TCD writer-in-residence and playwright Anne Devlin talks to Rosita Boland about writer's block, the North and work in progress
It's like watching someone falling off the tightrope they've been walking with such unselfconscious grace. The first 15 minutes of the interview with playwright and short-story writer Anne Devlin, are belting along nicely. Devlin, writer-in-residence at Trinity College, Dublin, is charming and engaging. She courteously goes out of her way to fetch tea and coffee from the nearby cafe before we sit down to talk in her room at the top of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Creative Writing - a bright white eyrie on the campus overlooking Westland Row, with Chagall prints and a Jack B. Yeats postcard on the wall.
Her desk and the chairs round the walls are covered with submissions from her 22 students. She's saying how happy she was to be appointed TCD's writer-in-residence, and enthusing about how talented and dedicated they are. She relates what a beautiful walk into Trinity she had this morning, in the clear blue weather.
She spies my pink-soled, pink-zippered boots and leans under the table for a better look, laughing with merriment and admiration. Devlin's own shoes are silver, her long hair streaked red and gold. She looks funky. A personality, someone you'd notice on a busy street.
But for some reason, something changes, very suddenly. One minute it's all spontaneity and the next, she's repeating, "I don't know what it is, but I suddenly feel really, really tired. I'm finding this interview really, really difficult." She looks quite haunted. There is no other word for it.
She continues talking, but her sentences come out in bits and pieces, many trailing off unfinished. It's a startling difference to the way things started off. She looks profoundly uncomfortable. Rattled.
I couldn't possibly imagine her leaning under the table to look at my shoes now. It's also clear she is not being difficult for the sake of it. - She honestly is suddenly finding it difficult to answer questions about her life and work. For a few minutes, I'm sure she will ask if we can stop, but she doesn't. That's admirable. And so we edge on, question by question.
Anne Devlin was born in 1951 in Belfast. Her father was the widely respected politician Paddy Devlin, a founder member of the SDLP, who died in 1999, so politics was always an integral part of her life growing up. In 1971, she went to college in Coleraine, specifically because the violence in Belfast scared her. By the mid-1970s, she was living in England, where she has lived since; most of that time in Birmingham, before moving to London in 1996.
Her first play, Ourselves Alone, set in Andersonstown after the hunger strikes, was a co-production between the Liverpool Playhouse Studio and the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1985, and a much-praised début. After Easter, about a Northern woman confronting her identity, followed in 1994, originally performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Other Place in Stratford. In between, there was The Way-Paver, a collection of stories,television dramas such as The Long March and The Venus de Milo; and also screenplays for Wuthering Heights, with the controversially miscast stars Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, and for Titanic Town, in 1998, a novel by Mary Costello.
In 1986, in an interview with The Irish Times, Devlin said: "I can't imagine what it would be like to grow up in a city which is your own city and to be part of it - to be welcomed - that must be wonderful." At the time, she had been living in England for 10 years. She also said: "I am continually trying to leave Ireland and longing to go back. It is both a tyranny and a privilege." When reminded of these lines, she laughs. "At this point in time, it would only be a privilege!"
The North has always informed Devlin's work. The six-month tenure as Trinity's writer-in-residence is her first time to live in the Republic, and the experience is an important experiment for her.
"When I got the residency, I was delirious. I wouldn't have applied to come here unless I thought I could do something in the residency for the students. But I wanted to come and live in the Republic for a time anyway. I was ready to find out what it was like. I felt I could live here and feel safe."
She tries to explain what attracts her to here. "There is some big dimension in this country which you don't find anywhere else. This will sound like rubbish, but I think it's to do with the light. The way you can be here."
Latitude? I suggest, and she says that latitude is the precise word she means, a space you're allowed to stretch in.
For a while, she talks about her "fantastic" students and how some of them have yet to find their subject matter and how others are completely in their subject matter. "Some people have a whole vision and some people are happy to stay in a cocoon. I'm interested in seeing what happens when you try to make people change their views, to step outside the cocoon in search of something else."
Devlin is quite clear about her own subject matter. "I have always known what my subject matter is - it's madness."
It is some years since Devlin published new work. After Easter was first performed nine years ago; the short story collection was 18 years ago, and is now, according to amazon.com, out of print.
Like every writer, nobody is more aware of this than she is. She admits that for a time, like many writers, she had writer's block. "Why are people blocked? What are we afraid to say? Why do writers have silences?" She is writing again now, and has been for some time. "I have done a lot of work which I haven't put into the public sphere since 1998. I wouldn't have come to Dublin in silence, I'd have hidden away," she says flatly.
Devlin believes she started off being a better short-story writer than a dramatist. "But now I'm working in drama again," she says. She has written two parts of a trilogy, which she describes as "taking the form of drama". She's also written a number of stories. "What I really want to do is write a big book - fiction; a novel. But I have to find a way of doing it quietly. Before I took the residency, I talked to a few people about what it might be like, and they all gave me different advice. I took Michael Longley's advice: he said: 'Don't attempt to write anything while you're there. If you turn your back on what you want, it will come to you'."
And then she smiles again. She's suddenly back on the tightrope again, walking it with both assurance and dignity.