Rock Of Stages

Conor McPherson is a rocker at heart. So much so that when he met Julie Christie a few years ago, he felt compelled to sing to her a line or three from the Kinks song ‘Waterloo Sunset’. No doubt he displayed the kind of unbridled passion that belied the fact that this must have been at least the millionth time someone reminded Christie that she was the “Julie” Ray Davies referred to in that song.

Then again, Dublin-born McPherson can be forgiven for such indulgences. After all, the guy has been performing rock songs in public since the age of fourteen, when he joined his first band. Conor also had every intention of making music his career, until university opened his eyes to other options. At the age of just 26, McPherson already has a highly-acclaimed play,The Weir and the screenplay for director Paddy Breathnach’s magnificent movie I Went Down to his credit.

In fact, earlier this month, the Irish Times theatre critic, David Nowlan, described The Weir as “one of the most original Irish plays in years” and movie critic Michael Dwyer reported that the American response to the latter included positive reviews in publications like Newsday, praising “the dry, ribald humour in Conor McPherson’s ingenious script” and The New York Times which, likewise, praised McPherson’s “ever-piquant dialogue.”

Obviously, Conor McPherson is on a roll. But due to his Irishness, as such, as soon as success arrives, there inevitably follows the backlash at home, from those who are unconvinced of his merits. Most notably Michael Ross who, in The Sunday Times took an agressive tone, arguing that “it takes more than a good monologue to make you Ireland’s answer to Chekov” and claiming that The Weir is crude, unmusical and shallow.

Joe Jackson: Let’s kick off with that wonderful image of you trying to seduce Julie Christie by singing ‘Waterloo Sunset’. Did it work?

Conor McPherson: Yeah, I think we melted her heart! We were at this Awards ceremony in Spain and she won some acting award and me and Rob Walpole, who produced I Went Down, were in very good form so we sang that song to her.

The fact that you were aware that Terry and Julie, in that Ray Davies song, refers to Julie Christie and Terence Stamp, would suggest that pop music is central to who Conor McPherson is.

It is. It’s my life, what I love, what I centre my day around. Whether I’m working, or not, I have to have music on. Or, if I’m walking, I have to have a Walkman. I must have music. But my knowledge of Ray Davies, say, would come more from the fact that I don’t read many novels, I read biographies. I’ve probably read nearly every book there is on The Beatles, because I’m fascinated with their lifestyle.

Did you really believe you were going to make a living out of theatre?

No. At the start it was more a case of “this will be my job and we’ll see what happens”. I only started making a living from writing about two years ago. Before that, after I left college, we started our own theatre group and did plays in places likeThe International Bar, where we used to charge people £1 and throw in a free sandwich! No one’s going to get rich on that! In fact, we lost money but we loved doing it so much we stuck with it.

When you say you started making money two years ago, was it from the successful staging of The Weir in London?

Yeah. When The Weir was on at the Royal Court, which is a big-enough theatre, it sold out for the entire run of three months and I got a percentage of each night’s takings – 7%, I think. But I’d be very lucky to have a hit like that. Even so, I’d get from that what a teacher’s wages might be for a year, which is great.

You are currently writing another movie for Paddy and adapting one of Neil Jordan’s “unfinished works” for the screen.

The one for Paddy we’ll do the same way we did I Went Down, whereby there is, as you say, no real money upfront because it’s a low-budget movie. It’s more if the film gets financed you get paid. But you never see any profits coming back on low-budget movies. We’ll be lucky to take $1 million in America and, with the distributors costs, that will disappear. Whereas the work for Neil, because that’s under the umbrella of a Hollywood Studio, they would give me a healthy advance.

Though you, as a writer, came-of-age in the ’80s, you wouldn’t exactly fit under the description of “child of MTV” in the sense that you don’t produce texts designed for people with a thirty-second attention span.

