Thomas Kilroy, who has just received the Irish Pen award, tells Sara Keatinghow his characters speak to him, and how an eye operation has given him dream-like visions.
Thomas Kilroy does not look like himself on the day we meet. In fact I do not recognise him at all. The large, thick-lensed glasses that have defined his face since childhood no longer sit staunchly on the bridge of his nose. His countenance, now freed of the mask of bulky bifocals, is clear and delicately featured. And his eyes, usually magnified and startled behind the shade of his spectacles, are actually a pale and brilliant blue.
The change in Kilroy, however, is not merely superficial, as the cataract operation that restored his sight last year has sharpened his memory suddenly too. This miraculous transformation gives rise to the first of many wonderful, fluently crafted anecdotes that he will share with me during our interview.
"Recently, I have begun writing a bit about my childhood in Kilkenny," he begins. "I have resisted writing about anything like this before, for the very good reason that I can hardly remember what happened yesterday, let alone things that might have happened so long ago. But this startling thing started happening to me after the [ cataract] operation last year. For the first time since I was six years old I could do without glasses, and without them I started to see things with an appalling clarity."
"I started to see memories with startling visual detail: things like clothes, or colours, or details about my mother and father and the house in which I grew up in Callan. But some of the things I saw were not my memories. They were things that I could not have ever experienced; like the Cromwellian siege of Callan in February of 1650. I knew a little bit about this event, but visions of it started coming to me with a dreamlike quality, like memories. When I spoke to my eye-doctor about these cataract visions, he said 'You need to talk to a different doctor'. So the end result of the operation on my cataracts is that I've begun writing about my childhood. But if [ what I am writing now] is ever finished, it will not be a memoir. It will be a strange compendium of fact, fiction and fantasy, not the story of my life."
THIS IS A poetic anecdote - one that itself has the quality of a dream rather than reality - but it is also a story that has resonances in Kilroy's large body of work, which was celebrated last night at the Royal St George Yacht Club, Dún Laoghaire, where Kilroy was awarded the Irish Pen/AT Cross award for his contribution to Irish literature. Of the award he says: "I am delighted. It means a lot to me, especially because it is an award from other writers and that makes it quite distinctive. We all know that the prize-giving culture of today is very much linked up with the marketplace, and that has sort of lessened its value. So when you come across this prize - this quiet award, presented with no great fanfare, and celebrated by a dinner with other writers - well, you are very honoured."
In fact, Kilroy's 12 stage plays, several radio plays, and single, widely celebrated novel, have continuously returned to the idea that the self - that self being lived or remembered - is a provisional and uncertain concept, not easily pinned down by traditional markers of gender or nationality, nor by memory, and definitely not by facts.
In Talbot's Box, for example, Kilroy traced the transformation of the famous Dublin figure Matt Talbot from debauched drunkard to religious martyr, and the vagaries of his vacillating identities in between. In Double Cross, he dissected the split personalities of political traitors Brendan Bracken and William Joyce, anatomising their betrayal of their country for the survival of their shifting selves. In The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche and The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde, he probed the boundaries between self and sexuality, discovering a world where desires are always deceiving, but remain the most fundamental defining factor of the human soul.
Kilroy has returned again and again to the nebulous and unstable theme of "the self", crafting the human drama anew each time through expressionistic theatrical techniques and even the masked dances of Japanese Noh. The complexity of these themes and forms in his work has seen Kilroy categorised as an "intellectual writer", a "difficult writer", or even - and perhaps most unfairly - an "unpopular playwright".
However, as Kilroy explains with unassuming candour, he is both prepared to concede and to contend such categorisation. "Some people find the work difficult and that's fine," he says. "I find the work extremely difficult, especially because the kinds of things that I wrestle with are not always fully overcome. But these [ subjects] will remain difficult no matter what I do, and often that's the journey of the work. But this reputation is also something that I resist. Because, for me, if the play has not [ developed] a basic human content that can be understood by an audience then it has failed."
In fact, despite the profound intelligence of works like Double Cross or The O'Neill, which both examine the personal pressures of ideological dogma, Kilroy talks about his writing process as one that is linked inextricably to the human essence rather than to ideas. "Without wanting to sound like I come from Knock or Lourdes, I actually begin writing when I hear voices. Whenever I hear that voice fully in my head, I have found the character. Sometimes the voice is accompanied by an idea of what it is that I want to write about, but these ideas are never really formed fully until I've finished a full draft of the play; until all the characters are speaking in the situation, are in the action doing something. The ideas come later."
THE VOICE THAT inspires Kilroy is something that he returns to when describing his own journey into the theatre as a university student at UCD during the late 1950s. "I think that all playwrights are actors manqué or directeurs manqué," he says. "There are those who act out the work as they write it, and those who direct the play as they write. I'm an actor manqué; the voice that I hear is distinctly a speaking voice: the actor speaking that voice [ as well as] the voice speaking in character. But I actually came to theatre through acting, as a young student in UCD and in Callan, where they had a drama group."
However, it was as an audience member rather than an actor that Kilroy found himself inspired to write for the stage. "The real defining experience," he says, "came when I was working as a student in Britain. I would go over every summer and work in canning factories or railway stations. The idea was that I'd save money for my university education, but the fact was that I spent most of it at the theatre, in Stratford or in London. I saw a lot of the new British drama of the 1950s, [ by] writers like John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, [ and] John Arden. It was freeing and exciting and interesting, the way in which these writers were reading English culture in such a close way. That was a real stimulus. The Irish plays that I grew up with between the 1930s and 1940s: they read Irish culture without any angle. There were exceptions of course, like TC Murray and Paul Vincent Carroll, but by and large there was a very docile approach to the theatre in Ireland, and [ post-war] English theatre taught me something different."
British theatre of this period influenced the form in which he began to write too, Kilroy explains, for his developing voice was less about formal experimentalism - as it is often read - than about the representation of reality through the individual imagination. "People talk about the way in which I reacted against Irish realism or naturalism - and I did, I hated that [ type of theatre] - but the English theatre of the time was realistic too, and it taught me that realism could actually be very effective; when it has a very specific attention to detail, when it is accurate, not generalised, it can be potent. Accuracy is actually a quality I admire greatly in theatre, whether it's accuracy to the social scene, or towards emotion, or the intense focus of the actor."
Even so, Kilroy insists, "[ documentary] reality on the stage is less important to me than the invented one, because I place the highest value on the imagination."
WHAT KILROY FINDS particularly inspiring about the theatre - and he has chosen to work almost entirely within the theatre, despite major success with his novel The Big Chapel, which was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1973 - is the collaboration of imaginative vision made possible in the theatre. "The most exciting day of my life", he says, "is the first day of rehearsal. I love working with directors [and he mentions Patrick Mason, his long-time collaborator, specifically] and actors. To sit in a room with a group of people, knowing that they are there to put something of yours into place; well, it is a humbling experience. There is so much generosity, and an enormous dedication to others. It is much better than sitting at your desk trying to put something on to a page," Kilroy concludes. "It is much more human."
And yet - as he finishes off a screenplay of The Colleen and The Cowboy, which will be directed by Paul Quinn for the Irish Film Board; as he re-reads The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde for a new production at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in June; as he sifts through the invented memories inspired by his cataract visions - Kilroy will continue to sit at his desk and listen out for new voices emerging in the silence. He admits with a wry smile as the interview finishes that he is hearing voices again: "I think I have a play coming in the distance before me."