It is great to see Irish playwright Conor McPherson getting so many rave reviews for Port Authority, his new play showing at the New Ambassadors theatre in London. It is already a smash hit and bound to enhance McPherson's considerable reputation.
But what is his new play about, you will be eager to know. Well, according to the London Independent review: "From a largely bare stage and with no apparent awareness of each other's presence, three generations of men tell intercut stories of loss and defeat, imparting a hauntingly sad sense of the loneliness and waste that lurk under the sociable, bantering surface of Irish life."
Elsewhere we were told that it deals with "remorse and the urge to speak, with its roots in Catholic confession".
The Observer, meanwhile, said that "one lament lies on top of another as if to form a mulch of male grief", while according to the Guardian, McPherson writes about "the waste, solitude and sadness that lie behind the convivial face of Ireland".
Dear, oh dear. Is this not a very, very negative view of ourselves to be giving to the English - and maybe to the Americans if the play travels to the US, as it very probably will? It is. But the truth often hurts, and we must be honest.
If we cannot rely on our best dramatists and other artists to peel back the sociable bantering surface of Irish life (especially male life) and expose the horrors beneath sure we might as well give up.
To emphasise the misery of the whole thing, the London In]dependent review was accompanied by a picture of the bare stage with the three characters, captioned "The three faces of desolate Irish male psychology".
One of these faces is turned away, its owner clearly too desolate in his Irish maleness to even face the camera. He sits apart, in shade, his back to the photographer. I would not be entirely sure, but judging from the poor fellow's pathological shyness, he is almost certainly from Co Roscommon.
The other two lads look perky enough but, of course, that is only because they do not realise how desolate they really are. They are most likely from Leitrim or possibly west Mayo where the male psyche is in particularly deep trouble.
I won't say I am not jealous of Conor McPherson's huge success with this play because I sure as hell am. The pain is all the more intense because it is no time at all since three of London's most prestigious theatres turned down my latest play, On the Back of the Celtic Tiger: One Mighty Ride.
This is all about the social and sexual adventures of three successful, sophisticated young Irishmen with no hang-ups and is full of rollicking humour and great banter and half-a-dozen really good if slightly blue jokes which I thought would surely swing the thing with those bastards in the West End.
How wrong I was. Jonathan Erehwon-Jones, so-called artistic director at the Prince of Wales theatre, had the nerve to tell me my play was "lacking in angst" and that honest vulgar success with no downside to it was not a fit subject for theatre.
Adam Cruth at Wyndham's (or Windbags as I now prefer to think of it) suggested that if I turned the thing into a "jolly little musical" I might have some chance of having it staged in a northern club: the patronising little git.
Only Michaela Hetherington at the Royal Court gave me any encouragement. She said she "nearly cracked up laughing" at the plot of my play, but pointed out that theatregoers were almost inevitably the comfortable and successful middle classes and they did not want to see plays about themselves.
"They want their consciences pricked," says Michaela, and my Celtic Tiger "Ride" apparently failed in this essential - though, as she added kindly, "there are plenty of other pricks in it."
Anyway, I could see her point. I am still in correspondence with Michaela and I am rewriting the thing so that the hero gets a major comeuppance. Just when he has made his first million he is walking down Temple Bar enjoying his new-found wealth when a knacker leaps out from a pub and stabs him and his entire family to death!
The focus of the play then switches to this filthy knacker who turns out to have a terribly deprived background and alcoholic parents. Gradually, over the course of about three minutes, he is fully reformed by a passing social worker called Patricia and at the end he makes a really long speech about the inadequacy of the Irish male psyche.
I wanted to have him go to confession just before the curtain falls, but Michaela says that might be overdoing the Irish angst bit, which I hardly thought was possible, but she is probably right.
bglacken@irish-times.ie