Conor McPherson Lifts the Veil
His characters peer through drunkenness (which he's left behind) and existential dread (which he hasn't) for glimpses of truth.
By Cassandra Csencsitz
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature.... The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.
—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Drink to where possibility feels endless and your immortality feels strong.
—Conor McPherson (Lockhart in The Seafarer)
| Related Links: The Seafarer by Conor McPherson (TCG Bookstore) Shining City by Conor McPherson (TCG Bookstore) Port Authority by Conor McPherson (TCG Bookstore) Dublin Carol by Conor McPherson (TCG Bookstore) The Weir and Other Plays by Conor McPherson (TCG Bookstore) |
Bar sales must either be very low or very high at intermission for The Seafarer, the latest play by Irishman Conor McPherson, which opened at Broadway’s Booth Theatre Nov. 15 under his direction. Here, characteristically, McPherson works a lot of drama, some diurnal, some otherworldly, as well as an inordinate amount of drinking, into one transformative day. After audiences spend the first act getting acquainted with two brothers—Sharky Harkin, on the wagon by the skin of his teeth but badgered to fall off by Richard, a devoted drunk who has recently gone blind—it’s hard to judge whether they will desperately need a drink or be ready to swear off the stuff for good.
The Seafarer is McPherson’s second full-length play set in the emotionally fertile landscape of Christmastime. The brothers Harkin are hosting a trio of holiday guests: Nicky, who is living with Sharky’s ex (as well as driving his ex-car); Ivan, a severe myopic who lost his glasses in the previous night’s shenanigans; and Lockhart, who turns out to be none other than the Devil himself. It’s a partial retelling of Faust—except that Faust was so bombed when he bargained with Mephistopheles he doesn’t recall his deal. Throughout The Seafarer Richard and his cohorts scorch their already raw throats with spirits and seek clarity within a fog of drunkenness. Act 2’s stage directions bear the mark of one who’s been there:
"Ivan’s intoxication is constant, he coasts along, veering neither up into euphoria nor down into depression. It is his efficient life-state, removed, yet heavily present. Nicky, on the other hand, is an euphoric drunk. His genuine love for friends and comrades is freed. Richard, as we have seen, can lurch from sentimentality to vicious insults within seconds. But while all inhibitions may be gone, he remains alert, quick-witted and deeply interested in what goes on around him. Lockhart is a maudlin, angry drunk. Sharky has thus far managed to remain sober."
The last time McPherson’s voice appeared in the pages of this magazine, in 1999, The Weir was on its way to Broadway, and he was on his way to rock bottom. Excessive drinking eventually led to pancreatitis and an emergency room visit on the night of his 2001 London opening of Port Authority. That hospital stay lasted two months. Now, sober for seven years and called “quite possibly the finest playwright of his generation” by Ben Brantley of the New York Times, McPherson still has a lot to worry about. Sure, he enjoys physical health and a stable relationship with a wife he adores—neither of which, he says, would have been possible a decade ago. And he’s the rare artist who hasn’t had to labor outside of his calling. At 36, he has been writing and directing exactly half his life. But McPherson’s anxieties are less of the professional than the ontological variety.
The signature invocation of the paranormal in McPherson’s plays—famous in The Weir ’s stories-within-a-story and Shining City ’s hair-raising metaphysics that had Broadway buzzing last year—are all part of his philosophical inquiry into the nature of existence. Thoughts that would leave most people cold with dread—there is a hell; there is no afterlife; human beings may one day be extinct; there is no God; we may be the only conscious life in the universe, or we may not be—ignite McPherson’s imagination. His fantastical stories, inspired in part by a tradition of Irish myth and the richly idiomatic storytelling of his grandfather, suggest his openness to the unknown. He echoes Socrates: “All I know is that I know nothing.” The recurring themes in McPherson’s plays—the ghosts, the dissection of the masculine psyche, the hilarity of human folly and bawdiness, fraternity, violence, law-breaking and death—form his own branch of epistemology.
