Conor McPherson Plays: One (NHB Modern Plays) E-Book

Conor McPherson

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Four plays from the author of The Weir, with a foreword by the author. The plays in this volume - three monologues and a three-hander - were all written while Conor McPherson was in his twenties. This Lime Tree Bower A poignant and gripping tale told through three interlinking monologues. Winner of a Thames TV Award, a Guinness/National Theatre Ingenuity Award and the Meyer Whitworth Award. St Nicholas An eccentric, teasing yarn involving a cynical and jaded drama critic falling for a beautiful young actress. Rum and Vodka A young Irishman with a drink problem tells of three momentous days in his life when his drab nine-to-five existence is obliterated in an escapist binge which threatens to engulf him. The Good Thief A 45-minute monologue following the misfortunes of a petty criminal whose conscience beats him up when he becomes involved in a bungled kidnap. Winner of the Stewart Parker Award. Revised edition with new Foreword by the author. 'the finest playwright of his generation' - New York Times

Leseprobe

Conor McPherson

PLAYS: ONE

Rum and Vodka The Good Thief This Lime Tree Bower St Nicholas

with a Foreword and Afterword by the Author

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Rum and Vodka

The Good Thief

This Lime Tree Bower

St Nicholas

Afterword

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Foreword

I was watching a TV programme the other night, the thesis of which was that Irish playwrights failed the Irish people during what was known as the Celtic Tiger period (roughly 1995–2007), when unprecedented prosperity raged through Ireland. The presenter of the show suggested that while Irish theatre had a duty to warn audiences that our fleeting prosperity was about to lead us to doom, in fact plays from this period tended to avoid political issues entirely. Given that I was extremely active as a playwright during these years I have to throw my hands up and say in one sense I’m guilty as charged because I’ve never written a play ostensibly about economics or politics. Suffice to say this TV programme got me thinking about what politics in the theatre really means, and what it means for the plays in this volume.

It’s twenty years since Rum and Vodka was written and performed. I was twenty years old when we did it. In Ireland at that time emigration was rampant. The eighties had seen huge unemployment and a kind of drabness pervaded everything.

However, I remember there was a feeling in the air that the nineties could be a time for positive change. Mary Robinson had just been elected as our first female president. After the Irish soccer team had reached the quarter finals of the World Cup, anything felt possible.

By the mid-nineties as borders melted away in the European Union, money and trade began to flow our way. There was a confidence none of us could remember feeling before. Coincidently, in my own field, a wave of young playwrights was flooding theatres in London, New York and beyond. Our work was being translated into many languages. It seemed as though the world was suddenly interested in what it meant to be Irish. We represented a place where a horrendous past met a glistening future and where tradition evolved.

The old monolithic enemies of change seemed to wither. Contraception was finally available in the shops. Divorce was no longer considered a fate worse than death. Single-party government was no longer possible because it just wasn’t cool any more. Young Irish people were tired of what Irish ‘politics’ had meant for so long. For us it was a term tangled up in the violence and sectarianism of our past but finally, thankfully, that all seemed to be winding down with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.

The emergence of the Progressive Democrats, a party committed to low taxation and small government, had a massive influence. The new key to prosperity was ‘light-touch regulation’, i.e. banks and businesses needed space to prevail so governments should butt out, keep taxes low and ensure credit was unfettered. Once this idea caught hold in Ireland, a country so accustomed to poverty, it seemed like the money tap would never be turned off. Books were written about our rapid economic transformation and we were held up as an example to developing countries all over the world.

But then something darker happened, perhaps around the turn of the millennium. The insecurity at the heart of the Irish psyche reared its wild sleepy head and roared ‘Surely to Jaysus this can’t last!’ And it no longer seemed to be enough to have a job and support your family; now it felt important to shore up one’s nominal wealth in order never to be poor again. One must remember that just four or five generations previously, Ireland had experienced a catastrophic famine which altered Irish society indelibly. Deep in the Irish heart lay this almost unspoken, and truly haunting, worst-case scenario. Owning property was a blanket which kept away the bite of fear. No matter how good things seemed to be, many of the burgeoning Irish middle class were compelled to attain what they had never had before; a family house, a holiday home, and a couple of apartments to rent out as an investment. Usually each of these was obtained by securing a mortgage on the other in a draughty house of cards.

All these mortgages didn’t seem like a problem at the time because property prices just kept rising. As soon as you’d bought a property you had made money on it, so European banks were happy to lend to Irish banks who were desperate to lend to Irish people. So a construction rampage ensued. By the mid-2000s developers were building apartment blocks for foreign workers to come and live in while they built apartment blocks for foreign workers to come and live in while they… and bang, in September 2008 the credit crunch arrived. The cheap foreign money disappeared. It was payback time and we couldn’t pay.

