The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Irish Plays Read online

  ‘THIS IS JUST THIS.

  IT ISN’T REAL.

  IT’S MONEY’

  ‘THIS IS JUST THIS.

  IT ISN’T REAL.

  IT’S MONEY’

  THE OBERON ANTHOLOGY OF

  CONTEMPORARY IRISH PLAYS

  EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY THOMAS CONWAY

  HEROIN by Grace Dyas

  Trade by Mark O’Halloran

  The Art of Swimming by Lynda Radley

  Pineapple by Phillip McMahon

  I Alice I by Amy Conroy

  The Big Deal edited by Una McKevitt

  Oedipus Loves You by Simon Doyle & Gavin Quinn

  The Year of Magical Wanking by Neil Watkins

  OBERON BOOKS

  LONDON

  WWW.OBERONBOOKS.COM

  First published in this collection in 2012 by Oberon Books Ltd

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  Introduction and editorial © Thomas Conway, 2012

  Heroin © Grace Dyas 2010; Trade © Mark O’Halloran 2011; The Art of Swimming © Lynda Radley 2006; Pineapple © Phillip McMahon 2011; The Big Deal © Una McKevitt Productions 2011; Oedipus Loves You © Simon Doyle and Gavin Quinn 2006; The Year of Magical Wanking © Neil Watkins 2011; I Alice I © Amy Conroy 2010.

  The Authors are hereby identified as authors of these plays in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Authors have asserted their moral rights.

  All rights whatsoever in these plays are strictly reserved and application for performance etc. should be made before commencement of rehearsal to the Authors and/or their agents. Full contact details can be found on the title pages of each play.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or binding or by any means (print, electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  PB ISBN: 978-1-84943-391-4

  EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84943-672-4

  Cover image by Gary Coyle

  Printed, bound and converted

  by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY.

  Visit www.oberonbooks.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

  Contents

  Introduction

  HEROIN

  by Grace Dyas

  Trade

  by Mark o’Halloran

  The Art of Swimming

  by Lynda Radley

  Pineapple

  by Phillip McMahon

  I Alice I

  by Amy Conroy

  The Big Deal

  edited by una McKevitt

  Oedipus Loves You

  by Simon Doyle and Gavin Quinn

  The Year of Magical Wanking

  by Neil Watkins

  Contributor Biographies

  INTRODUCTION

  Something of the enterprise of playwriting itself is being re-imagined in these plays. These playwrights ride in no slipstream of the identifiably Irish play or even the play per se. An inhabiting of the theatre comes before the construction of the dramatic world, an interrogation of the medium before the bon mot, a self-conscious use of language before garrulousness. To trade by what playwrights, Irish or otherwise, are known by or for is subordinated to a commitment to become in the theatre.

  Unsurprisingly, then, working through the volume is a commitment to cosmopolitanism before any foregrounding of so-called Irishness. As world-citizens these playwrights address audiences. For all that, we can say with confidence that each of them is concerned with what is unfinished business in Ireland. It becomes astonishing, in this light, to reflect just how often these plays revolve around the question of sexual identity.

  In The Year of Magical Wanking Neil Watkins takes us through twelve months of a gay sexual odyssey. Along the way the audience look into and, it might be said, look past excesses, not alone in the content but in the story-telling – inflated accounts, parodies, multiple personae, levels of artifice, rhyming couplets, an abundance of styles – to seeing the story-maker in his particularity. Frailty as the common ground of our humanity proves to be more binding here than sexuality is (needlessly but nonetheless) divisive, and the lightness we experience on arriving at the destination he has chosen for us, is in every way keyed to the person whom we meet.

  The Big Deal looks to work in the opposite direction for a similar destination of grace, finding a register and a performance language that is seemingly without style. It relays testimony from two Irish citizens who underwent sex reassignments (outside of Ireland) at a time when they found themselves in marriages to individuals of that self-same gender to which they would reassign. Actual diaries and correspondence between the principles form the material for this play where Una McKevitt’s authorial touch is, strictly speaking, exercised through the editing and the theatricalizing of the ‘found’ material. Performing this material means in practice playing for high stakes. Audience members, to connect with these stories, risk destabilizing cherished ideas and it is far from a passive activity to attend this play.

  Oedipus Loves You places Oedipus on the psychoanalyst’s couch in the twenty-first century, together with his family, and what registers as plague is less of an external nature than it is owed to the paralysis of their sexual lives. Their desires are catered for, it is the twenty-first century after all, but are not sated: they still demand placation. Here, their options coalesce around self-harm or reputational damage. And so, it is less a sense of heady abandon than enervating abandonment that runs through the play. And it is this sense of abandonment that begets its attitude – an ironical submissiveness before the abandonment by everyone and everything in the universe, an embrace of abandonment in a grunge pose.

