A Sense Of Place, A Place Of Dread

Jimmy Fay

If you grew up in Tallaght in the 1970s and 1980s and were of a somewhat sensitive nature you learnt to sense trouble like a deer. This didn’t mean you always avoided it but to survive any tricky environment you needed to adapt and camouflage. Tallaght was a new town with scarce resources and an ever-growing, young population. It was a brutal landscape.

Like Salem’s Lot in Stephen King’s novel, it was overlooked by ‘the house on the hill’: The Hellfire Club. In the forests beneath it, the mysterious Lord Massey’s ruin lay like a vampire’s labyrinthine lair, overgrown by ivy. But the ‘town’ itself was a vast concrete expanse of inner-city conflict transplanted onto some ill-thought-out 1960s vision of suburbia built on an ancient pagan burial ground. This was the badlands of Tallaght, Támhleacht, its very name evoking its dark history and grim reality: the Gaelic word ‘támh’ means plague; ‘leacht’ means grave. Támhleacht was a burial place for people who died of the plague. Tallaght was a place of the dead.

The landscape was a rich combination of mossy woodlands and streams, tamed for a time by the neat, sturdy houses built by the developer McInerney. It was an almost medieval place populated by roaming tribes, maundering wanders and semi-wild animals. From the windows of my classrooms at school, I would watch tramps wander the vast meadows outside and, walking home, see the traveller youths ride their horses through the suburban streets like outlaw cowboys. There was even a lad with a filthy, brown face and vivid blue eyes who seemed to live in an old ruin over the river. His special trick was to leap suddenly out of the bushes, scaring younger kids half to death, before inviting them to ride his ‘pet’ goat.

The schools were community schools meant to train the artisans of the republic. If you had aspirations you studied hard, worked at your technical drawing and aimed for engineering or, if you were canny, computer programming. Fantasies involved being a rock star or a karate expert. You didn’t entertain aristocratic notions of being a poet or involved in theatre.

Although Mark and I grew up a few hundred yards away from each other, we didn’t meet until we were in our twenties. We were the same age but a motorway divided our environments. When I did meet him I knew immediately were he’d come from: that, like me, he’d survived ‘Tallaghtafornia’.

Gerry Stembridge, who was involved in Dublin Youth Theatre at the time, introduced us and said we should work together: ‘sure isn’t that what it’s all about’. I was running an improvisation workshop for DYT and Mark sat in on it. Afterwards we went for coffee and talked about movies. I liked Mark immediately. He was full of enthusiasms and wit. He knew his pulp and his ‘art’ and appreciated both equally. He was generous in praise and scathing in his condemnations. But nothing prepared me for reading him. Gerry had already given The Aspidistra Code a much acclaimed public reading in the The Peacock in 1997, but I missed it, so I read it in my bedsit where I laughed so loud my neighbours banged on the wall. It was a fantastic noir tale set in the badlands of my youth. I loved it and wanted to direct it. I approached Mark about producing it with Bedrock at the Project Arts Centre but Mark had already moved on, and his second play From Both Hips was going into production with Fishamble. He didn’t want his first play going on second. To my knowledge The Aspidistra Code never did get a professional production here, which is a shame.

A few months later, I met Mark outside a bookshop. I was putting together a season with my company inspired by what was actually a mis-reading of Antonin Artuad’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, and I was inviting people outside the core Bedrock members to direct and write and act in it. I told him a little about ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, and what we were trying to do, but I also said I was thinking of putting Pinter and Beckett into the mix. This excited Mark because, like any emerging writer, he was still discovering his voice and was excited by the elegance and sharp style of those cruel and cool masters. He said he had an idea for something already and within no time he wrote the play and gave me a copy.

