Tapping into the mood

Belinda McKeon meets Shelagh Stephenson, whose new drama deals with every parent's worst fear - the disappearance of a child.

Playwright Shelagh Stephenson's agent calls her a witch. It's not a problem; it has nothing to do with fees or commissions or chilly relations between the two, it's just that Stephenson, or rather her writing, has given her agent good reason to wonder about her relationship to the uncanny.

Six years ago, her second stage play An Experiment with an Air Pump premiered at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. It explored the dark secrets hidden within a Northern English house in which huge advances in science had been achieved two centuries previously; under the kitchen sink lay the skeletons of those people whose bodies had enabled those advances. Arriving into the theatre for the first preview, Stephenson was beset by excited colleagues who wanted to know if she'd seen that day's London Times.

"I thought they meant there was a terrible photograph of me in it," she says. "But it was that someone had been doing some restoration in the house which had belonged to Benjamin Franklin, the 18th-century Enlightenment figure, in London, and that they had just found, in the kitchen, the bones of anatomised victims. On the same day that my play was opening. And that is what happened in my play."

The story does send something of a shiver down the spine. So, too, does the story of Enlightenment, the new play she has written for the Abbey Theatre, commissioned by Ben Barnes, and set to open under his direction at the Peacock tomorrow night. Nick and Lia are a middle-aged couple whose 20-year-old son, Adam, has disappeared without trace while travelling in the Middle East. The terror and grief of their situation, five months into his absence, is explored by Stephenson with a gripping blend of bluntness and sensitivity, and a terrible twist in events heightens their awareness of what is happening, and of why it has happened, to an almost unbearable level.

It's likely, they both know, that Adam has been murdered for who he is, or rather for what he represents. "They killed him because he's white and Western and they hated him," says his mother, in one of her agonising lurches away from the denial which offers her comfort. "And it wasn't personal. Which somehow makes it worse." The world, her father - an ageing MP - admits to her, "is a very unstable place".

"And it's our fault," Lia replies.

Though it is her first commission for an Irish theatre, Enlightenment is the third of Stephenson's plays to be produced in Ireland; The Memory of Water played at the Peacock in 2001, and Five Kinds of Silence was produced by Calypso at Andrew's Lane Theatre in 2004. Unlike these family-centred plays, Enlightenment seems written out of a communal consciousness - of the danger and fragility, the unease, which has developed in the wake of events such as the Bali bombing, the torment and murder of hostages such as Margaret Hassan and Ken Bigley - and, in a different sense, from the suddenness and devastation of the Asian tsunami.

The world of the play is the one which has become only too familiar in the past two years. It is not merely a post-September 11th world; in it, the new knowledge born on that day has been sharpened by the sort of understanding which can have grown only from observing, and learning from, the events which followed in its wake - an understanding that this horror can strike anywhere, kill anyone, the smiling individuals as well as the faceless thousands.

Yet Enlightenment is almost two years old, written before the abductions, before Madrid, before Beslan, before the shock of 250,000 snatched lives on the shores of the Indian Ocean. And in its mood, it seems to anticipate, not the specificity, but the shape of all of these things. Again, Stephenson has written with extraordinary prescience. But to her, it makes perfect sense.

"I think that writers can tap into things," she says, as she sits down to a rushed lunch between rehearsals in the Abbey. "I don't think it's as odd as it sounds. I think all plays, if they work, are tapping into something that already exists."

Besides, she points out, it is hardly as if the atmosphere which pervades the play was absent in 2003, when she wrote it. "Daniel Pearl [the US journalist] had been killed when I wrote it," she points out. "That didn't really make the same sort of headlines [as the later abductions], but it did to me. Because it makes you realise you're dealing with really weird stuff out there and it's happening to people like you. It isn't happening with strange people. And it makes people fearful, and it makes people think that we're living . . ." She pauses. "Well, we do live in an unstable world," she says, echoing her character.

"But we don't know just how unstable it is really, or is it just that they keep telling us that it's unstable? How much of it is real and how much of it is just us sitting around thinking, where is that plane going? Is it flying in to Heathrow or is it going into the Post Office Tower?" She laughs, imitating herself: "Oh, there's that plane coming towards us, and oh well, that's it. That's the end of my life. And we didn't think this five years ago, did we?"

She quotes with approval Ian McEwan's line from his new novel, Saturday, which was written during the same period that she wrote her play, that air planes look "different in the air these days, predatory and doomed".

But if Enlightenment paints a stark picture of life in an unstable world, it does not attempt to offer any easy solutions to the anxiety wrought by that instability. In fact, the "enlightenment" of the title (over which she worries a little, wondering if it sounds very pretentious, before laughing about the advantages of having an icon called "shortcut to Enlightenment" on her computer screen) refers not to recovery or to the easing of difficult burdens, but to the acceptance of brute, hard facts.

And it's this acceptance that attracts her as a writer, not the idea of missing people in itself; when I suggest to her that the subject of a missing son may have particular resonances for Irish audiences with the painful memory of young Robert Holohan's disappearance and death still fresh in their minds, she nods with only moderate interest.

Did she draw on real-life cases as she was writing the play, I persist? "No," she admits, and then, with something of a guilty laugh, "I'm not interested in missing children. Strangely. I have no interest in them at all. The missing son in this play is just a hook to hang something else on. What I'm interested in is absence. In loss. And not knowing. Lia does not know what has happened to her son. And I'm interested in there not being easy answers, or getting over things, moving on, or in closure."

The latter idea she practically spits on; though she is not a parent herself, her reaction to the idea that people can shut a door on the loss of child is almost venomous. "I don't know how people recover from it," she says gravely. "You can get over the loss of your parents, because that's normal, but the other way around unhinges the order of things. I think, I sincerely believe, that on some level your life is finished if your child dies before you in an unnatural way. It would have to be unnatural, because children don't die naturally. I think you don't get over that."

But you can accept that it has happened, and that, Stephenson's play suggests, is in a terrible situation the only hope of enlightenment. "What has happened to Lia is real, and it's not going to be . . ." She pauses. "The past will not be any better than it was. And I'd imagine that people can't live with that, because they just want there to be an answer or to say, he's gone to heaven so I'll see him again. But if you don't have those beliefs, you have to sit and look at it for what it is and say, it's just a terrible, terrible thing, and there is no consolation."

It sounds bleak. But Stephenson doesn't think that it is; and in rehearsal this morning, she says, there has been plenty of laughter with the cast, which includes Ingrid Craigie and Mark Lambert. "I think the ending is a resolution," she argues. "I think that Lia has reached a profound understanding that she didn't have at the beginning of the play. But it isn't the understanding that you'd find in a cheap television programme that says, you know, what lessons have we learned from this?"

She gasps. "The other day, I read somewhere the line, 'What lessons have we learned from the tsunami?'! How can you learn a lesson from a tsunami? I mean, it's just a giant wave that killed a lot of people. There's nothing to be said about it."

But isn't there something to be learned from what happened in Asia about the fragility of life, about the thin thread that binds us to our lives and to our families? "Yes," she responds. "But you'd like to learn it without it happening to you! It seems a bit harsh to say, no, you have to lose your family in the tsunami to learn that life's a bit tricky. We look on, and realise that it could also happen to us, and that's the horribleness of it. But we should know that. We should know that anyway."

* Enlightenment opens at the Peacock Theatre tomorrow.