What else would two Irish people be doing on a bright, sunny morning other than talking about ghosts and the paranormal?
Conor McPherson and I are sitting in one of the Gate Theatre’s lovely, time-worn period rooms with large Georgian windows that face out on to Parnell Square in Dublin.
I have just asked McPherson, whose play The Weir is among several of his to have had a long through line of the supernatural, if he believes that events can happen in ways we don’t understand.
Like every question I put to him over the course of an hour or so, he considers it carefully, frowning unselfconsciously now and then. He is consistently thoughtful, taking time to pause between answers. He may have had decades of experience of being interviewed, but it’s not a process he appears either to be jaded by or to take for granted. At one point he asks, with noticeable anxiety, “Was that an okay answer?”
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On the supernatural, he says, “I think we live in a situation we can’t understand, and that we know nothing really about – where we came from, why are we conscious, what does it mean to know you are alive and know that you will die? That is the context of our life, and there is no getting away from it.
“I think we fill our lives with lots of illusions and distractions and, hopefully, if you are lucky in life, pleasant experiences. The truth is, none of us know what is going on, whatsoever.”
He makes a connection between the lacunae of our understanding of the world and his work as a playwright.
“The stage is a great metaphor for that: there is this pool of light in the darkness where something is happening. That’s what life is like. As a playwright I am as interested in the darkness around the stage as I am in the pool of light.
“I think you are always trying to drag the darkness on to the stage somehow, because that’s really what it’s about. That’s where the truth is somewhere, and we’ll never know it.”
McPherson is 54. He was born in Dublin, where he still lives with his wife, the artist Fionnuala Ní Chiosáin, and their daughter. He has been working creatively and in theatre since 1992, both as a writer and as a director. Among his plays are This Lime Tree Bower, The Weir, Port Authority, The Night Alive and the musical Girl from the North Country, based on Bob Dylan songs.
He has also written screenplays and adapted several classics, such as Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and a stage version of The Hunger Games. He wrote The Weir when he was 26. It opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1997 and at once became a sensation, as he did.
McPherson almost didn’t make it out of his 20s. In the midst of his astonishing success, he drank to excess. On February 22nd, 2001, the day Port Authority premiered at the Ambassadors Theatre in London, his pancreas ruptured. Instead of attending the opening night, he was battling with mortality at a London hospital, where he remained for several weeks. He has been sober ever since.
The Brightening Air, which premeried at the Old Vic in London last year, was his first new play for 12 years. It begins a run at the Gate this month. The play follows a starry revival of The Weir at the 3Olympia in Dublin last year, when the Oscar nominee Brendan Gleeson featured in the main role. Brian Cox, who starred as Logan Roy in Succession, and who has won many acting awards, including an Emmy, a Golden Globe and two Baftas, was in the original productions of both Dublin Carol and St Nicholas.
“That’s the mystery of great actors,” McPherson says, talking about Gleeson and Cox in particular. “The layers that are there. There is some poetic depth of telepathic communication which is happening with really good actors. They are communicating not just with words but with some kind of instinctive transmission of sublingual things that we all seem to share and understand, and they can tap into that with such grace.”
I always say to my daughter, ‘Where you want to be in life is right in the middle, not too happy, not too sad’
What is his process for writing a new play, such as The Brightening Air?
“For me a play usually comes from the unconscious in an image,” he says. “Of some people in a room, usually. Over time, if that the image or feeling persists, it expands.
“I always think it’s like the stick that they use for candyfloss in the funfair. There is nothing there, and you just put it into this spinning sort of container, and gradually you see all these little wisps of something attaching to it.
“It’s a bit like that for me. I tend to think about something for a long time, just making little notes about it, what it could be, and allowing it to emerge from the unconscious, really, usually when I am doing something else. Then eventually, when you have got enough notes, you might start putting some shape on a first draft.”
McPherson writes longhand and on his computer. He does the early notes on paper. The skeleton of a draft emerges after 20 or 30 pages. “And then, once you have a first draft, you can work on it in a more office-hours way. You can go at it and spend a lot longer rewriting it. So it’s like that for me, very gradual in that way.
“I think one of the reasons why I write in those little bursts on a first draft is to keep the energy spontaneous. You want a little bit of chaos at the heart of it.”
It sounds obvious, but, no matter how naturalistic a play is, actors never speak on stage the way people do in their ordinary lives. Their words have to carry weight and suggestion and complexities; to be, in a sense, the opposite of literal.
