Her play 'B for Baby' won awards and divided critics, and her first film, 'Snap', is set to shock, but, far from being a new discovery, Carmel Winters has been grafting away for years, she tells SHANE HEGARTY
IT'S LATE September, at the door of the Peacock Theatre in Dublin, where a small sign warns patrons that the performance of Carmel Winters's B for Babywill include partial nudity and a live snake. The play comes and goes, and both promises are fulfilled with no great fuss. The performance gets a standing ovation. From some. Others stay in their seats. It is that kind of play.
"Shamelessly manipulative," said the Guardian. "Intellectual disability here rarely seems more than a playwright's device," said The Irish Times. "A wonderful bundle of perturbing laughs," said the Daily Telegraph.
It was named best new play at last month's Irish TimesTheatre Awards. The applause was louder than the tutting, but dissent was there.
Spin forward to January and a showing of Snap, a film written and directed by Winters. Its story of a mother, a son and an abducted toddler is strong enough to elicit gasps from some at the screening.
It will be released next week, when the critics will have their say, but it emerged from the Dublin International Film Festival with the prizes for best Irish film and best Irish director. They were handed to Winters the weekend she picked up the theatre award. And, at 39, here she sits, laughing at her new-found status as bright young thing.
“We’re guided by the exceptional cases rather than the normal,” she says. “The unknown who comes out of nowhere and gets the three-book deal. But that’s not the reality, and it’s the same with a film. I’d love to be able to subscribe to being this new discovery that came from nowhere, but the reality is I’ve been grafting away, slaving away and honing my craft diligently, you know, but there you go.”
She throws herself back in the chair as she laughs. It is endearing how she often contorts in the seat as, in her unadulterated Cork accent, she explains herself or talks about the work of others. It brings lightness to an intensity that is recognisable in her work: the bleak humour that occasionally loosens the knot-in-the-stomach mood of Snap; the wild playfulness of the language in B for Baby.
But even when she reads she can't do so without the danger of being totally immersed. She describes being so affected by Helen Dunmore's The Siege, set in wartime Leningrad, that descriptions of cold and hunger left her shivering and famished. She took to the shower to warm up, and to eat at the same time. "And this was in La Gomera, on a hot Canary island. So I'm very much at the mercy of things when I read."
Yet she grew up not as a reader but as a listener, one of 12 children at home in Kanturk. “I was a constant spectator at a theatre event in a small space. I was second-youngest – that’s the front row. And I loved it. I was surrounded by intense family dynamics, six boys and six girls. And anyone and everyone is coming into your house. So you end up living in a very vibrant community for all those formative years. I think it’s probably why I do what I do.”
She began writing in her 20s, spent time teaching creative writing at the University of East Anglia, writing, acting, developing. Snap, though, arrived from the unlikely source of a concocted scenario for trainee psychiatrists. They only got the essence, though. The story developed through a play, A-Picking at a Bone, which she performed herself.
She then earned €250,000 of the film budget through a programme for low-budget Irish film-makers, but says Snapwouldn't be any different if it had cost €1 million more.
Besides, it only became a film script rather than a play as "the tension of being looked at and looking" really came through in the writing. As Snaplooks back at the snatching of a toddler by a teenage boy, Winters builds an effective tension in part because much of the film is shot from a documentary perspective. It allows the plot to develop in some neat ways, although she starts off her projects without necessarily knowing where she's going to end up.
“For me the deliciousness in writing is the mixture between writing blind and writing absolutely cannily. When I know everything there is to know about something before I’ve executed it in writing, I don’t write it. I’ve no journey any more. If there’s some surprise in the ending, it’s your lovely inbuilt reward.”
She worked on Snapfor two years, writing nothing else other than B for Baby,which was something of a reaction to the restraints forced on her by writing for the screen. The resulting drama, in which two actors, Michele Moran and Louis Lovett (for whom it was written), played residents in care and a childless couple.
WINTERS WAS FASCINATED first by the reaction of the preview audiences, coming to it fresh. There were standing ovations, but she would watch someone walk out every other night or so. While the subject matter – intellectual disability, infertility and the characters’ “obstructed need for family” – was greeted warmly by those with direct experience, she says, not everyone was so generous.
“We’ve had rave reviews, we’ve had stinking reviews. But I think the reviews haven’t been very transparent. That you don’t necessarily see the play in them. And I’ve heard a lot of people who’ve seen the play and were surprised following the reviews. And I think it’s because it isn’t easily synopsised. It isn’t easily described. That would be my opinion, but you might have a different opinion.”
As it happens, I felt deeply uncomfortable at times, not least when a particular line – “You f**king spa’ ” – was greeted with laughter from an audience I felt was taking it at face value.
Winters then gives a lengthy, thoughtful and honest response. The line was important, a true expression of one of the characters and of the situation within the structure of the play, she says. “I can’t answer for a particular audience’s embarrassment, rejection or exploitation of the moment, but I can answer for the play’s own terms.”
Yet audiences are interesting to her. "I've been to plays where people have struggled: 'What the hell was that about?' They don't say, 'I wasn't sure,' or, 'That doesn't make a lot of sense.' They presume there's something to be got that they didn't get. I suppose B for Babyraises a red flag in what it's about. But not necessarily to me. I love it. I actually love it. I can't say I always loved it, because you go through phases: there's an in-love phase and then a highly critical period, but I love what it does on stage with audiences. The Guardiansaid it was shameless and manipulative. To me it was shameless but in the best sense."
Still, she prefers criticism if it is open and engages with the work. “I way prefer that than a cowardly avoidance, where in between the lines someone doesn’t even have the courage of their own convictions.”
B for Babywill tour later in the year, something she's looking forward to, not least because she believes Lovett and Moran will take it on to another level. "I love actors. I do. I truly love them. I don't love them in a luvvie way but in a brutal way. Because I'll ask them for everything. I know what they're capable of." (In Snapa stark, shocking bedroom scene featuring the late Mick Lally backs this up emphatically.)
Once the film opens, excepting some festivals Winters will return to her home in Cork (the same house that appears in Snap) to write. Her next feature film will be The Road to Joe, a slow road movie. "It's more of an allegory, more of a retelling of Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus, and the Nativity." There is another play to develop for the Abbey, the first draft of which is written, and there is a television project, Mind, an ensemble piece centred on a couple of neuroscientists, and written for Stephen Fry's production company. There may be a novel at some point too.
For now, she says, she must ring-fence her time, get on with the writing, get away from distraction and ignore the awards. “The world is full of fantastic first films. I’d say if anyone did a comparative study of first films and second films they’d be hard-pressed to say there was a trend for things improving – things are as likely to dip,” she says, sinking back in the chair.
“There’s a period for things . . . growing the work in the darkness, and the light from other people’s imagined perception. That’s a very bright light, and there’s just a time for not letting it in. I’m definitely up against that, and I hadn’t anticipated it. But I won’t let it out until it’s right.”
Snapis out next Friday
