KATY HAYES'S acerbic wit cuts right to the funny-bone in her first novel, icing the veneer neatly off the affectations of the theatre crowd with merciless hilarity.
Her protagonist is the lonely, guarded, super-successful Arlene ("actually it's Arlaynah"), the ultimate agent - but her hero is Arlene's house-guest and bete noir, the novice playwright Isebel Coole. Isobel is a wreck. She is constantly either suicidal or screaming with thrills; she is completely out of control, and she is the ultimate romantic poor sod.
In one scene of accumulating horror and comedy, Isobel decides to have it out with a critic who wrote bad things about her play. She goes to his house and interrupts a nice little dinner he is hosting. She tells him just what she thinks of someone who would write such things after drinking whiskey ("lsobel had got the details from Nick, the barman at the Lunar Theatre"). Meanwhile, the critic's wife invites her to join them. ("Won't you have a bite to eat, dear? I hate to be pad remarkable, but you don't have a pick on you.") His daughter is running her own small theatre event; dressed all in black, she is having a funeral for the cow who has died to give the guests the steak they are eating, with a banner dangling from her bedroom window: "Beef is brutal; Meat is murder; Spare a thought for the tortured udder; Support the bovine sisterhood."
Hayes describes all the events with her tongue firmly in her cheek, in a style that is gently understated and almost journalese. Her short chapters arc like a series of portraits that link together into a narrative, each revealing a little more.
There is a wild amalgam of characters. The Weirdo makes regular anonymous phone calls to Arlene's answering machine, commenting on her clothes, warning her of encroachments on her territory and spooking the hell out of her in his strange attempts to cheer her up. The bronze statue of Patrick Kavanagh chats away to her as she sits on his cold metal knee. The creepy ex-husband tries to convince her that he is now a fine person. The bitch, the big director, the nose-ringed ingenue all swirl around, making the production of Isobel's play go with a bang.
Katy Hayes is writing about a world she knows well - she is herself a theatrical director, with work commissioned by the Abbey. The world she creates here is more stark than the surface fluff of the green room, though. Each of the characters has a shadowed past that seeps up through the tinkling dialogue to poison the present.
Hayes is finding an authoritative voice for a darker comedy. Still uncertain - the comedy is not always sharp, there is the occasional grating Anglicism that throws the reader out of kilter, sometimes the structure wanders - this may be a voice that will mature into one of the finest comedy writers of the Nineties.
The telling thing about Curtains is that the laughter is based - as is all good comedy - on a foundation of driving pace, with the pit of despair yawning under the feet of the characters as they race for their lives.
One of the characters in this sharp and witty satire gives another a brooch of the masks of comedy and tragedy, but on a closer look it turns out to be two masks, both of, comedy. You could say the same of the novel; but the smile on the face of Katy Hayes's comedy mask would be a sad and wry one.
