McPherson Plays: Three E-Book

Conor McPherson

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This volume of Conor McPherson's collected plays, covering a decade of writing, celebrates a fascination with the uncanny which has led him to be described as 'quite possibly the finest playwright of his generation' (New York Times). In Shining City, a man seeks help from a counsellor, claiming to have seen the ghost of his dead wife. The play, premiered at the Royal Court, London, is 'up there with The Weir, moving, compassionate, ingenious and absolutely gripping' (Daily Telegraph) The Seafarer, premiered at the National Theatre before going on to become a Tony Award-winning Broadway hit, tells the story of an extended Christmas Eve card game, but one played for the highest stakes possible. 'McPherson proves yet again he is both a born yarn-spinner and an acute analyst of the melancholy Irish manhood' (Guardian) Set in 'the big house' in 1820s rural Ireland, The Veil is McPherson's first period play. Seventeen-year-old Hannah is to be married off in order to settle the debts of the crumbling estate. But when Reverend Berkeley arrives, determined to orchestrate a séance, chaos is unleased. 'A cracking fireside tale of haunting and decay' (The Times) The Birds, hauntingly adapted from the short story by Daphne du Maurier, is 'deliciously chilling, claustrophobic, questioning, frightening; and with a twist' (Irish Independent). It is published here for the first time, as is The Dance of Death, a new version of Strindberg's classic, which premiered at the Trafalgar Studios in London. 'A spectacularly bleak yet curiously bracing drama that often makes you laugh out loud' (Daily Telegraph) Completing the volume is a Foreword by the author.

Leseprobe

Conor McPherson

PLAYS: THREE

Shining City

The Seafarer

The Birds

The Veil

The Dance of Death

with a Foreword by the Author

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Shining City

The Seafarer

The Birds

The Veil

The Dance of Death

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Foreword

The best plays come in a flash. An image, a feeling, and that’s it. You know these ideas because they are the undeniable ones that won’t let go. They pull you in and compel you to start scribbling notes. If you are a playwright and you have one of these on the go, you know you have a responsibility. To what? Something that doesn’t exist? But the good ideas feel like they do exist. They’re just beyond view, and you’re trying to capture them with glimpses that may or may not be accurate.

So many things can go wrong along the way between the vision and its presentation on stage – missed beats in the writing (or too many beats), the wrong cast, wrong director, wrong theatre or just the wrong time. Any and all of these may consign your hard work to the ‘Who Cares?’ file. And you know you are playing Russian roulette – it all comes down to those couple of hours on opening night. But you keep the faith and you pull the trigger. What else can you do?

You start scribbling. Worry, issues of control, and even, ironically, a sense of longing to be free of the process, all propel you to write your first draft. Subsequent drafts can never quite fix all the problems, yet neither can they prompt the same exhilaration. Many playwrights I’ve talked with agree that the best moments are often those tentative notes when the ghosts first present themselves in your mind. They are so insubstantial, yet bear their complete mysterious history within. This is when playwriting is at its most private and, paradoxically, when the play is at its most beautiful. The more real you make it, the less magic it retains. You are aware of this but what can you do? You keep going. Always writing at the very edge of your limitations. And your limitations are not necessarily a bad thing. Your limitations are in fact what give you your unique voice. But it’s hard to view your limitations in a warm light when you’ve just read over your work and it makes you embarrassed.

The truth is nobody really knows how to write a good play. You just do your best to avoid writing a bad one. The rest falls to fate. Joe Penhall once said to me, ‘Who knows if the magic is there and – even if it is – will the bastards see it?’, which I think sums up the car crash of hope, despair and paranoia that accompanies artistic creation.

And the enemy of art is not the pram in the hallway, it is self-consciousness. When you are young you know nothing, least of all yourself. You write plays quickly, perhaps in a matter of days. As you grow older – and if you’ve managed to survive some decades of playwriting – you may gain a little wisdom. But you lose your recklessness. Why? Because, like the ageing stuntman, you know exactly what’s at stake each time you do it. Further, you are no longer new. Everyone knows what you can do and they have certain expectations. So you go the long way round, trying to surprise everyone. But going the long way round kills spontaneity.

