Throwing the Tiger into the hot tub

After 25 years of knife-sharp social comedy about Ireland, playwright Bernard Farrell is going for a full dissection, he tells Belinda McKeon

'It's like a spoofer's chart," says Bernard Farrell. Across the polished table of an upstairs office in the Gate Theatre, he's sliding towards me a list of his many plays. His tone is apologetic. "Look at the length of it!"

He eyes me for a moment as if I might be about to point to one of the 22 productions, most of them for the theatre but some, also, for television and radio, and splutter: "That's not yours!" But they're all his, and all here; some of the most popular plays seen on the Irish stage, a roll-call of the well-loved - and the well-seen. This is a list which starts as it means to go on, with the 1979 success of Farrell's first play, I Do Not Like Thee, Dr Fell, which premiered in the Peacock Theatre, was twice transferred to the Abbey stage, toured the country and, just as its Abbey run seemed to have secured the shillings of every last theatre-goer in the country, moved to the old Oscar Theatre in Ballsbridge for a further six-month triumph.

After that, the familiar names trip off the page like old tunes: All In Favour Said No!, Happy Birthday Dear Alice, Stella by Starlight, Kevin's Bed, The Spirit of Annie Ross, Lovers at Versailles. His newest play, Many Happy Returns, another example of the knife-sharp social comedy with which he has made his name, but this time with the added dramatic clout of a Christmas setting, opens this week at the Gate. And, reflects Farrell, "the 25 years just went like that. You know, it all seems to have just passed over".

He's not gloomy as he says this; on the contrary, he sounds almost relieved, not that 25 years of his career have been spent, not that they have been survived in some sense, but rather that he can sit here today and look back on them with lightness, with a constant laugh in his tone, with an ease that is born not of vanity or arrogance but of affection. In those 25 years, he has buried both his parents, the people who introduced him to theatre with their fierce, unpretentious interest in the way plays were made ("the worst thing you could say was that you were bored by a play. You had to explain why, was it the writing, the directing, or what"); he has married (to Gloria, in 1985); he has won several awards; he has become a member of Aosdána; and, from 1996 until August of this year, he has served on the board of the Abbey Theatre.

"I got out just before Vesuvius went up," he says. He's reluctant to criticise the Abbey over its recent crises - its artistic director, Ben Barnes, who has directed many of Farrell's plays, is a friend and someone he admires both as a director and as a reader of plays. Farrell believes Barnes could run a smaller theatre, one without the multi-stranded obligations of the Abbey, with great ability. As for the Abbey itself, he says only that "the structure at the top needs to be changed so that it's not all falling on one person to do so much all the time. You've got to go in there with a spade and a shovel and change things". Change at board level, he argues, will require that "different people be brought in from different areas". The idea of a board run by purely financial or commercial interests sounds to him "like the Mafia".

BUT FARRELL IS free of his Abbey responsibilities now, and ordinary life, as he calls it, has resumed. Ordinary life consists, for him, of being the same person he was 25 years ago, except that he writes a play every so often. Perhaps the biggest change to this life occurred near the start of Farrell's theatre career, when he decided to leave the job he had held for some 15 years - as a shipping clerk with Sealink - to devote himself to writing. After I Do Not Like Thee, Dr Fell, Joe Dowling, then artistic director of the Abbey, had commissioned another play, "and, crossing Abbey Street one day, I met Joe, and he said: 'I've written you a letter, it's on my desk. I've read the play, and I'm going to do it on the main stage for the Dublin Theatre Festival.' "

Farrell laughs with a sort of disbelief at the memory.

"I was blown away," he says. "I went right down to Sealink - I wasn't married then - and handed in my notice, and they handed it back to me and said get a grip on yourself, you know? You want to go into the most precarious business known to man? And, you know, he actually said: 'I saw your previous play, that Fell, and I have to say I didn't like it very much.'

" 'Now,' he said, 'Put that beside working at Sealink. All you have to do to become a manager in this place is to stay alive. And that was the option.' "

The prospect of years spent simply waiting for a raise failed to lure Farrell. Then aged 40, he took his resignation home and returned with it the next morning. Since then, he has been a full-time playwright. "Ordinary" life has carried on in much the same, contented way, with marriage to Gloria, a home in Greystones, Co Wicklow, and, too, the dinner parties where the news that he is a playwright is greeted with an unsure silence.