Anna’s Ankle is one of the darkest, most disturbing, plays I have ever read. I remember being almost scared to turn the page as I went deep into this strange, chilling tale of a film-maker and his pursuit of an ultimate truth: photographing the eyes of Anna as she walks on her stumps after he’s cut off her feet. It was unsettling because there was no obvious double meaning, no metaphor of political oppression. It was the pure graphic chill of a misogynist, narcissistic narrator, and it was the first time I ever felt the force of Mark’s storytelling. This was not a neat parable wrapped up and ready to be deciphered in some academic way. This was the thing itself: brutal first person narrative, exquisitely told. Mid-way through, it makes a subtle but key shift from the present to the future tense, but in no way does this ease the growing tension and then horror for the audience. Everybody who read it was either appalled or disgusted by it. I don’t remember any defenders.

I told Mark I thought it was really unsettling, and was hesitant to programme it. He said ‘what are you doing: a Theatre of Cruelty season or a Theatre of the Mildly Upsetting?’ There was no answer to that. I produced Anna’s Ankle as part of the Fragments series, the first part of Electroshock: A Theatre of Cruelty season in Project @ the Mint in February 1997. It nested there between Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe and What Where? and Heiner Müller’s Obituary. It was directed with fierce skill and restraint by John O’Brien, and Patrick Leech gave a brave and spiky performance as the narrator.

And boy, did the audience react! It was like a bomb exploded. They could accept the cruelties of Beckett and Müller and Edward Bond, but the unsettling violence of Anna’s Ankle, the sheer power of the understated shift from present to imagined storytelling, was too much. They reacted, the way weird and new things are often reacted to, with sneers and condemnation. One night, as one punter was leaving at the end of the play, he shouted out the final lines of the play from the back of the auditorium: ‘Too much? (Beat) Too much!” Yes it could do with some cuts alright!’ What struck me most was that he had stayed and listened until the very end of the play, before making his protest. The power of the storytelling had held him; the images, although repulsive, were compelling.

This was ‘in-yer-face theatre’, and the press went all-out in their attack. One evening paper stated it was the most vile, upsetting piece of theatre they ever had the misfortune to witness. You can’t buy those kind of reviews and we sold out the season. Fintan O’Toole was the only critic who attempted to contextualize it. This was Mark’s first professionally produced piece (I think he got paid something), and O’Toole knew he’d witnessed a new and disturbing voice enter the Irish theatre landscape.

Mark’s next play Howie the Rookie was fuelled by the myths and pulp violence that would be recognizable to anyone raised in an under- resourced town with a large, young population. It presented a landscape of concrete, fields and motorways, full of disenchanted youths that were vaguely in love with death. Death was ever-present. It was a snarling black dog on the edge of the estate, or two exotic rumble fish in a tank, one with a stringy poo. It offered an embrace, an escape, an avoidance of reality and its nasty day-glow of bills and butter vouchers, affairs and alcohol. It was a hoody nightmare for the middle-classes, a tale of revenge and kitchen-sink realism poeticized into something as redemptive, cathartic and violent as a revenge saga. It is one of the truly great epic plays of our times, and it floored me when I saw it on opening night at the Bush Theatre in February 1999.

What floored me the most was the language of the play and the joy in the telling, the words weaving in and out of each other: words upon words upon words. Nobody I knew, from anywhere, had ever played with language like this. It wasn’t rap and it wasn’t poetry. It was more like a whirlwind twisting you up and throwing you about, leaving you to pick up the pieces. Or lose its sense all together. Mark made it seem so simple. I’d heard other playwrights describe their own writing as cinematic but this really was: it was sparse, simple, fragmented, straight-ahead storytelling, using words alone to evoke atmosphere and build tension. The performances by Aidan Kelly and Karl Shiels are etched into the fabric of my mind as part of that merry go round.