And what’s wrong with that? Well, Neil Young’s late producer, David Briggs, said that the best way to record music is the simplest way. You get the mic as close to the sound as you possibly can and just record it as it is. ‘The more you think, the more you stink’ was his mantra. Neil Young’s albums are full of first takes – often the very first time the band have ever played the song – because that’s where the magic is. Neil Young calls it, ‘the spook’. In other words, you’ve got to be careful not to perfect what you are doing to the extent it has no soul left. Perfect is not best. Okay, so he’s talking about rock ’n’ roll, but there’s something in that for playwriting too.

And this book contains a decade of playwriting. And if there’s anything I can see that’s worth passing on, it’s this: it’s as important to forget what you’ve learned as it is to learn.

Shining City came in a flash. The last image of the play came first. I wrote the play in a few weeks. There are scenes in the play, perhaps the best ones, which never altered from the first scribbled draft. The Seafarer came in a more bizarre, slow-motion flash. I had written an entirely different play with entirely different characters – except for this one character at the heart of the play, Sharky. But there was something wrong with it. Somehow a deadness had crept in somewhere. And then suddenly I saw the living room in The Seafarer and the blind Richard Harkin sitting there. And I knew that Richard was the brother of Sharky, who was still stuck in the bad play. So Sharky walked from the bad play straight into The Seafarer to look after his brother. It was a hard play to write, however, because it presented many technical difficulties (the second-act card games, for instance), but I felt I had something. And I always lit a candle while I was writing it (the only time I’ve ever done that). And it stayed alive.

The short story The Birds by Daphne du Maurier was presented to me by the inimitable producer David Pugh. I had no flash of inspiration, just a desire to write it and to explore the female psyche (i.e. it has self-consciousness written all over it!). People have said it’s their favourite play of mine, but I suspect there are many others who felt I should stick to my more well-trodden ground. For myself, I like it because it really feels like someone else wrote it, and that’s a rare enough relief for any playwright watching their work on stage. I want to thank Joe Dowling at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and Henry Wishcamper, who directed the American premiere. Their belief in the play has undoubtedly ensured its continued life in the United States, where it’s regularly being produced. Whatever I was working out in that play continues to draw directors and actors – and that’s everything.

David Hare was once asked what advice he’d give to young playwrights, and he said: to enjoy the moment if your first play or two finds an audience. People are interested and you’re confident – because you have lots of ideas you haven’t tried yet. But, he cautioned, you must remember that sustaining that for thirty or forty years, fighting through the sheer incomprehension that may greet your efforts to develop your craft, is no picnic.

Bearing this in mind, I recognise that, in some quarters, a certain incomprehension greeted The Veil. In some ways it reflects a sense of disgust and panic at how my country had managed to almost destroy itself over the previous ten years. And personally I was also in thrall to the world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German transcendental philosophy, not to mention a fascination with James Joyce’s concept of time in Finnegans Wake. Talk about a heady brew! I think we presented a beautiful show (incredible design by Rae Smith and lighting by Neil Austin), and every performance was top notch, but when all the moments were strung along together, maybe some people – certainly more than usual anyway! – emerged wondering what all the ideas had to do with each other. And yet something tells me this play will be back in my life at some point, and that I may even begin to see it as one of my favourites some day because, strangely, it’s the tricky ones you end up most proud of.

And then, out of nowhere, August Strindberg walked into my life, kicked me up the arse, and reminded me what it’s all about. Josie Rourke, who had just taken over at the Donmar Warehouse, asked me to consider adapting The Dance of Death for their young directors’ programme. And Strindberg just took me right back to the beginning: i.e. it doesn’t matter what’s happening on stage as long as it has energy and emotion. Ideas flow from the energy, not the other way round. And we ended up with a cracking little production, directed by Titas Halder, starring Kevin McNally, Indira Varma and Daniel Lapaine, that really blew people away.

And I decided that my next play would have no ‘ideas’ (if that’s possible), only feelings. And it came in a flash one day while I was pushing my daughter on the swing in the park. And when I went home I started scribbling.

