What is this thing called love? The Dublin-born, Clare-based writer, Niall Williams, has been making a study of it for some time now, notably in his best-selling novel, Four Letters of Love, which tracks the fluctuating rhythms of romantic passion, longing, and wisdom painfully acquired. An earlier play, A Little Like Paradise, questioned whether love can be revived after it has ebbed away. His new play, The Way You Look Tonight, compares first love to late love, through the memories of a couple who have been married for decades. Opening this week in Galway in a Druid Theatre Company production, the work was commissioned by Garry Hynes in 1995. Set in a village post office in the west of Ireland as the last manual telephone exchange is being disconnected, it focuses on the lives of the post-master (Patrick Waldron) and his wheelchair-bound wife (Britta Smith), as they find themselves redundant. In their youth, they had been champion ballroom dancers, and the fluctuations in their relationship are presented as an emotional pas de deux.
"I want to look at how love endures and changes over the years," Williams says, "and to view the man and woman as figures in a dance."
For Williams, metaphors and imagery drive the writing. "I don't write out of my own life. I thought first about the disconnection of wires, the way parents and children's lives become detached, and then about the dance of relationships. The metaphor breathes life into the characters."
Directed by Paddy Cunneen (who was the musical director of Martin McDonagh's Leenane Trilogy), designed by Francis O'Connor, with choreography by Paul Johnson, the production is non-naturalistic, interweaving scenes from past and present, from memory and imagination. "It's about spirit - or the connection between human spirits."
The phenomenal success of Four Letters of Love has liberated Williams's writing for the stage, he says. "My writing has matured. I'm freer, more confident, I suppose, and I've enjoyed it more than the other two plays. I've enjoyed it as play." He's also very satisfied to see it premiered at Druid Lane where, in the audience in the mid-1980s, he first felt sufficiently fired up about theatre to consider writing for the stage. "I've been going to see plays in that space for years now and it feels wonderful to me to have my own work staged there. It's a kind of homecoming."
The Way You Look Tonight opens on December 10th at Druid Lane, Galway, with previews from December 7th. Booking on 091-568617