Madam, – According to Fintan O’Toole, Irish playwrights used to deal regularly in the 1970s with conflict – “‘with the stuff that mattered: violence, sexuality, class, power, money, religion, history”, and he wonders when large-scale, ambitious, socially-orientated plays will once again grace our stages (LifeCulture, June 7th).
Without wishing, unduly, to disagree with his diagnosis, I should point out that, as a practising playwright for more than three decades, the reason I stopped working in Irish theatre for the past 20 years was precisely because I could not get socio-political plays produced here! One Abbey Theatre literary manager, at the start of the 1980s, told me that he resigned because he had tried to get three political plays (one of them mine) produced at the Abbey but had finally concluded that the theatre wasn’t interested in such work.
To bring the story up to date, I met the current artistic director about four years ago and was told that I was one of a group of playwrights who had been – I paraphrase – hard done by. I specifically asked whether I should confine myself to small-cast plays or whether I could send in large-cast plays of a political nature. Of course! No limitations! was the reply. Two years later, after three e-mail reminders, I received a short note from a person in the literary department who seemed unaware that I was translated into more than 15 languages, produced on four continents, and had 10 stage plays currently in print. The letter, a response to the large-scale political trilogy I had sent in, suggested that I obviously wasn’t aware of contemporary theatre as large-scale plays cost too much money, so I should consider writing plays for smaller casts!
If my situation is anything to go by, the real answer to Mr O’Toole’s question is to be found in the organisational structures of our subsidised theatre. It is no coincidence that my current play Francis Frances which incidentally deals with all of those conflict areas that Mr O’Toole mentions, is not on at the Abbey but at the Focus Theatre, and as such is a two-hander – from necessity! – Yours, etc,