  I Alice I engages with a present-day struggle in Ireland more directly than any other play in the collection: the struggle for full marriage rights for same-sex couples. Which is to say, it discountenances ‘civil partnership’, recently placed on the Irish statute books, as anything like sufficient. Even so, parodying the verbatim play as it does, its subversion goes further than a genre, further even than challenging the attitudes against same-sex marriages. Its subversion goes all the way to upsetting the status of what is real and what is performance in a composition keyed to the precise effect of those who perform within it: the writer-director-actor, Amy Conroy, and actor, Clare Barrett. Here, we should know, nothing is as it seems.

  Trade brings us to where, to my knowledge, no verbatim account has ever taken us, where the imagination alone goes – the moments before a young man trades his body for sex with an older man. The older man speaks of his troubles, comes to recognize the precipice on which he balances, experiences his future as do-or-die. But for once a dramatization of Irish male identity holds off from exonerating him of the charge of exploitation. Rather, for all his bravado and reticence before the important questions, it is the vulnerability of the young man that hits us hardest.

  Two sisters hold the centre of Pineapple. One is a young mother looking askance over the book of her sexual history, prompted by the attenti
ons of a new lover who promises to be different. The other is a teenager at the point of writing out, as in a first draft, the pattern of her own sexuality. Weighing reality against opportunity, likelihood against desire, in a context of begrudging state support, the play finds a metonymical equivalence between their stories and those outside the theatre. (Axis Arts Centre, Ballymun, where the play premièred, sits in the shadow of the Ballymun Tower Blocks.1) Teeming, eye-popping social drama and at the same time, just a handful of the stories available from the infinite number in Ballymun, it is at once riveting and generous, attention-grabbing and stepping out of the way.

  The Art of Swimming tells the story, as the play itself lets us know, of ‘Mercedes Gleitze: the first British woman to swim the English Channel. This I did in 1927 aged twenty-six and it took fifteen hours and fifteen minutes.’ From this is woven a metaphor for the construction of self-hood outside class and gender boundaries, with materials that appeal as concrete achievements, from drives that can never fully be known. In this performance we are aware of watching two people become more themselves, Mercedes Gleitze, as her story unfolds, and Lynda Radley the writer-performer, as she tells it. In each case, however, we are aware that this growing is an effect of the theatre. Whatever about its passing itself off as a lecture on the art of swimming, it is a fathomless example of the art of theatrical storytelling.

  HEROIN might be said to buck the trend by identifying its unfinished business in the realm of social policy. But the stories of addiction here are neither accusatory of the individual nor the usual parade of ‘junkies’ pointing to state neglect. Rather, the play brings us into ethical contact with the individual story and leaves open what ensues. And for all that the play rehearses a history of Irish delusion, it questions the uses to which we put history. It collapses time into that ethical encounter in the present. It asks us to see the addict now, in her present fullness of being. It asks us to stop, look, listen, make eye contact, engage, recognize, before moving on. Whatever has or hasn’t worked in the past, whatever models of representation we were wont to have the addict fall into, we start again and we start by seeing again.

  In these plays you will recognize a conscious exercise of what I choose to call theatre’s ‘materiality’. The audience is, somehow, to complete the plays. The concrete experience of theatrical circumstance itself is to be available to our attention. Here is a conscious embrace of theatricality as a principle of composition.

  Let us explore this further in relation to each of the plays. Trade by performing during its première run in the bedroom of an actual guesthouse on Dublin’s north-side, explodes the realism to which it cleaves exaggeratedly, to leave us in the spoor of its theatricality.

  The Big Deal at no point asks us to connect the performer to the text, rather from ‘stand-ins’ we get our bearings in the text, from proxies we locate ourselves vis-à-vis these stories of metamorphosis.

  HEROIN builds for us a framework, an environment, a relationship with the actors, but leaves it entirely up to us to erect on them what illusions we will.

  The Art of Swimming is at once a journeying and a remaining in our theatre seats, an exhilarating remembering and a bittersweet re-calibration to the present.

  The Year of Magical Wanking builds artifice on artifice, all the more to see the person just there.

  Oedipus Loves You is all the time getting to the ‘what’s just there’ – a flaming barbecue, a paddling pool, a live grunge band, the director issuing notes from a cubicle onstage – all the while it invokes Thebes.

  I Alice I invites us in to meet, as it were, ‘Granny’ – two ‘authentic’ middle-aged women as lovers – and when we ask, ‘why the nervousness’, replies ‘all the better to see you with, my dear’, or ‘why the wigs’, replies ‘all the better to hear you with, my dear’, or ‘why the…’, whereupon we realize how malevolent and ‘wolfish’ are our own presumptions.

  Pineapple is firstly a drama, but secondly a monument – a tribute to those residents of the Ballymun Tower Blocks who are relocating, redesigning their homes and re-making their communities and identities even now as we watch or read the drama.

  The terms by which identity itself comes into play, the opening of the field of play, the raising into collective experience the exercise of that play: an urgency in the playwriting would appear to lie precisely here.

