Why do so many young men, particularly in the West of Ireland, commit suicide? And now that we are officially in a recession will more and more people start to wonder whether, in terms of emotional fulfilment at least, the Celtic Tiger led us down a dead-end alleyway? These are some of the questions that inspired Ursula Rani Sarma to write The Magic Tree. Of Irish/Indian descent, Ursula also has always been fascinated by the subject of identity – a question that also sits at the heart of her new play.

“That question has influenced all my plays over the past 10 years,” she says. “I’m very interested in ideas such as where home is, as in whether it is an actual geographical location or in your soul, or whatever, and where people feel they belong or how they feel alienated in society and so on. That theme has endured for the past years and is very much in evidence again in The Magic Tree.”
The play tells the tale of a man and a woman who take shelter in an abandoned summer home on a stormy night and gradually discover what they have in common and what it is that sets them apart from one another.
She is also interested in people who feel adrift in the materialistic new Ireland. “Our sense of community is in places drifting away,” she proffers. “It is being replaced by a huge emphasis on the individual and monetary success. I started wondering where do emotions and feelings fit in in this particular world? And this play shows how society has churned out two individuals, one who feels too intensely and the other who struggles to feel at all.”
Ursula also believes that as religion has slipped away from its position of dominance in Irish society, people have struggled to fill a spiritual vacuum in their lives.
She elaborates: “With religion came spirituality and that connection with something beyond the physical, and an acceptance that there is more to human beings then the need to progress from a financial point of view.”
There is, she suggests, a connection between our growing materialism and the increase in the suicide rate. “The amount of mental illness in this country, the amount of stress related illness, has sky-rocketed in the last couple of years. Suicides also have. And I think a lot of this comes from that sense of loneliness, isolation. Take suicide. If, say, a young man feels this world is not the world for him, that there is no place he belongs, what does that say about the way we are alienating young people?”
You won’t find any hard and fast answers in her work, however. She regards her job as being to pose questions, rather than offering pat solutions. “In writing this play I am not claiming I have any answers but what I am at least trying to do is uphold my position as an artist, which I’ve always felt was to hold a mirror up to a nation and reflect it back on itself,” she concludes. “The best I can do is simply say, ‘this is the world as I see it’ and ask an audience to observe that world with me. That’s what I do with this play.”

The Magic Tree is currently at the Granary Theatre, Cork