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As his first play since 2003 to premiere in Ireland opens in Cavan, playwright Frank McGuinness talks about his outsider role with SARA KEATING

Early in the interview, he admits as much, teasing out the varying depths of this disquiet with surprising frankness. “I trust very few people,” he confesses, and so his willingness to share his discomfort seems all the more startling. But then McGuinness believes that, as a writer, “it’s always better to be uneasy, to be dissatisfied. If you’re really seriously writing you are always perplexed, you are always making trouble.” Indeed, when he is teaching (he is Writer in Residence at UCD, but teaches a wide variety of literature, too, from Shakespeare to 20th-century theatre), he enjoys the “dissonance”, the fact that “the two worlds do not synthesise”. The occasion for our meeting is the Irish premiere of McGuinness’s play There Came a Gypsy Riding, which was originally produced at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2007.