- guardian.co.uk, Sunday February 4 2001 21.14 GMT
- The Observer, Sunday February 4 2001
In a rehearsal studio up a side alley, not far from the Liffey, Conor McPherson is in his element. He's listening to three generations of Irish actors talk about love, in words that are unmistakably his own: direct and exact and layered with deadpan lyricism. Even in a rough-edged read-through you feel shivers of recognition. Reticent and determined looking, McPherson describes what he wants to do as a playwright in very simple terms. He wants his sentences to 'paint clear pictures in people's heads'. His aim as a director is even more straightforward. 'I just want the actors to put their faith in the language,' he says, 'just let the words do the work.'
McPherson has always made his craft look remarkably easy. His first notable play, This Lime Tree Bower, was rapturously received when he was only 23 and fresh out of University College, Dublin. It came complete with a mini-manifesto, a prefaced quote from Coleridge: 'No sound is dissonant which tells of life.'
In the six years since he has kept rigorous faith in that idea, telling of life, with hardly a false note, in half a dozen plays and screenplays. With The Weir, a series of extraordinary haunted and haunting tales told in a remote bar in rural Ireland - a phenomenal success on Broadway and in the West End - he established himself as perhaps the pre-eminent narrative dramatist of his generation. And he shows no signs of letting up. He describes his new play, Port Authority, which we have been watching in rehearsal, as the most accomplished thing he has done. (He does this with a typical hesitant confidence - sure of his talent, unsure that he really wants to talk about it.)
It is, in some ways, too, a distillation of what has gone before. 'The play is really three generations of Dublin men talking about how they face up to the responsibility of emotion,' he says. 'The three men could be related; they could be the same person. I don't know...'
What he is sure about, characteristically, is the precise trajectory of the human feeling the men describe. The play suggests a progression of sorts, one that he sees as fundamental. 'The young person isn't certain that love can be real; the middle-aged man is only discovering that it is; and the older person seems so sure of it. I was interested in the way that many of us go through the whole of our lives staying with someone just out of complacency, because leaving isn't easy,' he says. 'It's about whether you are prepared to make yourself happy at the cost of someone else's happiness. And that's not just a personal or historical or psychological question. It's also a moral one.'
It's tempting to suggest that Conor McPherson has had a formal training in this kind of dilemma. A postgraduate in ethics, he tutored students for a while in moral philosophy and planned to do a PhD (which, he says, slightly whimsically, is still a real possibility, 'a return to sanity'). His academic subject made him realise, 'above all, that I didn't know much about anything, and that none of us do'. But while this spirit may inform the comedy of his plays, their more poignant truths, he guesses, come from somewhere else.
If McPherson's work has a recurrent theme, it is a fear of ending up on your own. 'I guess I'm attracted and repelled by isolation,' he says. 'It scares me. And it's why I tend to write about older characters, too, because for them the stakes are somewhat higher. You know, if you tell a person you're living with to go fuck themselves when you are 21, then you don't think too much of it; but if you say those same words near the end of your life, and then the person goes and walks out on you - where are you then?'
Some of this sense of the fragility of communication which is at the heart of his best work, he learnt as a boy. McPherson grew up on a Dublin housing estate, his father taught accountancy, his mother worked in a shoe shop. In holidays and at weekends he would often go down on the train, alone, to visit his grandfather in Leitrim, the isolated setting for the barroom in The Weir. The remoteness of this other Ireland had a profound effect on him as a writer, he believes. 'My grandfather was there on his own,' McPherson recalls, nursing a post-rehearsal glass of Guinness. 'I was fairly quiet when I was a teenager, and I liked the way you could go down there and sit, you know, and not talk, really, and look at the fire with him. And then he might say something. Or he might not. Sometimes he might tell me a story. But it would always come out of this sense of absolute isolation and silence, and I guess just the atmosphere of that stayed with me, struck me as something important, I suppose.'
McPherson is obsessive in his stage directions about pace. Phrases are punctuated with pauses and beats. His early plays, mostly monologues, were written like poetry. Each sentence occupying a line, building little formal silences into the rhythm of the piece. His writing retains that sense of speech as an anxious antidote to quiet. But if he learnt what he knows of silence from his grandfather, he adopted some of what he understands of dialogue from elsewhere.
'As a young man, I just read David Mamet and tried to copy it. I was impressed just by the rate of that language, you know in Glengarry Glen Ross or something. Just the speed of that. And when you are 18 all that swearing is very exciting, I guess. So I wanted to capture some of that, too.'
The other influence, or rather, he says, the other 'example' is, of course, Beckett. McPherson has been involved in Michael Colgan's epic effort to film all of the playwright's work. McPherson was one of the first directors Colgan approached, and he jumped at the opportunity to direct Endgame . 'People said that's because I was young,' he smiles. 'Many of the more experienced directors chose shorter stuff. But when you're 28 you say give me Godot , give me Endgame ...'
He cast Michael Gambon and David Thewliss as Hamm and Clov, and relished the experience. 'The great thing about working with Gambon,' he says, 'is that he has like 300 stories to tell, all top-class things. So when there was a lull, and on a film there is always a lull, he'd just sit there and sort of spoof us with these stories. He also insisted on calling me "Cunty McFuckface", so that was grand...'
The Beckett legacy is something he is slightly wary of, too. McPherson, along with the London-based Martin McDonagh, has been acclaimed as a natural heir to the great Irish playwrights. He does not mind the label if it sells tickets, but hopes that is as far as it goes. 'If people want to say there's a renaissance in this or that, that's great I guess, because it helps theatres to market plays in London. But as a writer, you're not aware of it, and without it, anyway, I'd like to think my plays would find an audience...'
I wonder if he felt a new weight of expectation after The Weir ? He thinks about it. 'That play was very good to me, certainly. For about a year after, I guess I was wondering, you know, what comes next? What did I do right? But that feeling did not last...' One of the things that did come next was an inevitable series of offers from Hollywood. McPherson was contracted to Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks to write a script for a film idea of Neil Jordan's. The film, set in Dublin, was, as he describes it, 'about a pair of bad actors who get themselves into trouble and have to use their crap skills to get out of it. It's kind of like an old Ealing comedy...'
Over a period of about a year, McPherson was flown out to Los Angeles , 'usually for two days or something mad', to thrash out ideas for the film. In the end, the project collapsed because of disagreements over casting. 'I just kept on saying, "If we are going to make a film in Dublin why not use European actors, not just think about America all the time..." '
But they wanted Tom Cruise to rerehearse his Irish accent? 'I'm not naming names,' he says, smiling into his pint. In the end, he got his script back, and Jordan has refinanced the project, which is due to start filming in May. He took out some of his frustration, you might imagine, in Dublin Carol , which he was writing at the same time, the blackest of comedies in which an alcoholic Dublin undertaker faces up to his mortality. ('I remember asking someone who had seen it, if they'd enjoyed it and they said, "If you call crying for an hour and a half enjoying yourself, then I enjoyed it..."
Certainly I couldn't have been that happy when I wrote it,' he says, looking back. 'Though at the time I thought it was pretty funny.') I wonder if his Hollywood experience has put him off doing a Sam Mendes? 'I don't think it's particularly difficult thing to do, to make a Hollywood film,' he says. 'If you have any name at all, all you have to do is go over to the meetings and say "Yes and yes and yes..." I didn't want to make something I couldn't stand, though.' He pauses for a moment, looks at me. 'There is one good think about casting big stars in a movie, I suppose.' He smiles. 'They at least have to do all the interviews...'
• Port Authority premieres at the New Ambassadors Theatre in London on 22 February. Box office: 020 7369 1761
