Happily, Lucy Caldwell did not have the miserable childhood that she writes about. She examines the nuances of family crises without writing issue- tainment plays, she tells Arminta Wallace
Lucy Caldwell had a happy childhood. It seems important to establish that, because her play Leaves, which opens in Galway today, and her novel, Where They Were Missed, (which has just come out in paperback), deal with - respectively - a suicidal teenager and an alcoholic mammy. Not autobiographical, then? "Both the play and the novel are utterly fictional," says the young Belfast-born writer, smiling her serene smile. "I had as normal a childhood as kids anywhere do." Then she breaks into a grin. When the novel was published in hardback, Caldwell's mother accompanied her to the launch - and was asked, by a well-meaning stranger, whether she was feeling better now that she was off the drink.
Caldwell's own story has taken a rather merrier tack. She is, in fact, something of a literary wunderkind. Having emerged from Cambridge with a First in English, she embarked on a Masters in creative and life writing at Goldsmiths College in London.
BY THE TIME she was half-way through the latter she had a short play and a novel under her belt, and had acquired an agent and a book deal - with Penguin Viking, no less. Her biography, though short, is strewn with the tell-tale capital letters of awards: 2005 PMA award for Most Promising Playwright; a Marie Claire magazine "Heroes of Tomorrow" award 2006; the 2006 George Devine award; joint winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize; and a long-listing on the inaugural Dylan Thomas Prize.
It's not a bad total for a young woman of 25. But it does beg the question: why does she write about alcoholism and suicide? "When I started writing the play, I was struck by the rate of teen suicide in Belfast," she says. "I kept on reading about it in newspapers and hearing people talk about it on the radio; it always seemed to be simmering at the edges of the news." Meanwhile, in order to earn a crust, Caldwell was working at the Royal Court Theatre as a script reader. The vast majority of the plays she was reading were about drugs and violence and teenage pregnancies on council estates - which didn't chime with her view of the world.
"I had a middle-class childhood, and I wanted to represent that," she says. "In my play the father is an academic and the mother has a book club. The children have violin lessons and ice-skating lessons. There's no violence, no swearing. I wanted to take away what can be used as a sloppy shorthand for drama - and then explore the nuances of what happens to a family in crisis."
Leaves isn't an issue-tainment play. Nor, for all its bourgeois setting, is it lacking in dramatic tension. It's an edgy, character-driven domestic drama which pins its well-bred characters into the spotlight and watches them squirm. The play opens with the eldest daughter, Lori, returning to the family home after a spell at university in England. It isn't a triumphant return, though; on the contrary, her father had to go and bring her home after she attempted to take her own life.
'WHEN I RESEARCHED the subject, I found out that statistically, Northern Ireland has one of the highest teen suicide rates in the world," says Caldwell. "Higher than the south, even. And it affects boys and girls, all classes, all religions. In Dublin there's talk about the Celtic Tiger and the pressures that come with that. But in the North this is the post-ceasefire generation. So I started wondering whether it had something to do with having grown up in a heightened political atmosphere." Caldwell was aware that she was treading on dangerous ground. "Whenever I said to people that I was writing a novel set in Belfast, you could see them switch off," she says. "People assume that because you're a writer from Belfast that that dictates your subject matter - or the angle that you're going to take on it. You get the sense that people just don't want to hear what you have to say. And that made me furious. For a while, it made me resent writing about Belfast."
Caldwell's mother is English, as is her accent. She has, she says, never really felt at home in Belfast. After leaving school she spent a year teaching English in Mexico - and in the winter of 2005, when she wanted to work on her second novel, she instinctively decamped to a hilltop village in southern Spain. But Belfast caught up with her, even in Andalucia. "Mum had posted me over a packet of newspaper stories that she thought I might be interested in," Caldwell recalls. "And one story was about a mother who had lost her 15-year-old daughter to suicide. I was reading her story and it was just so incredibly moving. She had wanted to be a writer, and they had included some of her poems. She died on November 21st, which was the day I had handed over a draft of Leaves. "Then I had a phone call to say that the play had won the George Devine award - which is £10,000 (€14,844). It was such an unexpected windfall that I thought I'd donate some money to the charity set up in her name."
Caldwell maintains a connection with the Niamh Louise Foundation, as well as the Pushkin Trust, which helps primary school children - and their teachers - to do creative writing. "It's fantastic," she says. "It's what I really believe in. If I wasn't a writer, I think I'd be an aid worker of some kind. It's nice to be able to use my technical skills - my craft, if you like - to do some good."
As a young writer who is just setting out on her career, Caldwell's craft is bound to change and develop in the years to come. At the moment, she doesn't even know whether she's a playwright or a novelist. "Everyone asks which am I really - at heart," she says. "And I can't say. I sort of lurch from one to the other."
SO FAR, HOWEVER, she has done pretty well, garnering critical comparisons to Trezza Azzopardi, Ian McEwan and Elizabeth Bowen. And there's one thing of which she is sure. "I believe literature can really change us," she says, "because it can change the way we see the world. Even in a tiny way, that can really change things."
Storytelling, from this perspective, becomes much more than just an escape into fantasy. At one point, Caldwell considered staying at Cambridge to research a PhD on trauma in African fiction - and she says she sees parallels between the South African experience and that of Northern Ireland. "Storytelling is really important in cases of post-traumatic stress disorder," she says. "Not in terms of justification or blame, but just in terms of stories being told, of things being heard, of events being knitted into a narrative." It becomes even more important in a situation where - as in the North at present - a new chapter of history is about to begin. "We have to tell the stories of the past, and we have to respect those stories," says Caldwell. "But we have to create our own stories as well." In its focus on an ordinary family trying to get through the increasingly common event of a teen suicide attempt, Leaves tells one of those stories.
"In the play I use imagery around light, which is very deliberate and very carefully calibrated to suggest illumination as a metaphor for knowledge," says Caldwell. "There are fairy lights in the bedroom, there's the light of a cigarette, the glow of a storm lantern. In Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, which is a philosophical investigation of whether life is worth living or not, there's an incredible phrase - 'light without effulgence'." Camus uses the phrase to sum up the absurd pointlessness of life. Happily, Caldwell takes a more positive view. In spite of her misery and sadness, the young heroine of Leaves opts to carry on. Not knowledge without hope, as in Camus: more like hope, in spite of knowledge? "I think, in a way, hope is a form of innocence," says Caldwell. "An adult innocence, almost. Yes, that's it exactly. Hope is innocence that exists in spite of, rather than because of, experience."
Druid Theatre's production of Lucy Caldwell's Leaves opens at Chapel Lane, Galway, today. It then transfers to London, where it will play the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court from Mar 14. When They Were Missed will be available as a Penguin paperback on Mar 1 at £7.99 in UK