The years he spent numbing these anxieties with drink have left him craving an aliveness that can only come with an all-feeling sobriety that takes in both the good and the bad. Many alcoholic literary figures—Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Berryman and Dylan Thomas—never conquered their addiction. Notably, their work rarely addresses alcoholism directly. McPherson, with his drinking days at an end before his 30th birthday, has peopled his body of work with imbibers and those actively avoiding the bottle. He does not use Alcoholics Anonymous, which does exist in Ireland, to stay sober. He seems very much at ease in his non-drinking life, while remaining a denizen in a culture that “uses just about any excuse to drink,” as he puts it. And while it’s clear he didn’t derive his considerable creative inspiration only from a drunken state, those troubled times have given him a wealth of material and undeniably form part of his worldview.
There’s a dearth of real critical analysis on the subject of creativity and alcohol and the relationship between them. Roger Forseth, founder of Dionysus, a now-extinct triquarterly journal on addiction and literature, has written, “A distinction must be made between the devastation of personal lives and the realization of art. The personal calamity [can be] sublimated into the positive creative act.” When asked to comment on McPherson’s The Seafarer, Forseth responds, “There are great literary creations that could only have been made by alcoholics, and McPherson’s inebriate Irishmen are worthy of the genre’s best, with his uncannily accurate portrayal of addiction, balancing humor with pathos, culpability with forgiveness.”
McPherson revels in the musicality of the rural Irish turns of phrase (despite being equipped with a less-colorful Dublin accent himself). His characters sling insults to artistic effect, and make poetry of their dysfunction. Their cures for a hangover are meticulous, involving elaborate rituals of cold baths and hot whiskeys, or lethal cocktails of paracetamol (Irish for “acetaminophen”) and rum and vodka. Dublin Carol, written in 1999, constructs a veritable anatomy of alcoholism. As that play’s undertaker character puts it:
"There’s nothing worse than decorations after Christmas. That’s the way I sometimes used to feel putting my clothes on in the morning. And that special alcoholic’s hangover.... It’s a fucking beaut. It’s after a couple of days on the serious piss. What happens is, day one, for whatever reason, you’ve started early and basically polluted yourself. It’s a form of poisoning. And so, on day two, you are in the absolute horrors. I don’t mean what most people feel like after their Christmas party, sick tummy and a headache. This is a raging dose of the screaming paranoid shits."
McPherson also knows the dramatic value of drunkenness. “Intoxication takes you on a journey,” he says. “It has a beginning, middle and an end, like any good story.”
Despite its presence in his recent work, though, overall McPherson wants the subject behind him. “Hopefully I can write about other things,” he says. He did in 2006’s Tony-nominated Shining City—his first play after getting sober—about a priest-turned-psychologist who treats a man convinced he’s seen the ghost of his wife. Tellingly, the characters seem to be moving forward toward resolution and greater peace of mind. He calls The Seafarer his most optimistic play yet.
For a self-described pagan, McPherson has a Catholic-scale sense of guilt and accountability, and he says he writes his plays in order to “forgive himself.” He cites his alcoholic years, but he’s also seeking to cope with being less than he should or could be, all the time—in short, for being the human that he really is. It’s an almost transcendental pursuit of perfection, and it applies to his plays, except that he’s far more forgiving of his characters than he is of himself—or the human species, which he indicts as “petty, and able to live with a lot of evil.” Unlike many of his contemporaries, McPherson is not giving voice to the victims of tragic circumstances or political injustice, but to people who freely self-destruct. In a chicken-egg cycle that may be difficult to parse once the damage is done, his characters are the harbingers of their own demise, regularly abandoning and/or destroying their relationships and ending up with little other than self-loathing.
Although he studied philosophy at university, McPherson seems less interested in the scholar’s approach to the meaning of life than the dramatist’s. As a theatremaker, he lets his id do the playwriting and his ego do the directing. “I don’t have any control over what I feel driven to write about,” he says, but as a director he has a composer’s vision for the whole, down to the minutiae. When I sat down with McPherson during rehearsals for The Seafarer in New York, he described directing his plays in musical terms, and even moved his arms as if holding a baton as he talked about “turning the volume up” and “riding on the waves of certain feelings.”
CASSANDRA CSENCSITZ: Have you always directed your own plays?
CONOR MCPHERSON: I wrote my first play when I was at university in 1989. I read Glengarry Glen Ross and it blew my mind. I wrote something sort of imitative of that, and the drama society asked me who was going to direct it. I didn’t know anyone, so I had to just do it. It became second nature.