Like the next person, I love to sit down with a can of beer and watch MTV and “turn off”, but my instinct to entertain people comes from a deeper place. I certainly don’t expect people to absorb what I’m saying in thirty-second soundbites. In fact, I think the best way to entertain an audience is to allow them to entertain themselves, by creating visual images through words, which allow them to explore the play, almost as participants, have a unified experience over an evening, rather than something fragmented, MTV-style.

So you’re not a drug casualty? Even as an ex-member of rock bands?

No. It’s not a scene I’m into at all. ‘E’ was more going to raves and I didn’t do that. We were far more, in a pub, drinking pints, playing music. And you’re right, as a writer I’m probably more old-fashioned in that sense, not someone who presents the kind of fragmented perspectives people expect from writers of my generation. I’m far more interested in really making a connection.

You have said that this form of “connection” was made when, in college, you saw a definitive production of Tom Murphy’s Conversations On A Homecoming which surely must have influenced a play like The Weir.

When you read a writer of that calibre, especially when they’re not on the curriculum, you’re blown away by the brutality of the language, the strength of it, the darkness. In fact, it can be quite shocking when you read it at first. You just go “My God!” and have to read it again and again. And it does show you there is another way. Tom Murphy goes after the heart. Sure, he goes after the head, as well, but Tom really turns the heart inside out. I admire Tom Murphy’s vision, the fact that he has always ploughed his own furrow. But Billy Roche also is a super playwright.

Why?

Because all his plays are about love, which is the most universal thing that happens to all of us. But with Billy that love is either unrequited or frustrated, whatever. Either way, he deals with the subject of love so well. And the minute one of his characters appears you go “I know that guy.” I love that about his work.

When you left college you seemed to be blessed with what Orson Welles once called “the confidence of ignorance”, this belief that, as you said about your first play, “now I’m going to shake up the world of theatre in Ireland.”

The more you go on, in life, the more self conscious and afraid you become. When you’re young you say “let’s put this play on” – and, if nobody comes to see it you go “so what!” Whereas, now, if I put on a play and nobody came, I’d be going “Am I any use at all?” That’s why, everything I do now is low-key. Then, if its doing well – like when we originally didThe Weir in a small 60-seater – it develops its own momentum and the success of the play speaks for itself, rather than me telling people “this is great” then watching it flop!

When This Limetree Bower was rejected by both the Abbey and the Dublin Theatre Festival, did that piss you off?

Yeah. Because I really wanted to have it on in the Dublin Theatre Festival but, at that point, in 1995, they’d just started up the Fringe Festival and felt it would be more suitable to that. In the end, it worked out very well for me because if we’d been in the main festival there would have been that main festival audience that was going to, y’know, an opera, Shakespeare, all that, whereas in the Fringe people were going to see new stuff.In terms of the Abbey, as Sebastian Barry said to me later, everything worked out better for me at that level too because, doing my stuff in London meant I was getting my break before a bigger audience, getting reviewed by people like Tom Stoppard, being somewhere where it seemed they did want my work.

Nevertheless, this image of you, as projected in the British media, of another Irish literary genius rejected at home and discovered by them is basically crap, given that all you’d offered to Irish theatre was one, two plays.

That is true. I was unknown. And I had given in this play to the Abbey and the Festival which was three monologues so I can understand, now, why they said “no.” Yet the British did “discover” me, to a degree and that certainly hasn’t ruined my life.

Is it true you were terrified about coming back, staging your plays here in Ireland?

Not terrified, just nervous of the reaction of Irish critics.

Again, you seem to be projecting this notion that Irish critics rubbished your work yet when I checked through the Irish Times for the review of your play St. Nicholas it was relatively positive.

That’s not how I remember it. When I went to London The Irish Times and The Sunday Tribune sent critics over and both did very negative reviews of St. Nicholas. And I felt, “why are they reviewing this when people aren’t getting a chance to see it, because it’s in a different country? And here they are presenting this negative view, when people in Ireland won’t be able to go along and make up their own minds.”

