In The Book of Evidence, actor Declan Conlon is alone on stage for 90 minutes, playing a figure who has become part of the national psyche, he tells Rosita Boland.
It's 21 years since Ireland was simultaneously repulsed and transfixed by the murders of nurse Bridie Gargan and farmer Donald Dunne. Their names are now part of a horrible litany, which begin and end with the name of Malcolm Macarthur, the man who killed both of them, although controversially, he was never charged with Dunne's murder.
Everything about the case was almost cartoon-like in its crude outline facts: the sunbathing nurse in the Phoenix Park bludgeoned to death; the Westmeath farmer shot with his own gun; the murderer's hideout in the attorney-general's apartment; Macarthur's trademark bow-tie and intense eyes staring out from the black-and-white newspaper photographs of the time.
Charlie Haughey accurately captured the mood of the country when he described the circumstances of the case as "grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, and unprecedented", thus coining the term "GUBU". There have been many more high-profile murders since, but the Macarthur killings have become watermarked into our national consciousness; they seem now like dark dividers between distinctive eras.
We did not know it then, but the kind of national ignorance-cum-naivety that was present in the early 1980s was soon to be replaced by a relentless familiarity with scandals of Church and State, planning disasters, and abuses of trust at every level of society. Macarthur is still in prison, the longest-serving prisoner in what would surely now be an unrecognisable State to him.
"People were fascinated by the arbitrariness of it," actor Declan Conlon suggests, sitting in one of the Gate Theatre's backstage rooms. "It has become part of our pysche."
Conlon is taking a morning off from rehearsing The Book of Evidence, an adaptation of John Banville's Booker-shortlisted novel, which was inspired by the Macarthur case. The book has been carefully adapted by Alan Gilsenan, who is also the show's director for the Kilkenny Arts Festival production. The Book of Evidence was first performed at the festival last year, where Conlon gave a mesmeric performance in the 90-minute monologue.
For three years, on and off between other projects, Gilsenan and Conlon have been working together on the adaptation. It was workshopped three years ago at Stratford, and then a long version was staged at the Gate in Notting Hill, west London. Fiach Mac Conghail was invited to see the production and, through him, Kilkenny Arts Festival became interested, with the piece being developed further. The interpretation audiences will see at the Gate from next week will differ again from the three previous versions of the script.
"It's not a revival," Conlon says. "We keep working at it, paring it down from the inside. After the Gate, we hope to take it elsewhere and we'll keep working on it."
There is something both nervous and obsessional about such close and constant reworking of a script; but it's also an apt analogy for the character of Freddie Montgomery, who is constantly revising his story of murder to us, the audience.
Conlon is not comfortable talking about Macarthur, nor what it feels like to be playing a part based on real events.
"They are Freddie Montgomery's words, not Malcolm Macarthur's," he says, while conceding that his character does dress like Macarthur, including the infamous bow-tie. He won't talk about Macarthur specifically, but he does talk about imagining the mind of a murderer, that dark commute between the boundaries of ordinary life and the act of killing.
"My character is an exploration of a man who's crossed the line," he says. "Everyone has the potential for it; you hear of fights outside chip shops and pubs and a punch is thrown and someone dies and the world changes for the person who killed them. I'm performing a part of a man who has crossed the line and who is now living in a parallel world."
The character of Montgomery is fascinated with ordinary life because he's left it behind forever and, in Kilkenny, Conlon captured expertly this strange and deeply unsettling parallel world of which he speaks.
Conlon, who is from Loughrea, Co Galway, became an actor "by chance". Unemployed in Dublin in the late 1980s, he arrived at the dole office as usual one week and was presented with an unavoidable choice of two community employment schemes: landscape gardening or a stint as an actor, performing for elderly people in nursing homes. For six months, he performed "terrible one-act plays in old people's homes, in tiny little spaces where everyone complained when we turned off the TV".
Yet he was increasingly intrigued by his new profession-by-dole-default. At the end of the prescribed stint, Conlon auditioned successfully for the newly established Trinity drama course, and went on afterwards to take up a scholarship in Connecticut.
On returning to Dublin, both he and Alan Gilsenan were involved in setting up the Naked Theatre Company, which put on Berkoff's controversial Decadence. He acted all around town, from the City Arts Centre to the Peacock, including a stint at Andrew's Lane with Olivia Treacey in a version of Lady Chatterley's Lover. He still shivers at the memory.
"We were the worse thing ever to come out of Andrew's Lane. Ever!" he says.
He moved to London nine years ago, but because there's been steady work here in the last couple of years, he decided last month to move back to Dublin, although he's superstitious about the word "permanently".
"I don't think any actor is ever that confident of having enough work to keep them somewhere," he says. He appeared recently in All My Sons at the Abbey, and after The Book of Evidence, he will be playing Jack/Ernest in the Gate's production of The Importance of Being Earnest.
Meanwhile, his attention is fully occupied by The Book of Evidence. Ninety minutes alone on stage is a relentless test of any actor's abilities, but also a welcome challenge, which can offer more rewards than ensemble work. A monologue such as The Book of Evidence is a rare opportunity for an actor to make a part truly his own.
It took him five weeks to learn the script first time round, and this time it's almost as difficult, since parts that were there before have now disappeared and lines have been added. "When the show begins, it feels like I'm beginning to climb a mountain, to tell this enormous story," he says. "The fear and difficulty I have with it is that I let it run away with me. You have to have the confidence to stop, and bring the audience along with you, not leave them behind. But I never get bored with the part. It's a fantastically rich text, and the more I play it, the more I see can be mined from it. The monologue is frightening, but also exhilarating."
Conlon has the look of the long-distance athlete about him as he speaks, lonely but happy, and longing for the off.
The Book of Evidence previews at the Gate from Tuesday, opens on Thursday and runs until June 28th