of plummy prose or nostalgia for her," as one American critic noted with approval.
Yet the piece is composed as a triptych, with the three characters seated in chairs facing the auditorium and speaking in turn to the audience. Which has become - how shall we put it? - something of a favourite compositional choice of Irish playwrights. Spallen snorts. "The monologue thing," she says. "Yeah, I know. It's been done. I remember people saying, at the time when I was writing the play, 'Don't write a monologue - they're going to bring back internment for Irish writers who write monologues.' I just thought, you know what? Don't go telling me what to write.
"Anyhow," she adds, "structurally and thematically the monologue form suited the story. We have a big reveal in the play, which wouldn't work unless you had an actor with a paper bag on her head. So actually it's the only way I could get away with it."
The decision to tell her story in this format has earned Spallen comparisons with Brian Friel and Conor McPherson, but it has also conjured up the awful ghost of Irish theatre past. "It is a blessing in a way," she says, "because Irish writers will always get read quicker. We do have a reputation. But there's an incredible baggage that comes with that. People compare you to other Irish writers; you get put into a bunch, and that can be debilitating."
Her own theatrical reference points range from the American playwright Adam American Sligo Rapp through Joe Penhall, who was responsible for both the big-screen version of Ian McEwan's Enduring Love and the four-part television adaptation of The Long Firm, Jake Arnott's gangster yarn, to the Belgian symbolist poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck.
"I adore his stuff," says Spallen. "I just got about six books of his off the internet - old, hoary, dusty books. I'm toying with the idea of . . . Hmm." She clams up again. She can't talk about her new play, which is "with a theatre", nor can she go into details about the commissions from Fishamble Theatre Company and the Bush Theatre that will occupy her in the early part of next year, or even the screenplay for which she recently won BBC Northern Ireland's Tony Doyle Bursary, except to say that "there are a couple of telly things on the boil" and that she'll be climbing back up that mountain in Catalonia as soon as the Christmas season is over. Pumpgirl, meanwhile, will be staged at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast next autumn.
But it's a fair bet that we'll be hearing more of Abbie Spallen. "I've a lot to say," she says. "I'm interested in challenging people's perspectives. More than anything I'm interested in the fundamentals of humanity. Why do people do the things they do? What makes people do bad things? What drives people? The best thing about theatre is the word 'play'. It is play. But I'm not in the business of entertainment. Lion King territory, you know?"
Apart from being reckless with postage stamps, has Spallen any advice for aspiring young Irish playwrights? She doesn't hesitate for a second. "Don't wear an orange jumper in a photograph. It makes you look like the Michelin Man."