As an Irish person, it’s hard not to smile when you hear an English actor acknowledge our cultural superiority in at least one area.
George Costigan, who plays one of the three leading roles in Joe Penhall’s play Blue/Orange at the Peacock, admits that he was in Eason’s bookshop at one point recently, saw no less than five Irish Nobel Prize winners for literature on one shelf, and could only think of two among his fellow countrymen. But more than that, George, who previously played in Ireland in a production of Hamlet, is also astounded by “the cultural respect for writers, and for writing, in this place” and encourages anyone attending a creative writing class to see Penhall’s play, which he characterises as a classic example of dramatic art. That said, Penhall, who also wrote the East End gangster TV series The Long Firm, uses a relatively small canvas in this play, a battle for one man’s soul staged in the arena of a psychiatric hospital. The opposing factions? A senior and junior psychiatrist.
“Indeed, we had a psychiatric nurse here in Dublin read the script,” George says, “and she said, ‘This is a game of football between these two doctors and he is the ball.’ And it is about the warring egos of these two doctors. But on a broader level it is a battle about pragmatics in a health system, and that, I am led to understand, is a very contemporary issue in Ireland. Though that is (also) an age-old issue. I play the senior psychiatrist and there is the junior psychiatrist who is all passion and bluster, and the victim is caught between them. So the drama, basically, is the fact that there is this continual tension between all three. I don’t want to give away the story but the spin of the play is that this boy tells us who his father is, and even though what he says seems incredible, it also is credible. But an audience watching Blue/Orange will pretty quickly see that what the play is about is something much more rich and dangerous than that.”
However, George stresses that the potentially weighty subject matter and setting of Penhall’s play do not automatically mean audiences are in for a heavy night at the theatre.
“No, no, don’t be led down that path,” he says empathically. “I can’t describe this man’s writing to you, but he is so brilliant. We’ve done two previews and both times, at a crucial point in the third act, you hear people go, ‘Oh my God, that is so true!’ or, ‘That’s right!’ because they are totally engaged in the play. But it is funny. These people bright and smart and erudite and witty. But Blue/Orange is not a comedy. It’s the opposite of a forgettable play. But it would be wrong to suggest that this play is ‘heavy’ like Ibsen can get heavy. Anyone who saw Joe’s The Long Firm will know his writing, and I really do think that Irish audiences in particular will love Blue/Orange at that level alone, whatever about the subject matter. And I honestly do think that any of your readers who are attending a creative writing class should come and see what a brilliantly written play can look like when it is finished. Blue/Orange really is a fantastic piece of writing and a total joy for me to be acting in.”