Our economy promptly collapsed, our banks all went bust, and the whole desperate, delusional frenzy ended in a mountain of personal debt. The state stepped in to guarantee the entire country’s borrowing responsibilities but it was a disastrous bluff. We staggered on for a while but before long we ended up in the arms of the International Monetary Fund, powerless and back where we’d started in 1990. In fact it was worse, because now unemployment and emigration had returned and we owed everybody a fortune.

A litany of blame blazed across our radio airwaves for months on end. Everyone suddenly had something to say. Whereas during the Celtic Tiger nothing seemed political – only economic – now everything was political. Horrifyingly, even a group of newspaper columnists and sports commentators banded together to declare their political intentions. However, when they suddenly backed down we realised that only professional politicians truly wanted the impossible job, because it was the only job they had.

So there I was the other night, watching this TV programme about how Irish playwrights apparently failed to write about all this stuff, but over the next few days I began to wonder if the programme was actually missing the point of what art does and how time reveals it. I had a look back over the successful plays from the time and speculated if (like looking at the rings in a fallen tree) it’s possible to argue that our theatre history contains the unmistakable mark of its climate at this time.

The nineties in Irish theatre will probably always be associated with the monologue. Almost every successful new play that emerged from Ireland at the time had an element of direct storytelling. It was as though the crazy explosion of money and stress was happening too close to us, too fast for us, making it impossible for the mood of the nation to be objectively dramatised in a traditional sense. It could only be expressed in the most subjective way possible because when everything you know is changing, the subjective experience is the only experience. For example, a seemingly modest play like Eden by Eugene O’Brien – which consisted of a married couple speaking directly to the audience for two hours in the Abbey Theatre’s studio space – became a smash hit. It was revived, toured and transferred to the bigger Abbey space, returning again and again over a period of about two years. It even made it to the West End (where admittedly the British critics scratched their heads and wondered at its native popularity).

I would suggest that the hunger for this kind of highly personal work was unprecedented because the whole phenomenon of living in Ireland at the time was unprecedented. It has been argued elsewhere that a secular need flooded the space left by the disgraced Catholic Church and a contemporary dearth of true political leadership. We still had souls, but we just couldn’t trust anyone with them any more. Thus monologue theatre flourished because it was a mirror which took you inside your own eye. The work had to become more private and the humour more painful in order to reflect the mood of an audience who didn’t feel like they were living in a sustainable reality on any level. Big old ‘state of the nation’ plays simply couldn’t have reflected that feeling, I don’t think. The dramatic problem was far subtler than before so the successful plays of the time took a subtler approach.

As young writers, we knew of Beckett’s great monologue plays and Brian Friel’s iconic Faith Healer, but these were examples of a form rather than the norm. When one considers the tumultuous time in which this form re-emerged and became almost ubiquitous it doesn’t feel like mere coincidence, and I would contend that to dismiss such a sea change in Irish drama is to ignore how well it charted the peculiar history of the Irish mind for its time. And all the more so when one considers how organic and unconscious this movement was. It just happened. The more Ireland’s economic fortunes appeared to catapult us into a twenty-first-century orbit, the more our theatre seemed determined to return us to an almost ancient mode of storytelling.

For myself, I haven’t written a monologue play for well over a decade now. This year I am forty and consider myself extraordinarily fortunate to have worked as a playwright for the last twenty years. The hard-won perspective of the intervening time shows me that I thought I was free and independent back then, but now I know I was struggling with history just like everybody else. I used to find it so difficult to even think about my own past work. I always felt the need to look away into the future. But as I enter middle age I look back with a more forgiving regard. I read the very first line of the first play in this volume, which says: ‘I think my overall fucked-upness is my impatience.’ It was true then, and it’s true now, and probably not just for me. And maybe that impatience drew me to the monologue form. Because it could take you right where you wanted to be so fast and keep you there because it just felt real.

At every performance the audience suspend their disbelief. They know they are watching people pretending yet they believe they are seeing something real and true. This is the magic of theatre, and it’s purer than film because the audience generate this belief without any of the aids of cinema. A bare story told by a single voice in the theatre can distil this experience even further. Of course it takes a good story and a good actor to tell it. And of course it’s probably not for everybody, but for those who like theatre for precisely what it can do best, i.e. create a world out of nothing, this kind of work can be surprisingly memorable.