But Charles Hunter praised the fact that under your direction Brian Cox “gives the sort of big man’s performance you hope for, but rarely get from Albert Finney” and said “the first half of this journey is compulsive.” Though, then, yes, he did suggest that “the supernatural second act is not well-crafted, funny or substantial enough”.

There also was that snide remark, something along the lines of, “McPherson wants his words to soar, but so often they land with a thud upon the stage” which made me feel, “you’re really going in there with the jackboots on”. And Jocelyn Clarke’s review in The Sunday Tribune was even worse. Then the same thing happened with the reviews of The Weir. And what really got me was that the Irish reviews came out after the English reviews, which, were so positive, saying things like “go see this show”, “great theatre” then a few weeks later you’re back in Dublin and you read all that negative stuff and just feel ‘what is this?’

You have been described as an “amoral” playwright who is, paradoxically, obsessed with morality.

I wouldn’t describe myself as “amoral” at all. I am hugely fucking moral. But the difference is between creating characters who would have a different mind-set to me. If the actors in my plays are amoral that doesn’t mean I am.

Nevertheless, you have said that you get a lot of “the messing” out of yourself, through the plays. So when, in This Limetree Bower, you focus on a character who rapes, can you project yourself into his mind-set?

No. I would be more in the mind-set of the guy who saw the rape and was scared, because it was not something he’d ever seen in his life. I wouldn’t want to project myself into the mind of a rapist. I don’t like the idea at all.

But you did create in that play, a character who admits that although he was disturbed by the rape it also turned him on, which captures what, for some people, might be the duality in such situations.

But that’s it, exactly. We are mind and body, and something that you might be highly moralistic about and say “oh, that is disgraceful” at the same time your body can be going “wow! look at this.” That’s what really fascinates me.

We talked earlier about how you were “discovered” by the British but wasn’t your break into cinema directly a result of Paddy Breathnach seeing an Irish production of your play, The Good Thief and asking you to write I Went Down?

That is how it all happened, yeah. He wanted to do a crime-based, commercial film, though none of us knew how to go about getting that! Although Paddy and Rob had a lot of experience, in film, at that time, they decided to move onto a new level, make a film they could release all over the world, which really was an ambitious thing to want to do!

So was the script a tripartite creation or did you write it all?

I wrote a first draft and the lads thought the first thirty pages were what they wanted but the rest was too dark and too violent and they wanted to keep it light. So, I wrote another draft and it still wasn’t quite what they wanted. So I decided to move into their office and work on it from there. After I moved into the office Paddy said “I think they should go to Cork”, so, now we had them in a car and that’s when the whole movie took off. Once we had them in this enclosed space we had to ask, “who are these characters?” and that really is where it all began.

So, I Went Down didn’t start out as a conceptually-driven road-movie like Midnight Run, which it resembles, in terms of two protagonists taking a journey together, not liking each other to begin with but finally becoming friends?

Paddy did say “think about Midnight Run” because it did have two guys locked together in that situation. So, in that classic sense it is like a road-movie, a buddy-movie, definitely. But, no, it didn’t start out that way.

Brendan Gleeson’s performance was astounding, particularly during that scene where the car is stopped by a cop. How much of the success of such a scene is down to you, as a writer, and how much did he, Peter McDonald and Frank Caffrey improvise?

Brendan stayed very close to the text but, definitely, that Garda scene works because of the looks he’s giving the cop, the smiles, the way he uses his face. That’s where the comedy comes from and he is wonderful. So, to me the text is 50% and the acting is the other 50%.

Would you accept it if actors improvised around your script?

If they said they were uncomfortable with certain lines I’d change them but, in terms of improvisation, no, I’d have to say, “I spent a long time writing this script.”

One Film Ireland critic suggested that the parts for women in I Went Down were so “poorly written” that maybe like Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs you should have written women out of the movie altogether?

I didn’t think those parts were poorly-written.