  ‘I only met Patrick once. I was passing by Cathy’s office and she said call in. I said, “okay, but I won’t be me, I’ll be Sean,” and she said, “call in anyway, I’ll be Patrick.”’ (The Big Deal)

  The exercise of playfulness of identity and the question of the reading of that playfulness would seem to be the wheel to which these playwrights put their shoulders.

  ‘Leave on your smalls just. Your boxers. Let me look at you. I don’t want a show or anything.’ (Trade)

  It is not enough, so these playwrights would seem to say, that ‘we’ get on with ‘our’ play. Rather the range of terms recognized as ‘play’ is to be re-negotiated by everyone, vouchsafed by everyone, to be a part of our collective witness, our collective possibilities, to be an experience imaginable by everyone.

  ‘Both Alices move back. Alice Slattery prompts Alice Kinsella subtly. They check the “map” on the wall. They give each other a reassuring glance.’ (I Alice I)

  You are entitled to think that we are coming here to the question of ‘visibility’, of making visible what has hitherto been concealed. But you might also be prevailed upon to recognize – which is to touch on theatre’s province and majesty – what is a reconnecting with the power of the invisible.

  ‘If it helps you to have a more fulfilling theatrical experience you can imagine that I did decide to spend the exorbitant amount of money they were asking for in the second-hand clothing shop where I found an authentic period swimming costume – you know, one of the ones that comes down to here (indicating thighs) and looks like something a wrestler might wear. It was navy blue and made out of cotton jersey.’ (The Art of Swimming)

  You’d also be forgiven for thinking these Irish playwrights hadn’t heard.

  ‘But your needs, young one. Your needs! Let that be your number one concern from here on in.’ (Pineapple)

  Perhaps they’ve chosen not to hear, perhaps they were determined to tune in elsewhere.

  ‘On alcohol, on ketomene, on coke.

  On poppers, on my own, on with the porn.

  On headshop herbal smoke, I am reborn.

  On x-tube I’m used and abused by ghosts.’

  (The Year of Magical Wanking)

  Perhaps no such choosing had even been involved. Perhaps they kept out of step because it had nothing to do with them, or because it had no story in which they could see themselves.

  ‘“Please don’t panic,” she said, “but I saw you two in Tesco. I saw your kiss and it was beautiful.”’ (I Alice I)

  Sure, in the real world economic pressure is being brought to bear on them just as much as on anyone else.

  ‘This is just this. It isn’t real. It’s money.’ (Trade)

  Sure, they are as alive as everyone else to the changed realities.

  ‘Keep it up now

  Keep it up

  Keep it the fuck up

  Keep it up now

  Go for it

  I dare you

  See what happens’ (HEROIN)

  But the sense of urgency would appear to be directed elsewhere.

  ‘In the open sea you have no idea what’s coming next. You must make your peace with currents and tides. You must learn how to track them. You have to swim straight but you cannot waste too much energy on looking up so you learn blind how to navigate a straight liquid line. You must learn how to swim in the dark.’ (The Art of Swimming)

  It would appear to be directed to a re-negotiation both in and of the theatre that is, if anything, coming to a head.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s kind of reassuring. Like being half-asleep and knowing that you don’t have to wake up. I think i
t suits us here this plague.’ (Oedipus Loves You)

  Other fronts have ceded sovereignty here. These playwrights give no quarter. They engage the theatre, and engage us in the theatre, on their own terms. We can insist on reading from the historical moment into these plays. Or we can take them at their word. It is for us as readers, just as we have as theatregoers – frequently scandalized, enthralled, shamed, appalled, unburdened, tickled pink – to decide.

  Acknowledgements

  I wish to acknowledge the contribution of photographer and performance artist, Gary Coyle, who generously provided the cover image, ‘Forty Foot’ (2005).

  To the writers, editors and the wider personnel behind each of the plays, my heartfelt thanks for your generosity, patience, attention to detail and commitment to the anthology through each of its phases.

  To Andrew Walby and the team at Oberon books, equally heartfelt thanks for the vision, support, commitment, unstinting labours, good humour and spirit of adventure that you brought to this, the most collaborative of publications.

  Thomas Conway

  September 10, 2012

  1. Social housing in north Dublin, close to Dublin airport, that has been the by-word for social trap in Ireland throughout its forty-five-year history – its demolition, begun in 2005, is ongoing.

  Selected texts by Grace Dyas from

  HEROIN

  BY THEATRECLUB

  All rights whatsoever in this play are strictly reserved and application for performance etc. should be made before commencement of rehearsal to the Author c/o Oberon Books Ltd. No performance may be given unless a licence has been obtained, and no alterations may be made in the title or the text of the play without the author’s prior written consent.

  HEROIN was authored by Grace Dyas in collaboration with Barry O’Connor, Lauren Larkin, Gerard Kelly, Rachael Keogh, Graham Ryall and The Men’s Group at Rialto Community Drug Team.