That said, I want to reiterate that all of the work in this volume is unconscious. I was between the ages of twenty and twenty-four writing it. I knew little about myself and less about the world. I had no insight, political or otherwise. And now? Well, I probably still have the impatience, but regrettably, like all of us who’ve lived through the last twenty years, so much less of the innocence.

Anyway, welcome to the past.

Conor McPherson Dublin, August 2011

RUM AND VODKA

For The Fly by Nights

Rum and Vodka was first performed at University College Dublin on 27 November 1992.

Performer Stephen Walshe

Director Conor McPherson

It was subsequently performed by Fly by Night Theatre Company at the City Arts Centre, Dublin, on 30 August 1994.

Performer Jason Byrne

Director Colin O’Connor

Part One

I think my overall fucked-upness is my impatience.

I could never wait for anything to be over.

And I think that’s the sign of an inquiring mind.

I don’t want to do the investigations, I just want the answers.

And I reckon that because of that I’m a bit of a pessimist.

Because I never got any.

And that can lead to a lack of social graces.

I always feel that wherever I go, people look at me with a squinty face as if to say ‘Now, just who the fuck are you?’

I think I hate the human race.

And I think they know it.

I often think the world gets together behind my back while I’m on the jacks or in bed and makes hasty decisions about new ways to get me to leave the planet.

They leave the meeting laughing.

Now, that’s got to be the king of conspiracy theories.

But I know it’s not true.

I suppose my impatience is due to my embarrassment a lot.

Maybe I don’t like myself too much.

I hate looking back at things I’ve done.

So I’m always doing something new.

That means that my memories are like being different people.

But that’s all a load of shit.

What I really want to tell you about is what’s happened to me over the last three days.

I’m twenty-four going twenty-five.

I live on a new, well fairly new, estate in Raheny.

I’m married.

I have two young girls.

Until a couple of days ago I worked for the voting registration department of the corporation on Wellington Quay.

I’d been working there since I got married.

When I was twenty.

You might think that’s quite young for someone to get married these days.

And I probably agree with you.

But em . . .

I had been going out with a girl since I was eighteen. We had been going out for two years.

And I mean, you’re twenty.

What the fuck do you know? I mean, I was still trying the world for size.

Do you understand me? I was arsing about.

You know? I was messing.

With other girls.

I don’t think I ever meant it to happen.

It usually happened when I had too much to drink.

But, ah . . . I was at this party one night and I ended up half-comatose in the back garden.

And this girl, friend of a friend, decided she was going to look after me.

While I got sick in her shoe.

She stayed with me all night.

And I was grateful and I thought I felt something for her, and as the night wore on and everyone went home it was mostly horny.

I’m not going into the sordid details.

My life’s one big sordid detail.

But we ended up being intimate.

On a number of occasions that night.

And I ended up seeing her for, well, whatever reasons after that.

And all the while I was still going out with my girlfriend and this other girl, the party girl, knew I was. Alright?

And then when the chewing gum lost its taste I stopped seeing her and decided to be faithful again.

For, well, forever.

But then I got a phone call from the party girl.

She was having a baby.

And now she’s my wife.

You have to understand I didn’t marry her for religious or moral . . .I mean, we didn’t have to get married at all.

But as more and more people found out . . .

My mum and dad were furious.

My friends thought I was a fucking fool because they liked my girlfriend.

And my girlfriend.

Well I think it’s the worst thing that ever happened to her in her life.

And . . . I have nothing else to say about that except that sometimes I. . . miss her.

So anyway.

There I was.

Lowest of the low, with no one really to turn to except this pregnant girl.

And she was the only one who didn’t criticise me.

We got on well enough and the more shit I got off other people the more I found comfort with her.

I ended up saying, ‘Fuck you, everybody!’

Got a job, hundred and eighty quid a week, got a mortgage and figured my life finally had some direction.

And I got down to it.

I was the real nine-to-five animal.

And it was alright.

I spent the next two years getting on with making money, getting my wife pregnant again and drinking at the weekends.

The thrill of having your own house.

I could do what I liked.

I was a pretty good family man.

I remembered birthdays and I was Santa.

And the freedom.

I was always waiting for a knock at the door and a slap. But it wasn’t going to come. I was grown up. I was allowed.

If I wanted to I could drink till three o’clock, watch videos till dawn, fuck my missus.

I mean, she was always there.

And that’s one thing about that marriage.

Maybe there’s never been too much . . . I don’t know, but that’s always been more than made up for in the bedroom.

Even from the outset.

We were married in a registry office.

There was very little ceremony.

But we spent our honeymoon in the house we were buying.

In Raheny.

