The Last Straw:'So how many morphine tablets have we got?" I need to know this. I fidget. I twitch. Des and I look at each other in bleary, desperate silence, two men clearly nearing the end of their respective ropes.
"We should find out how many we'd need, realistically. I'll ask a pharmacist," Des says finally. Grand, so. We decide to shelve the morphine question for now and get back to the rationing of the laudanum.
Lately, Des Bishop and I have been discussing opiates a lot. We've just written a play together, a farce about a pair of opium addicts living in Dublin during the 1916 Rising; the play is already in rehearsal, but we're still teasing out a few last fiddly plot details. Hence the morphine, the laudanum, and the cheap and misleading opening to this column.
Chronic drug addiction and physical force nationalism. Well, just put those two together and that's your comedy gold, right there! At least that's what Des reckoned a couple of years ago, and I could see his point, sort of. And who knows, maybe some cute parallels could be drawn between drug dependency and patriotic fervour. Lives consumed, skewed perspectives, that kind of thing. And of course, a few gratuitous shots exploiting the gulf between Pearse and Connolly's aspirations, and the state of present-day Ireland. So, together we submitted the idea to the artistic director of Bedrock Theatre Company, Jimmy Fay, and Jimmy commissioned us to write it.
Collaborative playwriting is an odd business. On the one hand, you naturally want to keep your own style intact, and exert creative control, and get the acclaim that is obviously your due; on the other, you're damned to hell if you're going to be saddled with all the work while your collaborator shares the accolades. And then there's the danger of being over-accommodating. Egos need to be reined in, of course, but rein them in too far and it's "after you" - "no, please, after you", and nothing gets written. And of course there's the simple attraction of being able to pass the buck.
Ideally, for collaboration to work, tasks need to be evenly apportioned, sensitivities observed, and every last plot point hammered out and mutually agreed before you write a line of dialogue.
Alternatively, you could opt for the strategy favoured by Des and myself. We meet as little as is humanly possible, e-mail random take-it-or-leave-it scenes whenever the mood takes us, and eventually get together in a white-knuckle frenzy to try and stitch the body parts together, see what kind of Frankenstein's monster emerges, and hope it'll be enough to keep Jimmy off our backs.
This new play, Shooting Gallery, isn't the first thing we've written together. We evolved our distinctive working methods while writing a rap musical a few years ago. We barely knew each other when we started, and the mutual mistrust was palpable. Des would fire out ideas, while I'd obsess all day over one. One of us would suggest something, and invariably the other would go, "hmmm . . . well, if you really think that's going to work".
Funnily enough, it mostly did work. Rap Eire, as directed by Jimmy, was a blast to perform, a funny, exhilarating hybrid of our very different styles. Rap Eire was mostly songs though, so it was easy enough for us to divide the tasks. We'd meet, discuss what a song should be about, then we'd each go off and come back when we'd written some verses.
How would this system play with dialogue? And with a (hopefully) tightly knit farce plot?
Well, worryingly at first. It turned out our styles of writing dialogue were radically, scarily different. In the scenes that Des wrote, characters launched verbose, densely gag-laden fusillades at each other; then those same characters would wander into one of my scenes and engage in terse, monosyllabic verbal ping pong. Even a massive ingestion of opiates wouldn't explain these violent personality lurches.
That sorted itself out though. As we swapped drafts, the two styles began to gel and complement each other. Now, more or less believable characters seemed capable of producing sudden, unexpected verbal fireworks when the occasion demanded. And by now, it's become hard even for the writers to tell who wrote which line.
I'll also be performing in Shooting Gallery, so now it's time for me to learn those lines. Obviously, it's a bit easier to learn material you wrote yourself, but there is the terrible temptation, if a line isn't working, to take out a pen rather than try and fix the acting. You've no idea how far this gets up a director's nose, but hey, the playwright does have the final say. I guess I'd better stop changing them some time before opening night all the same. It was fun working with Des again. There's a certain stage, late in the writing process, where we have to sit down together and thrash out all the remaining problems, and it's always surprising how well we work together, given our differences in style, (not to mention age, background, personality, everything really). Shooting Gallery's in good shape. I think it'll go down well. If it doesn't, well Des and I have a really good arrangement. We'll just blame each other!
Shooting Gallery previews at Andrews Lane Theatre from Oct 13-17, and runs Oct 18-29
Frank McNally is on leave