A roller-coaster ride

During a hotpress interview, Bono once told me that he believes “real liberation” comes from “living with uncertainties”. He even suggested that this may be a “defining feature of the Irish psyche” and that this was the leitmotif running through U2’s album Zooropa.

So maybe it should come as no surprise to find that the American playwright and screenplay writer John Patrick Shanley is of Irish descent, and describes the “music in the language” of his plays as “definitively Irish”. Or that his latest play is called Doubt, and focuses fundamentally on that very subject.
Incidentally, the play won a 2005 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and his previous awards include an Oscar for the screenplay of Moonshine, which starred Cher and Nick Cage. He was in Dublin recently for the opening of Doubt at the Abbey, and we met to discuss what has since turned out to be a huge critical and popular success with Irish audiences. Deservedly so. In fact, clocking in at roughly 90 minutes with no break, it is a powerfully-focused, provocative, witty and wonderful roller-coaster ride that has roughly the same sensory effect as, well, the Zooropa tour and album. But what originally provoked John Patrick Shanley to tackle the theme of doubt?
“Well, I wrote it at a time of great certainty in America, when we were gearing up for the war in Iraq, and everybody seemed very confident in the direction the country was going. They had great faith in the government, that they were honest and true, the way they were depicting things,” he responds. “And that reminded me of another, earlier, time in my life and the kind of certitude that surrounded me, and how some bad things came out of that, and the echoes between those two times.”
That earlier time Shanley, who was raised in the Bronx in New York, is referring to is the period he spent at the predominantly Catholic Thomas Moore Preparatory School. It was there he encountered “a homosexual teacher” who “saved” him. At least in the sense that this teacher directed him towards literature, and first fired his sense of self-faith.
“No-one I grew up with went into the arts, and my personality was artistic, yet no-one knew what to do with that,” he says. “Whereas that teacher appreciated me and was willing to spend time with me, because he was attracted to me. But he didn’t actively do anything about that, and I simply wasn’t interested in homosexuality. Yet he helped, because he saw that I was a diamond in the rough. I had been thrown out of all those schools and failed all my subjects, even though I was reading six books a week and writing, and this guy gave me a novel by Evelyn Waugh. When I talked with him about it, there was a look of incredulity on his face, because I was a 15-year-old from the Bronx who understood it. Then he gave me lots of novels and poetry, and even set up classes just for me. And all that happened at a key time in my life. He also was the first person who said I was good, and this was like a green light, telling me ‘who you are is interesting, terrific, go for it’.”
Years after leaving that school, however, Shanley learned that even though this teacher never made advances at him, he did abuse other children. Shanley’s dichotomous response to this fact sits at the soul of Doubt, he explains. This truth is what helps make the play resonate way beyond his personal experience.
“I was dealing with all that in the play, and even though I completely acknowledge the contribution that teacher made to my life, I have talked to someone else who said the same teacher had been a huge factor in destroying his life. Therefore the teacher means one thing to me, and another thing to that guy. That’s what Doubt is really about, this kind of dualism, looking at both sides of all stories. What it’s made me realise is that whereas I used to be very uncomfortable with uncertainty, now I know that no-one can ever be utterly certain about anything. Yet this doesn’t, in any sense, lessen my passion for life. On the contrary, I now realise that uncertainty is enlivening, that it’s closer to the truth, and I wanted to show in this play how I got to that point.”