And even though she was quite pregnant we got up to some of the weirdest stuff.

She’s always been insatiable.

She often wakes me up with a cup of coffee which is like just an excuse.

She wants me there and then.

Even when she was huge with the baby she’d insist on doing it standing up with me behind her.

The complaints department weren’t exactly run off their feet.

The kids came in a year of each other so we really had two babies in the house for a while.

I’ve never been gone on kids but I got a real kick out of these girls.

I know it’s cruel, but I used to laugh at them trying to walk, falling on their arses or walking into chairs.

I thought that was very funny.

But as they got older I sort of felt like I was just playing at being Mr Daddy.

And it all got a bit unreal. A bit hard to believe.

I still felt eighteen or sixteen.

And it came as quite a shock when I realised that this was as good as things were going to get.

I found myself ticking off the minutes at work, skiving in and out of flexi-time, and, most importantly, drinking a lot.

This year especially it’s got to the stage where I’m getting pissed every day.

The only days I don’t drink are the ones where I’m too sick to move.

And it’s this that really leads me on to the last three days.

Maria, my wife, and I’ve been fighting a lot recently.

She’s been giving out about the money I’m spending, saving nothing, not coming in till one or two every morning.

Thing is, on top of everything, I’m an awful stupid bastard with money.

I don’t drive and I jump in and out of taxis like there’s no tomorrow.

I know it’s ridiculous, but I don’t know . . .

I’m just lazy . . .

I’m a thick fucker.

I tried cycling into work for a while.

I haven’t cycled in years and Maria said it would keep me in shape as well as cutting down on expenses.

It worked for about three days.

I left the bike in the car park under work, but that meant it got locked in after six.

If I wanted to go for a few jars I’d have to lock it on the street somewhere.

I locked it to the railings of a house on Wellington Quay but then I decided to lock it inside the railings to make it harder to nick.

It worked because it was still there at half twelve that night.

Trouble was . . . my judgement was impaired.

When I unlocked it it fell right down into the basement.

All the lights in the house went on.

I ran down Wellington Quay because sometimes I’m shy.

I had no money for a taxi and I started walking, thinking I’d get the bike back in the morning.

I must have gotten some fright though, because only when I was half way up North Strand did I realise I was holding half a U-lock.

I think I’d have to say that my drinking or habitual drinking is due to two of the men I work with.

Phil Comesky and Declan Short.

They live together in a house in Killester which is the most disgraceful kip I’ve ever seen.

There’s leftovers and remains of about a thousand takeaways, bottles, cans, socks, the place stinks.

It’s a mixture of rotting and deodorant. They must spray the air.

I’ve ended up there hundreds of nights.

They drink, I mean drink, get drunk every day. They smoke about forty each as well.

They’re both odd in their own ways.

Declan’s got this girlfriend he’s been going out with for about ten years.

They always fight. But you should see her drink. Pints. That’s what keeps their flame aglow.

They fall around in each others’ arms at closing time. Then they get two naggins. Vodka for him, Jameson or Powers for her, as long as it’s Irish.

Every day. I’m serious.

Declan doesn’t even have a beer belly.

He’s one of those people who can drink a keg of Guinness, get four hours’ sleep, and still look like he runs a health-food shop.

I sometimes think that he’ll be eating his breakfast one morning and it’ll catch up with him. He’ll disintegrate in seconds.

His girlfriend is a state though.

She looks like her mother shat her.

And that’s pure drink.

Phil’s the real spacer though.

He’s been in and out of mental homes up till a few years ago.

When he was fourteen a boy on his road was killed when he was hit by a car.

It was a big tragedy at the time.

Big turnout at the funeral.

The boy who’d been killed had a girlfriend. They had been going out for about three weeks.

I mean. At that age.

She threw a letter into the grave when the coffin was being lowered.

And . . . she was young. She got over it.

She grew up.

Now, when Phil was twenty, no one knows why, because he didn’t even know the girl, he dug up the grave and got this letter out.

He broke into the girl’s house at three o’ clock in the morning, sat on her bed, and read it to her.

Nearly drove her mad.

I mean. That’s real bonkers for you.

Anyway.

Last Friday lunchtime we were out having a drink.

We sank four pints each and I knew the weekend was going to be bananas.

I had been so depressed all week that to get paid meant get pissed.

Trouble was I was already hungover from the night before and my body was staging a coup.

I was finding it difficult to keep anything down.

All I wanted was to put my head on the desk and die.

I would have knocked off early saying I was sick, but there was some fuck-up with the cheques and no one was getting paid till four.

So I sat there sleepy and sick.