I directed The Seafarer in Britain. Normally I don’t do my plays more than once, but I’m still writing to make this one better. Directing is like finishing the writing. I like to tailor the work to the actors. If they’ve got flaws or if they’re very good at doing certain things, I’ll cut things that don’t suit that, or write things that do, so you get the best possible chance of emotion that’s really strong. I change the work a lot as we rehearse. I like the freedom of that. Usually by the time I’ve put the play on, I’ve made sure it’s right. I’ve done what I’ve wanted to do. It’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s a hassle having to do your plays a number of times. I can’t do that—it’s too painful.
Ian Rickson directed The Weir and Dublin Carol. Is it hard to give the premiere over to another director?
Ian is a very sensitive director. It was a pleasant experience for me. But there’s a natural instinct in me now to finish the work. That’s how I can find out what works—that’s too long, that’s too short, this bit is dead. I don’t care how good a director is: If something is not alive, it’s not going to come to life. You’ve got to cut it, and the writer can do that. It’s all part of the same process for me. I don’t really see any division. I’m lucky. When I wrote Shining City and Seafarer, the first question theatres asked was, “Do you want to direct it?” I haven’t had any resistance, but I suppose that’s because I’ve yet to fuck up one of my own plays.
What about directing work by other writers?
I directed a play by Eugene O’Brien, two monologues, for the Abbey Theatre. I was quite aggressive as a director, I remember. I wanted it to be something. Then I directed a play by a playwright I admire very much, Billy Roche, with six actors in it. I realized for the first time that my word wasn’t final. It was a baptism by fire. The actor would be like, “I think I should be standing in the middle of the stage,” and I wouldn’t have an argument. When I’m directing my own work I have so much power that even if there’s tension and conflict I can usually get what I want.
You’ve worked with designer Rae Smith for many of your plays.
We met when she did The Weir. I like her designs because there’s very little there—I don’t like sets with walls. I don’t like to have a room. I like there to be a lot of darkness around the image, the idea of the infinite spreading out from the story. It’s more mysterious.
People always marvel at your age—you wrote The Weir when you were 25, for example. How has your work changed as you’ve aged?
That’s a hard question for me because I’m not a conscious writer. Recently, maybe, I’ve begun to make my plays more traditional, like what people see a play to be, moving toward more multi-character, dialogue-driven plays, less lonely than monologue plays, but not consciously. Maybe I’ve come to know better what audiences like—what freaks them out, what’s boring—by being before so many audiences.
Do you write with an eye to entertainment above all else?
It’s all about the audience. I’m always looking for ways to go beyond the material world. I want to go somewhere totally new in the theatre, to really transport the audience, to take them inside themselves and back out. You have to concentrate on things in yourself that are essentially human. You have to go inside yourself. What is the actual feeling of being alive, beyond language? It’s very complicated, but it’s very simple, too. Those are the things I’m after. It’s a messy journey. You can’t be too scientific.
The journey of The Seafarer was a long one for me. There’s this monument in Ireland, not very big, a 5,000-year-old tomb called Newgrange. It’s got a long tunnel with little hole in the middle in it, and on the [winter solstice] each year, the sun shines directly down that chamber and lights it up—on the darkest day of the year. That image was mind-blowing to me—so simple, spiritual, amazing. I wanted to write a play that had that moment. So I wrote this character, Sharky, working for these people, maybe having this relationship with the guy’s wife, going to see his brother. I showed it to my wife and she said, “It’s good, but it needs work.” Instead of going back to it, I followed the story into the future. That play was like a prelude to The Seafarer we have now. The devil, Lockhart, was a force of nature coming into the play. He’s scary, but he’s also an agent of change for the characters. He is the darkness we need in our lives to recognize what’s important and hopeful. But it really started with the idea of Newgrange—that darkest moment, darkest day of the year, where at the end the light comes in.
You do get that image in the play, with the window in the staircase leading down to the basement apartment.
That’s almost the most conscious idea I’ve ever had in writing a play. But how I arrived at that was unconscious. It took me a whole other play.
In an interview in the Guardian, you said human beings are 90 percent animal and 10 percent human. That’s apparent in your plays, especially in a character like Richard in The Seafarer, who is grossly sensual but has the ability to rationalize as well.
