Profile Conor McPherson - the Dublin dramatist whose play 'The Seafarer'is the toast of Broadway:There are shadows of Conor McPherson's own life in his plays' depictions of alcohol abuse, broken relationships and lost souls, writes Peter Crawley
One cold Christmas evening several years ago, Conor McPherson decided to spin a ridiculous yarn. Making small talk with the friends of some friends, he told each of them, by way of an icebreaker, that while crossing the Ha'penny Bridge that day he had been assaulted by a seagull. "It got all tangled up in my glasses," he elaborated, "and its wings were flapping around my head." Floored by the encounter, until a crowd could prise the bird free, McPherson would conclude his tale by announcing that both he and the seagull were doing fine, but that it had been quite an embarrassing incident.
The first thing people would ask upon hearing that story, McPherson recalled in the preface to a collection of his early plays, was if it was true, "because although they didn't believe me, we live in a world where we don't expect complete strangers to lie to us," he wrote. "But in the theatre," he added, "it's nice." It is the playwright, director and film-maker's extraordinary facility with a tall tale, beginning stories with the disarming directness of a conversation before steering them towards the mythic and even the supernatural, that has brought the Dublin writer huge international success.
His most recent play, The Seafarer, which was first staged in the Royal National Theatre in 2006, now finds itself the toast of Broadway in a critically lauded production directed by McPherson. Reserving special praise for McPherson's frequent collaborator, the actor Jim Norton, the play's accolades from the New York Times ("dark and despairing Christmas fable of despair and redemption") or the New Yorker ("splendidly written and directed") may not count as a high-water mark in McPherson's career, but that is only because the same publications had already hailed him 10 years ago as the youngest member of a wave of Irish playwrights who brought new vitality to the theatre.
A booze-sodden fable in which four Irish men become unwitting hosts for a high-stakes poker game with the devil, The Seafarer is a departure from McPherson's earlier monologue-driven work. Thematically, however, it remains true to form: bewildered masculinity, the loss of faith, and the struggle with inner demons have never been far from the surface of McPherson's work.
From the unsettling tales that wind their way through The Weir (the play that he made his name with in 1997) to the vampires that populate his mischievous monologue St Nicholas and the spectral allusions of his more recent Shining City (2004), his plays have the intimacy of a ghost story told by the fireplace.
Although none of these plays are conspicuously autobiographical, they are certainly more than a tissue of entertaining fictions, and in their depictions of alcohol abuse, broken relationships and lost souls, the demons they exorcise, McPherson has admitted, are often shadows of his own. "I'm all the characters in the play," he said of The Seafarer, which features two brothers, one an alcoholic, the other newly sober. Just as McPherson has spoken publicly about an alcoholism that almost killed him, it is tempting to see each stage of his dramatic career in some way reflecting his own personal journey.
At just 36, McPherson is a playwriting celebrity in the age of globalisation. No stranger to the New York theatre, having found success both on and off Broadway very early in his career, McPherson tends to open his work in London - only one of his plays, the short piece Come on Over (2001), was premiered in Dublin in the last 10 years - and until recently those plays have transferred to the Gate Theatre. When the Abbey Theatre stages The Seafarer this April, it will mark McPherson's debut at a theatre he had long felt snubbed by, and give Irish audiences their first opportunity to see the well-travelled play since it opened 18 months ago.
Conor McPherson himself remains in north Dublin, where he grew up. The second of three children (he has two sisters), his father was an accountancy teacher and his mother worked in a shoe shop. His interest in storytelling was an inheritance from his grandfather, whom he would travel to see in Leitrim, often alone. "My grandfather was there on his own," he told the Observer in 2001. "I was fairly quiet when I was a teenager, and I liked the way you could go down there and sit, you know, and not talk, really, and look at the fire with him. And then he might say something. Or he might not.
"Sometimes he might tell me a story. But it would always come out of this sense of absolute isolation and silence, and I guess just the atmosphere of that stayed with me, struck me as something important, I suppose."
He would put that atmosphere into The Weir, which is set in a small rural pub, while the story that emerges from the solitary speaker gave him the form for which he (and a significant amount of Irish theatre) has now become famous: the monologue.
CURIOUSLY, THOUGH, IT was the bullet-paced, rhythmic and archly profane dialogue of David Mamet that first spun him towards theatre, when he discovered Glengarry Glen Ross as a student in University College Dublin.
There McPherson studied philosophy and English, choosing college over his teenage rock band under the gentle suasion of his parents, before becoming a committed student. He finished his degree with double first-class honours and completed a master's degree in philosophy while tutoring students in ethics. At UCD he also devoted himself to Dramsoc, where he wrote and directed his first play, Taking Stock, a one-act about Irish businessmen so achingly Mametian that he once joked it could have been called "Glengaire Glen Ross".
