PRE-MILLENNIUM angst, sex, death, floods and copious Bloody Marys are just a few old the tricks and treats offered by Rough Magic when Declan Hughes's Halloween Night opens this Friday. Directed by Lynn Parker, this new play is set firmly in familiar Hughes, territory: eight young Dublin urbanites venture outside the city for a Halloween party in a cottage in the west.
The characters are a motley crew of PR gurus and film directors, frustrated waitresses, junkies and gays both in and out of the closet. Drink, drugs, abortion, AIDS and party games all rear their ugly heads in the course of an evening in which events begin to take a distinctly odd turn.
"It's a fairly gothic evening," says Hughes. "A party play with a set of supernatural twists. In the end everyone is pretty much out of control, and I don't just mean bad behaviour, though there's a lot of that as well."
It may sound like The Big Chill given the X-Files treatment but Hughes is tired of comparisons being drawn with other works that centre on friends' reunions.
"If you write about families that's natural, but if it's about groups of friends that's somehow strange. Which is odd because I think for many, people of my generation, a reunion of friends for an occasion like a Halloween party becomes in, some way a spiritual festival. These events have in some way replaced the family reunion and religious ceremonies.
"I don't want to reveal the suspense element too much but the characters in Halloween Night think they have witnessed a miracle. The generation of Irish people I'm writing about in the play have pretty much abandoned God, but there's still a God-shaped hole there. So, much of the play centres on the question of what would one do in that situation in the absence of a belief in God, in what way is it going to change your life?"
Halloween Night will run for three weeks in the Andrew's Lane Theatre before moving to the Donmar Warehouse in London's West End. Hughes is not surprised by the recent success of Irish playwrights abroad.
"When I went to London with Digging For Fire 1992, friend brought along the editor of Arena magazine Ia glossy men's magazine who commented that he didn't know there were people like that in Dublin. But I think the people going to watch the work of young Irish playwrights like Martin McDonogh and Connor McPherson aren't going because they're Irish anymore, they're going because they're good."