Well, Richard’s strength as a character is that he moves forward—he embraces his life with energy and power and strength, though he’s incapacitated because he’s blind. Sharky has all his faculties but is broken inside, so he can’t function. David Morse, who is playing that part in New York, is a very big, healthy, vital man. It’s really like Freud said: The unconscious is the iceberg underneath the surface, so we vainly think—in both senses of the word “vain”—that the important stuff is up here [in the head], that we’re calling the shots because we can rationalize what we want to do. But isn’t that the trick of life—how we fool ourselves, how our illusions are so strong, how they have to be? It’s a necessary fiction, the story of our life. We often get totally lost in the illusion—but that’s a terrific way to approach making plays. In London some people didn’t think of the character Lockhart as real—like he was coming out of Sharky’s imagination. That’s a terrific way to look at it. All this dark energy moves the play forward and allows things to come to the surface.
All my plays are a picture of me trying to find what’s the real energy or force in my life. You dig at it until you reach some point where you make peace with yourself because you’ve got to accept certain things. What’s driving you is bigger than you. So there are huge personal drives in the work, too.
I think we’ve evolved from animals—we can talk, for example—but it doesn’t really make us holy. It doesn’t put us in touch with God. It doesn’t make us particularly special. I think we’ve got to get real. We’re animals who can talk. That 10 percent—the rational and civilized part that keeps the rest in check—is, of course, the most impressive and interesting part of being human.
That’s the part that causes us to suffer, though.
That’s why the Christian myth is so powerful. God becomes human, but in order to be human he really has to suffer, to the point where he says, “Why have you forsaken me?” He doesn’t even believe in himself. I don’t know that it’s true, but it’s an amazing story. That’s why it’s so resonant.
You put your characters through that.
You have got to face the mystery of the universe, the vastness of ignorance. We are on a tiny speck in this huge cosmos, and we don’t even know how it started, where we come from or why there is space or time. People say the Big Bang, but can anything have started it? Something can’t come out of nothing. Eternity doesn’t stretch forward, it stretches into the past. If we’re the only rational life in the whole of the cosmos, then we’re the only part of the universe that knows itself. Is this where it all comes together in some bizarre, fucking way? Human beings will probably become extinct at some point. There’s something very beautiful about that—like the universe came to life and knew itself for a little while, which is really sad, but we made art. Television and radio waves keep going into space and exist forever. The things we create do exist forever. That’s beautiful. That’s what I walk around with. (Laughs.) I do try to get all that in my work—but I don’t want to write it in a speech. You’ve got to hide it. The characters are playing against this backdrop.
Richard says to Sharky at the end, “You’re a gobshite, but you’re alive.” There’s also the closing song with the line, “I’m just waiting for the end.” Which of those is closer to how you feel? Is life on any terms better than none at all, or would Sharky like to be put out of his misery?
Sharky seems prepared to go. To be resonant, the ending has to feel incredibly emotional. It’s both sad and happy, and that’s life. There are a lot of questions and unfinished business in our lives. It’s very difficult to forgive ourselves. That’s a big journey.
You’re not religious, but you use very religious language. You were Catholic-school educated. There’s a sense of guilt in your plays, which is notoriously Catholic.
The Seafarer is a very Catholic play. It sort of accepts that Christian framework, the Devil and God, redemption. I use those archetypes but hopefully more toward pagan ends than Roman Catholic ones. That’s what I like about Rae’s designs. We always have a set surrounded by darkness. When Lockhart is talking to Sharky about heaven and hell, the whole back of the set can be transparent and we see the cosmos coming in—it’s about the mystery.
Is Lockhart’s definition of hell yours?
I wanted to think about something that was genuinely scary—being locked in a box and the thought of never dying. People told me they saw the play and didn’t sleep that night. But I hope there isn’t an afterlife at all; I don’t want to be conscious forever. I prefer to have what I have and die. To me that sounds more healthy for your consciousness now.
In your afterword to This Lime Tree Bower you describe an incredibly tranquil moment after that play opened in London in 1996: The sun is beating down and you see your friends “sipping mid-morning gin and tonics, watching the planes landing and taking off from HeathrowÉthat’s the pace we should strive for.” Is that your definition of heaven?
