Waterford playwright spreads his wings

If Jim Nolan had his way, going to the theatre might be a very different experience today.

In 17th-century London, says the Waterford playwright, if audiences didn't like your work, they told you so. "And having told you they'd throw oranges at you or, even worse, they'd ignore you completely and have a chat or play cards or dice or something like that.

"I think that's really healthy and very much regret it's no longer the norm." He then laughs, but swears he really means it. Writers are too easily hurt by bad reviews, he believes, and should visit their local football ground to see what it's like for professionals to be seriously abused for their efforts.

A promising schoolboy footballer, Nolan's dream of a career in the game was ended by a knee injury. He's still a frequent visitor to the RSC, home to Waterford United; there manager Mike Flanagan was a hero in May for keeping the Blues in the National League's premier division, and an idiot in January for allowing Longford to knock them out of the Cup.

"I saw Mike Flanagan being jeered at the cup match last week by the same people who decided he was God when we beat St Pat's two weeks before that." And if you're not being jeered, it's even worse: you get laughed at.

"A phone was ringing towards the end of the cup game and one local wit shouted: `Taxi for Mike Flanagan'. We'd never get that in the theatre, we're really protected."

Some might say it's easy for Nolan to be philosophical about bad reviews, as he doesn't get them, but of course it's not true. His most recent play, The Salvage Shop, received critical acclaim and was hailed as one of the best plays of the 1998 Dublin Theatre Festival. It was a richly-layered drama, wrote David Nowlan in this newspaper, to be revisited in the memory "time and again to retrieve its subtle wisdom".

Nolan recalls his devastation, however, at a negative review in this newspaper for a previous play, Moonshine, which was otherwise well received. "Your life is over - for an hour or so, then you start climbing up again."

"The only thing I ask of critics is that they come in with an open heart, wanting it to work, and by and large they do. After that they've got to report it as they see it." It's not only professional reviewers, though, who deliver damning verdicts.

He recalls sitting in McLoughlin's pub, across the street from Waterford's Garter Lane theatre where a play of his was being staged, when someone he knew came in during the interval.

"I asked, `How's it going inside?' and he said, `Well, I can tell you how many people are in there'. He was so bored he counted the audience. "That's great, it's good for you. A play, ultimately, is for nobody else but the audience." After years of writing and directing specifically for a Waterford audience, albeit to wider acclaim, he is entering a new phase in his career, having retired at the end of December as artistic director of Red Kettle, the theatre company he was involved in founding 12 years ago.

The move, which he had planned anyway, was facilitated by his election to Aosdana at the end of last year. Membership is "a signal honour", he says, but it does have positive financial implications, as members can apply for State support of almost £9,000 a year.

Nolan is not afraid to express his gratitude to the former Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, for setting up the organisation in 1981. "At a time when he is remembered for other things I would have to acknowledge the vision of Charles Haughey and Anthony Cronin in making provision for some form of security for artists. I think it was also extraordinarily courageous because there wasn't much in it for him."

He is currently working on a play for the Abbey Theatre which was commissioned by its former artistic director, Patrick Mason. The play has a striking working title: The Temptation of Valentine Greatrakes. The real-life eponymous subject was a Cromwellian soldier who settled in the village of Affane in west Waterford in the mid-17th century. "He was a healer who could heal by touch, and in particular he could heal a disease called the King's Evil, which it was reputed that only kings could heal."

As is his prerogative, Nolan is taking liberties with the story of Greatrakes's life, but is doing so with caution. "There's a sort of pillage goes on where you steal and you hope that in stealing you also give something back."

Nolan - who grew up in Waterford's John's Park and now lives in the city centre - gives the impression of having ambivalent feelings about the life he leads, with its necessary "thinking time", which some might misinterpret as shirking an honest day's work. There's always a "vague cloud", he admits, a sensation that he's not doing a "real job", though he knows this is not the case.

The reality is that he has a March 31st deadline for completion of the play. With the research nearly finished, he will soon head for the solitude of a rented house in Dunmore East to begin getting the words down on paper. It's an "indescribable privilege", he says, to be doing what he does for a living.

That's the case even if opening nights are murder, no matter how good your sense of perspective about bad reviews. "Certainly when you're sitting in the theatre and the doors are locked on the first night and you can't get out and people are sitting there waiting for something to happen, and you're responsible for them being there."

"At that moment you know it's a job, and it's a bloody tough one."