But that’s a story for another day.

Conor McPhersonDublin, January 2013

SHINING CITY

For my wifeFionnuala

Shining City was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on 4 June 2004, with the following cast:

NEASA

Kathy Kiera Clarke

IAN

Michael McElhatton

LAURENCE

Tom Jordan Murphy

JOHN

Stanley Townsend

Director

Conor McPherson

Designer

Rae Smith

Lighting Designer

Mark Henderson

Sound Designer

Ian Dickinson

The play received its American premiere at the Biltmore Theater, New York, in a production by the Manhattan Theater Club, in May 2006, with the following cast:

IAN

Brían F. O’Byrne

JOHN

Oliver Platt

NEASA

Martha Plimpton

LAURENCE

Peter Scanavino

Director

Robert Falls

Designer

Santo Loquasto

Costume Designer

Kaye Voyce

Lighting Designer

Christopher Akerlind

Sound Designer

Obadiah Eaves

Setting

The play is set in Ian’s office in Dublin, around Phibsboro maybe, or Berkeley Road, an old part of the city which, while it retains a sense of history, is not a salubrious area. It has a Victorian feel, lots of redbrick terraced houses dominated by the Mater hospital, Mountjoy Prison, and the church spires of Phibsboro Church and the church at Berkeley Road. It doesn’t feel like a suburb, if anything it feels like a less commercial part of the city centre, which is only a short walk away.

Ian’s office is perhaps in an older, larger building than most in the area, up on the second floor. From his elevated position, at the back of the building, one or two church spires loom outside.

There is a big sash window at the back. There are some shelves with books on them. A stereo and some CDs. There are more books on the floor, as though they have been unpacked but have yet to be put away. Ian has a desk, stage left-ish, with a chair behind it. There is also a chair in front of the desk which Ian uses for sitting with clients. Clients sit on a little two-seater sofa near the middle of the room, a little more stage right. There’s a coffee table near the sofa with a box of tissues and a jug of water.

At the back, stage right, is a door to a little toilet. Stage right is a cabinet of some kind, a filing cabinet maybe, or a bookcase.

The door is stage right, and when it is open we can see out to the banister and the top of the stairs. Beside the door is a handset for an intercom to the main door to the street on the ground floor.

The play has five scenes and about two months elapse between each scene.

The time is the present.

Characters

IAN, forties

JOHN, fifties

NEASA, thirties

LAURENCE, twenties

Dialogue in square brackets [ ] is unspoken.

Scene One

As the lights come up there is no one onstage. It is daytime. We hear distant church bells. Music is playing softly on the stereo. We hear the toilet flush, and IAN, a man in his forties, comes out of the bathroom. He takes a tissue from the box and goes to the window, blowing his nose. He is a man who has struggled with many personal fears in his life and has had some victories, some defeats. The resulting struggle has made him very sharp. He is essentially a gentle man, but sometimes his desire to get to the lifeboats, to feel safe, drives him in ways that even he himself doesn’t fully understand. A loud ugly buzzer goes off. IAN turns off the stereo and goes to the intercom, picking up the handset.

IAN. Hello? (Pushing a button on the intercom.) Okay, come in.

Pause.

Are you in? Okay. (Pushing the button.) Push the door. Are you in?

Pause.

Hello? No? Okay, okay, hold on.

He hangs up the handset and goes out, leaving the door open. He goes down the stairs.

(Off.) Now.

JOHN (off). Sorry.

IAN (off). No, I’m sorry. Come on up. Yeah. It was fixed. I don’t know if all this rain… We’re all the way up, I’m afraid.

JOHN (off). Straight on?

IAN (off). Eh, the next one. Yeah. And that’s it there. The door is open.

JOHN comes in. He is in his fifties and dressed quite respectably. He has an air of confusion when we first see him, not just because of his recent experiences but also because he has yet to accept that the world is not as orderly and predictable as he thought. He has always found problems to arise from what he regards as other people’s ignorance. He almost regards himself as a benchmark for normality. He carries an anorak. He seems very tired. IAN .