Telling stories in the dark

`I just have a curiosity about people . . . When I was growing up, I found the people around me funny, or I found them intriguing, or I was sorry for them. If there was a teacher at school everyone hated, or a priest who was very strict, I would feel sorry for them."

You could call Conor McPherson an amoral playwright. He doesn't have one particular story he needs to tell, one particular set of values he needs to prove. But he needs to tell stories. Here he is, arguably, in the company of all the world's greatest playwrights.

If he is an amoral playwright, he is also a playwright obsessed with morality, fascinated by the issue of what is right and what is wrong. In This Lime Tree Bower, a play he directed with Fly By Night and Iomha Ildanach theatre companies for the first Dublin Theatre Festival Fringe in 1995, the teenager, Joe, witnesses a rape, and the beautiful writing spares us none of its horror: "The girl's legs were on either side of him, like they were broken." But later on, Joe says: "The horrible thing was that what I saw made me sick to my stomach, but at the same time it was really turning me on."

What McPherson is interested in, he says, is "that sense of not having control and gaining control again, in order to be happy. It's great fuel for stories." (This is an expression he likes.) He remembers listening to a man telling the story of a hideously irresponsible sexual spree. He said: "If I did something like that, I'd feel really guilty", but the man replied: "I don't really feel guilt." Characters like that, are, he says, "interesting characters to watch". I commented that Shakespeare had had the same interest, and he immediately made the Richard 111 connection. In a way, he adds, we envy the character Ray, from This Lime-Tree Bower - a truly reptilian university lecturer in philosophy, whose field studies bring him into half his students' beds.

He adds: "I think we have a huge concern in this country with right and wrong, because of Catholicism. You're brought up thinking you have to redeem yourself. You're always, from a young age, thinking `am I good? Am I bad?' That's maybe why we have so many playwrights, we're always thinking about character."

The Weir, which opens at the Gate in a Royal Court production on Tuesday, is a new departure, and it has catapulted this intense, quiet-spoken and seemingly modest red-haired 26-year-old from Coolock to being called "an Irish Chekhov" and all manner of other flattering things by the British press. That press, no better than this one in lazily following a set of pre-determined narratives, and of course, less well-provisioned in its set of narratives about Ireland, has sought to cast McPherson as an Irishman abandoned by his own people, a la Sean O'Casey. In fact, The Weir was commissioned by the Royal Court and was never offered to an Irish theatre. This Lime-Tree Bower was turned down by the main Dublin Theatre Festival, but it is a strange series of monologues and McPherson says he understands how this could have happened, and feels no bitterness. "In fact", he says, "Sebastian Barry said to me it was the best thing that ever happened to me that I was produced in London before Dublin, because the theatre community is much bigger and it is more advantageous. You find yourself being reviewed beside Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard." He is, however, feeling very nervous about how he will be received here.

The Weir is set in a pub in remote Leitrim, where a few men gather to lend each other some company, some support against the encircling gloom. Then comes one of the oldest theatrical device in the book: McPherson introduces a stranger. And the stranger is a woman. She stimulates the men into a night of story-telling, which ends by effecting a small transformation in their lives. Women tend to be seen as having this potential in McPherson plays: "They are possibility embodied," agrees McPherson. "They offer the chance of being happy. My characters tend to idolise women." Does McPherson? He is certainly used to them, he says, he grew up with two sisters: "One younger, one older, they'd got me at both ends." And he has had the same girlfriend for seven years, a woman he met when he was at college. "I suppose," he says, "I get all my messing out through my characters."

But why Leitrim? "I used to go and visit my grandfather, who was living in a house on his own in the middle of nowhere in Leitrim," he explains. "His wife had died. When you go places when you're young, they tend to stay with you. You remember how you felt. The loneliness struck me. I wondered, what's it like, living with grief in a place like that?" This experience coalesced with McPherson's interest in ghost stories, and a play was born. "The play is about breaking the ordinary world and allowing the supernatural to flow in, and finding out what your fears are," he says.

"The men are slightly hysterical. There is the hysteria of thinking that your life might change and you might fall in love. It's a handy fuel for stories, the electricity created by sexual fears. I think when people meet a member of the opposite sex, they're thinking: `Am I going to be attracted to this person?' "

Couldn't he be accused of peddling an image of Ireland which is far from the truth? "I'm getting away with an image of Ireland in which Dublin is very far away. But really, Ireland has become much smaller. With the new roads, you shoot up there in an hour and a half. The people who came over to research bars in Leitrim had allowed three days to do it in." He adds, however: "I have been in bars like the one in the play. It's not all like that, but there are those places and so I defend my right to set it there." As far as the attitudes of the men in the pub go, he says: "I don't know if that's really the case in a lot of those places, but it's just a striking conceit."

The Weir goes to the West End after Dublin, and then on to Broadway in the Autumn. I suggested that it was interesting that three of the major Irish productions on Broadway in recent years will have portrayed a rural and socially backward Ireland: Dancing At Lughnasa, The Beauty Queen Of Leenane and now, The Weir. He agrees that, unintentionally, he will be confirming some people's expectations, but he adds: "In fairness, mine is the closest to reality."

Another of the lazy media narratives in which he has found himself caught up are comparisons with Martin McDonagh; he actually heard someone in the audience of The Weir say: `Is this part of the Trilogy?' But McPherson adds: "In a lot of ways Martin's been great for me. He's heightened expectations of new work, and because of his unique style in interviews, he's taken a lot of the flak." What he does share with McDonagh, is the fact that the reasons he started writing, started writing so young and started writing for the stage, are a wonderful mystery. There was no particular interest in the arts at home, though there were a lot of books around, and he read a lot of Stephen King - which seems to have done him no harm, because even in his early plays for Dramsoc, his sense of what makes a good yarn was acute.

His parents gave him two great gifts however: they insisted that he go to university and after that, they never questioned what he was doing. He had wanted to be a rock star, and played a kind of New Wave music with different bands from about the ages of 14 to 20: "I considered myself quite weird at the time", he announces. Now he tends to like women singer/songwriters like Natalie Merchant and Aimee Mann, and country and western fusion artists, like Ron Sexsmith and the Jayhawks. But at UCD, the plays took over from the songs.

He has a strong sense of his own destiny, but perhaps a small amount of anxiety about being able to control it. He doesn't take commissions for plays any more, because he doesn't need the pressure or the interference, but he is writing two, one ensemble, one a monologue. He is also working on two film scripts, one, set in a small-town police department in Georgia, for director Paddy Breathnach, who directed his script I Went Down, and another for Neil Jordan, which is being developed from some chapters of a novel which Jordan never completed. But he is also anxious to go back to directing, and will shortly bring his own production of St. Nicholas, about a demented theatre critic, to the Geffen Theatre in Los Angeles. He admits he was a complete pain on the set of The Weir, as Ian Rickson tried to get on with directing.

For the future, what he wants to do is sit back in his flat in Clontarf and plan the future "in a less hectic way. What I want is for things to slow down. I don't want to be an athlete - I don't want to produce a gold medal every year."

He wants to retain his right to work in his own way in small studio spaces. After agreeing that Tom Murphy - as well as Billy Roche - are positive influences, he says: "One of the best things I have ever seen is a production of Conversations On A Homecoming by UCG Dramsoc. It just shows you that great theatre can come from anywhere. You just have to have heart."

The Weir opens at the Gate Theatre on Tuesday.