Mark and I were firm friends by now and we really wanted to work together; me directing, Mark adapting, and we settled on Henry IV, Part I, which was staged at the Peacock in November 2002. (Originally, we were supposed to do Part II as well, but the second part got dropped for reasons too confusing to recall.) It was probably not the most obvious project for either of us to embark on, but it had a couple of crucial elements that attracted us both. It is a play about wayward youth and responsibility, hedonism and facing up to reality. We were in our early thirties at this stage, and the stark truth of ‘will you ever grow up’? was squaring up to us in the mirror a bit too often. It is also one of Shakespeare’s most verbally dexterous rhapsodies, and Mark felt eager and willing to get his knife into it, to transform it into a different beast altogether. He liked the thrill of paring it back to reveal as stark and sharp text as he could.

But as Mark edited, we differed, and I began to add stuff back in. In a sense something as verbally dense and rich as Henry IV needs it all or it needs nothing, and the piece became misshapen. We fought, and there’s nothing as demoralizing as fighting with your collaborator and best friend. During a run through midway through rehearsals Mark walked out. The relationship between a director and a writer can be fraught with ego. It wasn’t exactly a wounded Will Shakespeare who exited mid-run but it was the next best thing. I rang him and we made up, agreeing, among other things, that we needed to make the sword fights as spectacular as possible.

In the end we were both really pleased with Henry. It was a piece about friendship, tall tales and father/son anxiety, and the tension between the environment you inhabit versus the one you inherit. It opened in the Peacock and had brilliant performances from Declan Conlon, Sean Kearns, Niamh Linehan, Nick Dunning and a haunted, complex portrayal of Hal by the late Tom Murphy. Over all it was well received but the Abbey didn’t pick up the mantle for us to do Part II, which is a shame because we were definitely onto something.

In 2006 I got my chance to work on Howie the Rookie in a production at the Peacock Theatre, the first time the play was produced at the Abbey. I enjoyed every minute of it. I loved being in its verbal embrace. But I was using the same actors – Aidan Kelly and Karl Shiels who had performed in the original production – and I felt like I couldn’t bring anything substantially new to the play. I liked the idea that Karl and Aidan were having a last go; like ageing gunslingers in a Sam Peckinpah Western on one last, insane, job. It gave the production a vaguely elegiac air which seemed entirely appropriate. Things were changing.

Mark was also eager to direct his own work at this stage. In his early work, he sought to contain the damage a director could bring to his work by limiting it to monologues, creating a confined space, where it is an actor speaking Mark’s words that create the imaginary, and there isn’t much room for misinterpretation.

We talked about directing all the time. About what we liked and didn’t care for. When it boiled right down to it our only difference was I liked more movement on stage then he did. But even then we’d probably argue with each other the other way too.

He got the opportunity to direct his own work with Terminus, which was produced at the Peacock in 2007, and presented three very different but deeply dark stories, in verse!! About a year previously Mark said he wanted to tell me the story, to see if it held together, and in a cafe on Wicklow Street, over about 40 minutes, he held steady eye contact and relayed this tender tale of devil-riding gore, full of slashing death and a mother’s love, while other punters looked on in open-mouthed horror. I could see them thinking: ‘what is this madman saying?’ But the story held you glued and the horror thrills were deserved.

As Mark’s confidence grows as a director his scope for staging expands. He recently revisited Howie the Rookie with a towering performance by Tom Vaughan Lawlor, who showed a remarkable zeal for Mark’s language in an almost acrobatic staging. It established the play, finally, as a modern classic. Mark once saw a kid in Eason’s bookshop nick a copy of Howie the Rookie off the shelves, and was filled with pride, while being slightly miffed at the loss of royalties: it was a classic if it was worth nicking.

Mark recently told me the scenario for his next play. It’s a family drama tinged with horror that requires an epic visual sensibility. He was struggling with two different ways of telling the story, and he wanted to test which was the most effective. I gasped at one way; that helped him make his decision, he said. It premiered under Mark’s direction last year in the Abbey: Mark has become his own best storyteller.

Extract From: Sullied Magnificence: The Theatre of Mark O’Rowe, edited by Sara Keating and Emma Creedon (2015)

Cross Reference: McPherson, Peacock Theatre, Bush Theatre

See Also: Class and Masculinities