Magic Mark

The more Mark Doherty talks about the Seeds initiative set up by the Rough Magic Theatre Company the more you feel it’s the best thing that has ever happened to him, as a creative writer. Doherty, of course, is best known as a stand-up comic but he’s about to present a public reading of his first full-length play, Trad, at 2pm on Saturday afternoon May 11th in Dublin’s Project Theatre. So is this a change of career?

“No, I was writing and acting before I ever got into stand-up” he responds.”I was writing bits of stuff from about ten years ago for radio slows like Only Slagging because me da was involved in that, as a musician. And I was doing theatre shows, telly work, movie work, whatever I could pick up. Then finally I found my way into stand-up, which I actually did, at the start, because I thought that would be interesting from an acting point of view. Then it totally took over my life for about five years and I ended up gigging here, in London, Edinburgh, even Australia. But I haven’t done a gig for about two years because it just got to be too much.”

In what sense?

“I stopped getting the craic out of it myself,” he says. “And a lot of the gigs are tough. Especially the kind of stand-up I did, which wasn’t really suitable for pubs, venues where people are pissed. What I did demanded a degree of concentration, let’s say.”

Mark’s play did not come out of his experience as a stand-up comic, stemming instead from the fact that he originally wrote a 15-minute play for a wonderfully innovate Temple Bar concept called Car Show.

“It’s something they do every year in the Meeting Place in Temple bar, where plays are acted out in cars with two actors in each car and an audience of a maximum of four in the back” he explains.” And the audience go from car to car and get snippets of what is going. But after I did my piece I was contacted by Rough Magic, who asked if I was working on anything else and would I be interested in talking to them.”

It was at this point that Rough Magic, in conjunction with the Dublin Fringe festival, started the Seeds Project, which focused on six new plays by relatively new writers who were given a mentor. In Mark’s case it was Conall Morrison. He also got ‘a few thousand quid” which helped him focus on the play.

“The idea was to put writers who had little experience, with directors who had masses of experience and in that sense Conall was great in terms of the development of the whole thing,” says Mark. “Because, at the start what I wrote was rubbish and Conall, at one level, is great at pointing out when you are writing crap, without offending you completely. Though you do have to take a week off and say to yourself, ‘Sure he’s a Northern bollix, what would he know!’. Then a week later you realise he knows far more than you do and that he was right!”

Better still, Mark was able to workshop Trad – a play “about the idea that every generation believes that things are getting worse and tends to look to the past for it’s heroes and for what we seem to think were better times” – with a group of actors from Rough Magic.

“That was a real luxury because it was the first time I actually heard the play,” he says. “And the idea is to do another draft after it’s read a few times and actors give their response to every line! Which is pretty scary. But it was a brilliant help to hear them kick the shit out of my play word-by-word! It makes you sit down and defend and justify every line. So this whole process has been very good for me.”

And the next, eh, stage is to have the play staged?

“Definitely. But the sense of achievement I have already comes from the fact that I actually finished the play and am ready to give a public reading of it. I don’t think I ever would have done that if it hadn’t been for this Rough Magic initiative.”