Learning to laugh in the face of pain

Damian Gorman's play uses humour as a way in to life in an alcohol treatment unit. It's a story that holds a personal poignancy, he tells Jane Coyle

Hearing and telling stories is Damian Gorman's speciality. The Lyric Theatre's publicity blurb describes Gorman as " . . . an acclaimed writer . . . one of the most socially significant contemporary writers in Northern Ireland". But in spite of such a warm recommendation, he has never had a play premiered there - a situation which is about to change.

"The motivation came from within the Lyric itself," says Gorman. "Paula McFetridge [the theatre's artistic director] had been saying to me about premiering something there. As I had never done that before, she thought it was important that it should be 'the one, the play that you would like to begin its life on this stage'. So we agreed to be patient and wait until that play emerged."

And thus it was that 1974 - The End of the Year Show took its first faltering steps, though nobody, least of all Gorman himself, could have foreseen the tragedy which would threaten its completion and give it an almost unbearably poignant resonance.

Gorman started his literary life as a poet. In the 20 or so intervening years, almost everything he has written has been spiked with an acute perception of the immediate issue and softened by the lyricism and sensitivity of a natural poet. He can also be extremely funny, a gift which proved an invaluable lifeline in dealing with the problematic central themes of his new play.

For such a quietly spoken, self-effacing man, his first outing as a playwright was an uncharacteristically spectacular, headline-grabbing affair. Broken Nails was an ambitious suite of verse plays, performed and produced by a combined team of professional and community participants and staged in the magnificent setting of St Peter's Cathedral in West Belfast. "To have those resources and a cathedral setting on my first time out was kind of unreal, ridiculous," he recalls. "It was a wonderful gift to be presented with the richness of being asked to do something for the Nativity and with all that community support behind it."

The attention and praise garnered from Broken Nails catapulted Gorman into a decade of intense and varied activity, during which he found himself in great demand, on stage and on the small screen, writing and presenting a string of landmark documentaries and authoring one of the BBC's Great Train Journeys. In 1996, he set off on a rather different track, when he became the founding director of An Crann/The Tree, a charity which used the medium of the written and spoken word to encourage people to tell and hear stories of the Troubles. As with so much of his substantial canon of work, the very existence of An Crann was inspired by apparently ordinary, everyday events.

"I heard an interview with a politician, in which he said something to the effect that in the new dispensation, Northern Ireland people would have to take each other into account. It set me wondering where one would go to to find these accounts, to hear first hand what it was like to be a loyalist or a republican, the wife or husband of someone who had been shot or bombed.

"Then I heard a woman talking about how, in the immediate aftermath of her husband's death, the media had only two questions for her - how did she feel and had she anything to say to the killers. She said how unfair it was to call somebody into that public position of fixed utterance on the day of such a tragedy, but that if these people sat down with her, she would tell them everything about her husband and then they would know how she felt." Looking back on all those individual stories, Gorman is struck by something that is crucial to his latest play.

"Humour was the element that it worked in. So many of the stories were hard to start, painful to say. So we would start off sharing a few jokes, before moving in to the kernel of the experience." He started addressing the Lyric's request about two years ago, trying to locate something that would link what he had done on television, on radio, in the community and on stage.

"There are a number of concerns that I have when I am writing. I am interested in the Troubles and, as a result of my own family and personal circumstances, I am interested in problems related to alcoholism and depression. I also have a great interest in laughing and music, so it was a case of trying to find a context in which all these things could come together. "I hit on the year 1974 as a year which was not only crucial to Northern Ireland, with the fall of the Sunningdale executive and the rising number of pub bombings, but was also the year in which I woke up to an interest in the place where I lived.

"Another of my interests is in lives lived on the margins and rather than go up the North face, I decided I would like to do this play from the side. I thought I would set the play in an alcohol treatment unit, where there are people who would never be asked to give their opinions about anything. In the period between Christmas and New Year, when the rest of society is having a merry time, the whole metabolism of such a place would run down and you'd find a group of individuals on the margin of the margins. Once set up, it deepened in my mind and in the spring of 2004, I started doing some research."

Gorman did not have to go far to discover the facts of life inside such a unit. He had a meeting with his brother Brendan.

"Brendan had been in a drink unit at this time - and other times - of year. He was in many units. He was actually in one over Christmas 1984, and was willing and able to give me insights about the way things functioned at the slow end of the year. One thing he was insistent about was that if I was going to write a play about one of these places, it should be funny. Apparently they all ribbed each other unmercifully. 'The banter was non-stop - mighty,' he said. 'Make sure you put that in.' "

But, in July of 2004, just as Gorman prepared to show Brendan the first draft, he received a phone call to tell him his brother had been found dead in his flat. He had died of alcoholism.

Not surprisingly, during the next few months, his creative juices dried up, his writing slowed to a halt and he felt himself completely devoid of the energy needed to get the show back on the road.

"I feel a bit awkward talking about it now," he says. "It was all a bit strange - I couldn't pick the thing up, but I couldn't put it down either. What enabled me to come back to it was that, at the end of the day, this is my job. It was a question of going back to work. My brothers and sister were keen that I should finish it and, of course, I wanted to honour Brendan in some way. I have never given them anything before. I don't make tables or chairs, but this was something I could put before them and say, this is for you."

When he did come back to it, its themes naturally broadened into an examination of the maleness and tunnel vision so prevalent in the North, as well as the drink issue. "I hope I have made it funny enough. It's certainly not a comedy, but there is comedy in it, and a lot of craic. That was my brief from Brendan. There is a shock element at the end, but there is a last note, too, that I hope people will register and take away with them."