There are articles you regret writing and articles you don’t regret writing. And there certainly is a Stage column I regret writing – and at the same time don’t! Either way the experience was a highlight of covering theatre for hotpress over these past 20 years.
The piece in question led to much bad blood between the theatre company, hotpress and myself in particular. That company even stopped sending me press releases and invites to their shows. But I still feel its basic argument was right at the time, and all parties finally made our peace, a reconciliation that led to a relatively long-term love affair with one of the company’s actors. Female, I hasten to add.
So what theatre company am I talking about? Passion Machine. And it was nearly 20 years ago today that I wrote a column criticising Paul Mercier, the writer/director of plays such as Drowning and Studs, and Roddy Doyle, author of The Commitments. The play in question was Brownbread. Doyle, incidentally, hasn’t spoken to me since.
What had I said that so upset their delicate sensibilities? Well, at the time I was studying for a degree in Popular Culture and probably foolishly besotted by semiological, sociological and stucturalist analysis, but even so, I stated that having supported “the Passion Machine philosophy of bringing theatre to people who don’t usually come to theatre I now find it difficult to attend, much less recommend such plays.” Why? Because, as I suggested, “what was brave and innovative in Drowning and Studs, has degenerated into a rigid adherence to a formula which can best be described as the theatrical equivalent of British Carry On films.”
I also, at the time, was a writer-in-residence at Lucan Vocational school, taught Creative Writing classes in Finglas, and having come from a working class background, felt I had every right to further assert, “too often the humour is at the expense of working class characters which the authors persistently present in a way that is both patronising and fundamentally ignorant.” This particularly applied, as far as I was concerned, to Doyle, who had been a teacher and, I felt, too often simply cannibalised the lives of his students. My school principal in Lucan Jack Harte agreed, adding, “perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if they gave back something positive in return.” To which I also added, “Doyle and Mercier may be masters at capturing surface motions of working-class life, but they continually miss the essence by a mile.”
However, I think the final paragraph really hit home. Having declared that “more respect should be shown to the people about whom these authors are writing – and maybe theatrical evidence of their acceptance of the fact that working class people play more than one note in life,” I then delivered the punch line: “It remains to be seen whether the same can be said about Paul Mercier and Roddy Doyle. One would hate to discover that in the final analysis, the only note which ever concerned them was the ringing of the cash register.”
The latter, I later realised was certainly not the case in relation to Paul Mercier. But I also remember Ger Ryan later telling me she went into Paul with that article in her hand and said, “We think there is some truth in what Joe Jackson is saying” and he did not react too well to that. If I remember right, this may have been one of the reasons Ryan finally left Passion Machine.
However by 1996 I knew I had been wrong in many ways about Paul so I tried to make amends by going with Passion Machine to a drama festival in Poland and doing all I could not only to support their production of Buddleia, which I loved, but also to highlight their need for better funding from the Arts Council. Not only that. Paul Mercier and I have done an even more recent interview for the Stage column and neither of us harbours any bad feelings towards the other. As for Roddy Doyle? How can I say this with subtlety and sensitivity? At this point, 20 years later, he can go fuck himself!