“You have to be good at writing things in the way that actors can launch the words,” McPherson says. “That also speaks to the collaborative nature of the work, in the sense that all you are ever really doing is half the work, because you are trying to create the spaces to say the things that aren’t said. You are trying to create space for subtext all the time.”
The themes in McPherson’s work have included loneliness, broken relationships, regret and grief, all spun together in his bittersweet cotton-candy confection of masterful storytelling and elements of the supernatural.
McPherson studied philosophy at college, and its influence is watermarked through his work. I ask about his thoughts on that perpetually elusive state happiness.
“It’s about finding balance in life,” he says. “Being busy but not too busy. Having something to look forward to but that’s not too unsettling. That’s what it is about. Happiness is an ongoing process. Keeping the balance.
“I always say to my daughter, ‘Where you want to be in life is right in the middle, not too happy, not too sad.’ That’s where nature likes everything to be, in balance. And if you have the luck to be in that place where everything is not too one way or the other, that’s great.”
This theory, McPherson says, is “Aristotle’s description of happiness, which is, as it has come to be known in English, the happy medium. Everything has to be in the right balance. You have to be brave but not reckless. You need to be ambitious but not evil. You need to be kind but not a walkover. If you find the happy medium in all those virtues, you describe that as happiness.”
McPherson now directs a lot of his own work. This might seem to give a playwright more control, but, as he points out, “There are so many steps where a play can go wrong. First of all, you’re trying to write it, and you can go wrong there. Then, when it’s finished, you’ve got to try and get it on somewhere, and that can all go wrong. And then you’ve got to cast it, and you’ve got to get that right. Then you’ve got rehearsals, and you’ve got to figure all of that out. Then you’re still only halfway up the mountain.
“The first preview, when you have an audience, is when you start to actually understand how the thing works. It is a process full of potential calamity. But I think that’s also what gives it its power: if you can get all those things going, then it can really fly.”
Among the audiences are always the critics. What is McPherson’s take on reviews, 30 years or more in?
“When I was younger I probably paid attention to them, because you lived and died by them, really, so you’d worry about them. And you want them to be good. Then, over the years, you develop scar tissue.
“I don’t quite worry about them quite so much now. I’ve had, for the same play” – The Night Alive – “and the same production on the same day, a five-star review and a one-star review. What can you do? You’ve got to trust in the work.
“What you don’t want is the three-star reviews. You’d nearly be better off getting absolutely hammered, because at least you’re getting some kind of reaction. The three-star review? Ah God, that’s a lot of work for a shrug. A shrug of indifference.”
Neither of us mentions it, but we’re both aware that The Brightening Air received three stars from The Guardian in April last year for its run at the Old Vic.
Earlier this year McPherson began to make a film of The Weir in Co Wicklow, with the cast from last year’s revival in Dublin and London. He’s now editing it. It doesn’t have a release date yet, but it’s due to be in cinemas. “Kate McCullough, who was director of cinematography on An Cailín Ciúin, which I was a big fan of, is involved.”
McPherson’s adaptation of The Cherry Orchard is due to open in London in October, at the Harold Pinter Theatre, starring Kristin Scott Thomas. It’s being directed by Ian Rickson, who also directed McPherson’s lauded adaptation of Uncle Vanya in 2020.
The playwright and the director go back a long way: Rickson also directed the first production of The Weir.
As for The Brightening Air, five of the original London cast – Chris O’Dowd, Derbhle Crotty, Brian Gleeson, Seán McGinley and Aisling Kearns – are returning for the Dublin run. They’re being joined by three new cast members, Peter Corboy, Kate Gilmore and Judith Roddy.
[ Conor McPherson: ‘Plays are stupid. You are supposed to feel them in your bones’Opens in new window ]
What does McPherson want audiences to feel when they leave the theatre after seeing one of his shows?
“I guess a feeling of recognition of something, but also that it’s been an emotional experience, that you recognised something that moved you. I guess it’s like that old-fashioned word ‘catharsis’.
“But it’s something you can’t maybe even describe. Just that there was a moment where you were locked into something that was happening. It doesn’t even have to be that long. But sometimes it takes a whole play to get there.
“Even if it was 30 seconds or a minute of feeling, that is absolutely fantastic. I think it’s almost particular to the theatre in a weird way.
“It’s a little bit like the rarefied atmosphere of a religious service, if you can reach that kind of transubstantiation of something else that seems to be happening underneath the play, and beyond the play, and beyond the actors, and beyond yourself.”
The Brightening Air is at the Gate Theatre, in Dublin, from Wednesday, July 22nd, until Sunday, August 30th, with previews from Friday, July 17th