By 1994, McPherson had found his voice as a playwright with his first monologue play, Rum & Vodka, in which a frustrated office worker with a young family and a drinking problem embarks on a weekend-long bender. He followed it with The Good Thief, the grisly monologue of a small-time thug, which won him the Stewart Parker Award, awarded for new playwrights. Both plays were produced by Fly By Night, a company McPherson founded with a few other Dramsoc alumni (including the director Jason Byrne), staging his work in tiny fringe venues such as the International Bar and the Crypt.
This Lime Tree Bower, which first began his experiment with overlapping narrators, and which the Abbey Theatre had considered, but ultimately passed on producing, ultimately earned him the attention of London's Bush Theatre and the Royal Court when Fly By Night staged the play at the 1995 Dublin Fringe Festival. When he came to direct This Lime Tree Bower for the Bush, McPherson notoriously refused a set, but changed his mind when he saw the cluttered space of the theatre halfway through the dismantling of the previous show's. He made the detritus of the theatre his setting, presenting drama in a state of undress, where artifice was stripped away to a raw and entrancing form of storytelling.
With his film career also took off, his screenplay for Paddy Breathnach's I Went Down (1997) led to his own feature film debut as writer and director of Saltwater (2000). Meanwhile, McPherson's dramatic work weathered criticism that his writing was untheatrical, or anti-theatrical; that his monologues and their obvious influence on writers such as Mark O'Rowe, Enda Walsh and Eugene O'Brien (whose play Eden McPherson directed for the Peacock) gave rise to an Irish theatre unwilling to pursue the communication of dialogue and uncomfortable with the mechanics of drama.
MCPHERSON'S FASCINATION with words, though, bears the influence of his philosophy studies. "Our thoughts are always trailing around after our appetites," he once said of the animal impulses in humans, "justifying them with language - it's tragic and it's hilarious." The monologue is one way of safeguarding the primacy of that language, and though McPherson's recent plays have been more conventional in form (2001's Port Authority was his only monologue play since 1997), The Weir, Shining City and moments of The Seafarer retain the intimacy of direct storytelling between a speaker and silent listener.
As director of his own work, too, McPherson often seems to forbid impositions or interpretation. "I just want the actors to put their faith in the language," he has said, with a characteristic blend of self-effacement and self-assurance, "just let the words do the work."
THOSE WORDS HAVE certainly been gifts to his actors, with Jim Norton winning a Laurence Olivier Award for his role in The Seafarer, Stanley Townsend winning an Irish Times/ESB Theatre Award for his performance in Shining City, Oliver Platt receiving a Tony nomination for his role in the Broadway production of Shining City, and Michael McElhatton and Brian Cox each distinguishing themselves in his plays.
That women are generally restricted to endlessly supportive figures for floundering men and mainly kept offstage, may suggest a creeping sense of chauvinism. But McPherson has defended his failing. "I've forgiven myself a bit," he said recently, "because I've realised it's not a choice. I'm a man, and I experience life as a male, and that real, raw truth of your life is male for me."
McPherson's life seeped into his art with the grim Dublin Carol in 2000, reflecting a then-all-consuming alcoholism that somehow never interfered with his work. It finally took its toll when, at the age of 29, McPherson was rushed to intensive care with pancreatitis on the opening night of his play Port Authority - itself a meditation on love, written when his long-term relationship was breaking down. After three months in hospital, he emerged sober - and has remained so - finding inspiration in his therapy sessions to write Shining City. The play emerged in 2004, by which time McPherson had married the painter Fionnuala Ní Chiosáin.
If there is constant yearning for salvation in McPherson's work, in either the acceptance of loss, an antidote to loneliness, or an abandonment to the supernatural, The Seafarer, based on the legend of the Hellfire Club, may be McPherson's most explicit evocation of the exorcism of demons: drink, despair, loneliness and the devil himself. Recently McPherson admitted to another influence in the play: the winter solstice at Newgrange in Co Meath. His explanation coursed with the seduction of storytelling, the power of redemption and, perhaps, the key to his stagecraft. "This pagan monument or burial chamber symbolises that, at the darkest time, there can still be hope, light and energy flowing in."
The McPherson File
Who is he?Successful Irish playwright, director and
film-maker.
Why is he in the news?Delayed for a month by the
Broadway stagehands' strike, his latest play The Seafarer is
finally setting the Great White Way alight.
Most appealing characteristic:Used to front a band
named Squidinky and still writes and records his own songs in the
lull between work.
Least appealing characteristic:A self-assurance,
used to mask his professional insecurity, which, in the past, could
seem like plain arrogance.
Most likely to say:Something uninterrupted.
Least likely to say:"For old time's sake, I'd like
my next show to open in the International Bar."