But the women in the film were marginal, ciphers or, in the case of the sex scene, simply something for Git to “ride the arse off,” as he said. That particular woman didn’t even get a name and had little or no dialogue after they had sex.

(Defensively) The film is about Bunny and Git. And though the women’s roles were marginal they are not poorly written. That’s the first film I’ve done. In the next film there is a woman in the lead role.

Though Bunny says “I’m not queer”, the hold Tom French has over him is the fact that he had homosexual sex in prison.

Yeah, and he was afraid of the feminine side of himself, in that sense.

Do you really believe a character like Bunny would be terrified that a gangland boss would reveal he had a homosexual fling in jail. Surely that’s the norm in prisons?

This film is not about the real world. I was working according to the logic of the film and within that context, to me, that aspect of the plot worked. I’m not commenting on what people do, sexually, when they do time. And to get back to the criticism that the women’s roles are marginal, to me, that doesn’t matter. If we’d said “this is a film about men and women” then I’d say “they’re poorly written” but we didn’t. We said “it’s a road movie about these guys, there’s women in it.” But it wasn’t that she was just there to be fucked by Git. She allows him to tell his story, about how he ended up in jail. Did we need a sex scene? Perhaps we didn’t. But Paddy was very concerned. He said: “I want a scene that is exuberant, joyful sex, rather than something you wake up and regret doing, in this classic Irish-guilt sense.”

Such scenes often are used in buddy-movies to offset any hint of two male characters being sexually attracted to each other.

I wasn’t conscious of that but if it served that purpose, well and good.

So you don’t buy into the suggestion that if one more reel was added to classic buddy-movies, like Midnight Cowboy, the guys would end up getting married!

(laughs) I honestly never thought of those movies in that sense, though, now that you point it out, I can see how some would. But it certainly didn’t apply to this movie.

You got highly defensive there a moment ago, in terms of that criticism about the women’s roles in I Went Down. So how do you deal with, not just bad reviews, but the kind of personal criticism levelled at you recently by Michael Ross?

It upsets me.

He described your work as “crude and unmusical”.

That’s his impression and the play is obviously something he doesn’t like. Then again, that article is more like a letter to other critics, from Michael Ross. If he wants to use his column that way, fine, it’s his column. Yet as for that Chekov comparison, I would never say ‘I’m like Chekov.’ Never. That came from The Daily Telegraph but their critic just said, trying to describe the play for his readers, “it put me in mind of an Irish Chekov”. And then you get labelled and someone like Michael Ross comes along with his “who-does-McPherson-think-he-is?” put-down. But I never made those claims for myself. Yet Ross was so eager to attack me that he said nothing about the play.

He said it was “shallow” which is the polar opposite of, say, critic Michael Coveney, who said it was “deeply spiritual.”

Ross said it was “shallow” but didn’t describe why he thought it was. He didn’t elaborate, which is what your supposed to do as a critic, surely? But he didn’t. He just tossed in that word, which is a devastating word, horrible. And I really was hurt by that.

Why not accept that his is just one person’s opinion, whereas thousands probably agree more with Coveney?

Maybe I should accept that. Because that is how I see The Weir. We do want more than just waking up in the morning and having our breakfast. And those things are out there, and we’re trying to reach for them but we don’t even know what it all means. That’s what these characters are all about. Ordinary people trying to reach for something else. And I really do believe that our great needs are spiritual needs.

Are you religious, in a traditional sense?

Like most people I’m confused by it all. I don’t know what I am. That really is the way I’d describe myself. As a “I don’t know.” And that, too, is where the plays come from. As I say, I feel fully alive when I listen to music. And the most I can ask for is that people would feel that alive if they are enjoying my play. And that they like being alive, for a little while. It would be too presumptuous, too big-headed of me to even begin to believe they are being moved that way. But, yes, I would hope that somebody, somewhere is being affected that way by a play like The Weir.

• The Weir is running at the Gate Theatre, Mondays-Saturdays, at 8pm. The run continues till September 12th. The performance of the play lasts 75 minutes.