"Yeah, they'll ask: 'Did you write Philadelphia, Here I Come?' " he laughs, " 'No? And what did you write then? No, no, haven't heard of that one . . .' "

He groans.

"But when people I've been to school with or whatever say 'I've been to see your play', I get embarrassed, because I think, well, this is not my image with these people. These people know me from playing rugby or talking about football or whatever."

It's fascinating to think of Farrell himself trapped in the social tensions out of which he constructs his plays, out of which he builds the mercilessly funny situations which ensnare his characters. From the early plays, his fluency in the vocabulary of awkwardness and pretension was evident, as his characters hid from one another, and from themselves, behind masks of sophistication, of confidence, which were always bound to slip. His men suffer from depression, impotence, from the worry of debt or the shadow of unresolved sexuality; his women trip down the social ladders they have tried to climb, out of the marriages they have tried to believe in; husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, would murder one another in their determination to mount a united front.

In Farrell's most recent plays, The Spirit of Annie Ross (1999) and Lovers at Versailles (2002), the extra complication of these delicious frictions by the economic boom was alluded to rather than thoroughly exposed, delivered in small touches rather than allowed to pervade the lives of the characters. This was an Ireland where a hospital visit could justify a manicure, an Ireland where a grocery shop could become a health club. Many Happy Returns, on the other hand, is an Ireland where the Christmas Eve visit of a wealthy couple to their still-aspiring acquaintances demands an outdoor display "like Clery's window", an almost military programme of toasts and speeches, an elaborate performance including a chimney and a Santa suit, and the accessory that now squats in all the most fashionable Irish backyards: the hot tub.

Far from hinting at social pretensions, Many Happy Returns is a full-scale dissection. It has Farrell's ruthless humour and his ability to see what that humour itself is masking - and, says Farrell, it has been a long time coming. The Ireland of bijou boutiques and botched social kissing, of DART accents and San Tropez tanning has long been in his sights.

"For a while, I've been very interested in the Celtic Tiger, and not just the success of it, but the casualties," he explains. "You know that all boats did not rise. There were people who made mistakes, or who didn't move at the right time, and went down. And I wanted to see how those were getting on."

IN THE NEW play, the character who has suffered in this way is Arthur, a young businessman who started out brilliantly, and motivated others to do the same, but fell behind while his protégés - of which his visitor, Declan, now booming in New Zealand, is one - went on to make their fortunes. Arthur's wife, Irene, is determined to put on the best show possible for the visitor and his new wife, hoping that the evidence of apparent success at home will open doors, for herself and Arthur, to real success, and real wealth, abroad - the key to which lies in Declan's hands.

"I also wanted to look at how things have changed for the emigrants coming home for Christmas," says Farrell. "You know, I think that now they're under terrible pressure coming home. They would come home, you know, well off and full of success, to what was almost a peasant society, and to kind of spoof around the place. But now we're the ones who are successful, so what are they coming home to?"

Commissioned last year by Michael Colgan, director of the Gate, the play was written, says Farrell, "at the height of summer". Pity Gloria, who had to endure carols on the stereo throughout June, so that her husband could think his way into December.

Thinking his way into the phenomenon of hot tubs was more mischievously done.

"I was at dinner one day, sat next to this lady who I know, and I said to her: 'I know something about you. You have a hot tub.' And she says: 'Yeah, but we only use it for ourselves!' And it was like that I have said 'and you have an orgy in it every weekend'. You know?"

That heady mixture of sophistication and discomfiture is what fills the cauldron into which he plunges the characters of his new play. But Farrell doesn't write out of mean-spiritedness; though hard on his characters, he has great sympathy for the dilemmas and the insecurities which push them into the masks they wear. What he sees himself as doing, he says, is "continually outing people in a gentle sort of way. Because everybody has things to hide for a very good reason".

Many Happy Returns opens at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, on Tuesday.