Well, that sounds like some sort of drunken reverie, sort of an illusion. But what isn’t illusion? Maybe heaven is simply unconsciousness.
You drank heavily until about seven years ago. What about your work has changed since you quit drinking?
I remember just after I stopped drinking a friend asked, “Are you afraid it’s all gonna go away? Now you won’t be the same artist?” I had never thought of that—and I’m happy to say the answer is no. I haven’t changed. My drinking was me coping with those big fears and questions.
You didn’t get what they call “alcoholic inspiration,” go get drunk and have a burst of creativity?
No, no, no. Certain plays, like Dublin Carol, I wouldn’t have written when I was drunk, though I was certainly drinking at the time. That whole play is a hangover. When you have a really bad hangover like that, that’s your mindset. It’s gloomy, guilty, scary. I suppose drinking gave me plays like that, but I don’t think that’s something to be particularly proud of.
That was your life, and those are good plays.
You’re writing what you know. When I stopped drinking I realized you can live from day to day. You’re not going to die. Something awful is not going to happen to you. You can have the courage to live each day. There was a time when I wouldn’t have thought that was possible. I thought that you had to be drunk to take the sting out of life, the apprehension and regret, to get rid of that. But those stings are actually part of your life. That’s what I’ve realized in the past few years. For every moment of escape, you’re paying three times back. You’re really living for that moment when you can have a few drinks. You have your day, however many hours you’re sober, waiting for the moment you’re not, so you get a few hours of illusory euphoria followed by 10 to 12 hours of pain and suffering.
John shows us that in Dublin Carol.
Some people say Dublin Carol is their favorite play. That’s frightening. I always think, when people say that, “What is your life like?” But the play is about saying, “I can’t live here,” and anyone understands that. In a play we don’t see the next day, so the feeling we’re left with is hope. There is potential. I like to leave audiences with that feeling.
Your early play Rum and Vodka could be about John many years earlier in his life.
(Laughs.) I was 20 when I wrote that. I guess I was on my way. Hopefully now I can choose a little more what I want to write about.
Even when the drinking isn’t in the foreground of your plays, it’s in the background—but it’s center stage in The Seafarer. Does drinking take on the role of a storytelling device for you now?
I think the distance allows me to make it funnier now. But it’s not contrived. I see my characters, hear them, write it down. But, sure, the drinking gives them license. They can say anything—they’re drunk! So you can have these massive mood swings, explore anything you want.
It’s almost operatic, though. Can people really drink that much and live?
It’ll be interesting to see when it goes to the Abbey in Dublin this spring. People in New York may be a bit more shocked, but I think most Irishmen could say that at some point in their lives they drank like that—like in the morning. I wouldn’t say it’s exaggerated.
If I look back at my plays now, I see that The Weir is about death, Dublin Carol is about fear, Port Authority is about love, Shining City is about guilt and The Seafarer is about family. That wasn’t on purpose, but it’s what I see now. Now I have a slightly more conscious way of working. In my newest work, I wanted to try to write a woman, to tune more into the female part of my psyche. If I were drinking I couldn’t do that. It takes too much work. Not drinking allows me the patience and energy to move on to other things.
Your next project is an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds.
This is the first time I’ve adapted anything for the stage. It’s the short story that Alfred Hitchcock based his movie on. It’s only about 11 pages, but it’s the beginning of a story set in the countryside in Cornwall after the Second World War. Birds start to attack people. A family is holed up in a house. They don’t know how much food they have—and then the story ends. I wanted to have a play about people locked in a house, but I didn’t want them to know each other—so in my version they’ve broken into this abandoned house. It’s a man and a woman who begin working together to survive. This is oversimplifying it, but I think about the man as a sperm, linear, and the woman as an egg. Think of the way men and women talk on the phone: The man gets to the point while women can talk forever about seemingly nothing. They have this totally different kind of energy. I want to tune into that.
What else is next for you?
I’m working on a movie adaptation of a short story with Billy Roche. I did Saltwater in 2001, which is a movie adaptation of This Lime Tree Bower , but movies take so long. There’s politics, and you have to please so many people because so much more money and time is at stake, and I hate to do that. I will do small-budget movies, but I like plays. A film you do once so you have only one shot. I like to allow plays to gestate. You can be in charge in the theatre.