Bored stupid, wondering how I was going to get through the afternoon.

And everything went haywire.

Even now it’s a blur.

Eamon Meaney, our arsehead of an office manager, came over to my desk in his Farah slacks and Clarke’s shoes.

He used to be a national school teacher but he threw a tantrum one day and got fired. He was completely bald and thought he was gorgeous.

He had two queries with my work, and while I tried to dig myself out of a hole full of shit, I saw his expression change.

‘Have you been drinking?’ he asked me.

‘I had a glass of wine with my lunch,’ I slurred.

I must have smelled like a brewery, because he asked me just who I thought I was, getting drunk on tax payers’ time and money.

I said I didn’t know.

He told me to get into his office and walked off.

And I sat there.

Looking at the buildings on Batchelor’s Walk, all falling down and filthy.

I saw the last name I had typed on my Apple Mac, Helen Falconer.

What a name.

Her ancestors must have been falconers.

Wow, I thought.

Meaney shouted across the room at me to hurry up.

Everyone looked at me.

People from every county.

I went red from my shoulders to my scalp and . . . I picked up my terminal, and I swung it out the window.

It sailed down two flights and right though the windscreen, and I didn’t mean this, of Eamon Meaney’s car.

Okay, I had a choice.

I could pretend to have a nervous breakdown and beg everyone’s pity, or I could brazen it out.

‘Do you have any idea how long I’ve wanted to do that for?’ I said.

They stared at me.

Meaney took a step backwards.

I picked up my jacket and strode out of the office.

As I went down the stairs I heard the door slam. I hadn’t meant it but I was glad it did.

The day was overcast and people moved about on the street.

I went straight to The Norseman.

A pint and a short.

Never drank so fast.

Same again.

People in the pub.

Friday lunchtimers taking the afternoon off. Justified. They’d done their work.

And I felt so stupid and sick and guilty and angry and . . . low.

I wasn’t very happy.

But I was glad of a drink.

It took the edge off my worries.

Brought out my self-reliance.

If things are going well it helps you congratulate yourself.

If you’re in the shitter it gives you all the righteous indignation of an innocent victim.

And by five o’clock I felt both.

At six Phil and Declan came in.

I was quite a sensation.

By seven we were discussing my future plans.

Fuck, the three of us’d go into business together.

We were going to be gardeners.

Out in nature and stuff.

No more fluorescent lights or instant coffee.

And oh yeah, no more drinking.

It was time to take our lives by the scruff said Phil and he got change for the cigarette machine.

We were mates said Declan.

I told the lads I loved them.

I told them I’d wanted to say that for a long time.

We all embraced and I went for a piss.

By ten the place was jammed.

None of us were talking much.

Just drinking.

I thought I was getting a temperature.

The floor swayed and I puked on the carpet.

We moved away from that spot and since the barmen hadn’t seen, we got another one in.

By eleven I was nearly asleep.

The whole day felt like something that had happened to someone else.

I put my head in my hands and cried.

I cried until my eyes stung, till my gums felt swollen, till I couldn’t lick my lips.

Then it was time to go.

Phil and Declan were arguing about economics. The argument went something like ‘Fuck you.’ ‘No fuck you.’ ‘That’s bollocks.’ ‘You’re a cunt.’ ‘Me?’

Like that. Like every fucking night.

Declan bought a bottle from behind the bar and we headed for the lads’ house.

We had to stop the taxi for me to be sick and while I did, Phil ran up the road and got a Chinese.

Declan’s girlfriend was back at the house with some friend of hers from Denmark.

I tried some whiskey but my throat was raw and I nearly got sick again.

Phil vanished upstairs with Miss Denmark and Declan and Siobhan crashed out on the couch.

I went outside. It was nearly two.

I walked along the Howth road to Raheny.

I turned left up Station Road and into my estate.

We live in at the back, in a cul-de-sac.

I went in quietly and took four paracetamol.

The lights were all out upstairs.

I undressed in the dark.

I was too tired to look for pyjamas.

I just slipped under the quilt and stayed as far over my side as possible.

I curled in a ball and shivered.

Maria moved close and held me.

I knew I was going to break her heart.

I’d always known it.

I wished I could wake her up and talk but I was too tired to think.

And then the curse of any tender moment, an erection.

I suddenly wanted her more than ever.

And drink’ll do that to you.

And all this . . . aggression.

This is my house.

I’m in bed with my wife.

And I’m going to fuck her now.

I rolled over and felt her tits.

She was warm and soft.

I pulled the front of her nightie up and felt between her legs.

She was fast asleep.