Reflections on the Muse

Conor McPherson

I first became aware of Billy Roche in the early nineties when he was he was interviewed on Ireland’s iconic Late Late Show. He was blazing a trail in Britain at the Bush Theatre with his Wexford Trilogy. Not only had he bucked the odds by having three plays all running at once in London, but he suddenly concluded the interview by whipping out a guitar and singing a few songs, and I was thinking ‘Who is this guy?’

I was about twenty and had just started writing plays, putting them on with my friends at UCD where I was student. Seeing Billy getting his work done out there in the big bad world having been refused the support of professional Irish theatres was inspirational. Also impressive, when I finally got to see his plays for myself, was the deceptive modesty of the work. His characters seemed to wander on stage from Wexford’s side streets with an insouciance that was beguiling. He wasn’t writing about kings and queens, politics, history or Mother Ireland but the audience were ripped apart because, without realising it, they’d invested so much emotion in what was unfolding. It was clear there was a mythical dramatic structure hidden deep beneath the small town bluster and I was immediately smitten.

Within a few years good fortune led my own path to the door of the Bush Theatre and I began presenting my work there, having also found it impossible to secure professional productions of my work in Ireland.

It was quickly apparent the high regard in which Roche was held at the Bush. On the landing, half way up the stairs to the tiny theatre, where it could not be missed, was a framed Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Outstanding Contribution to London Theatre in recognition of the Wexford Trilogy. Amongst the staff his plays were spoken of with fondness and awe.

We finally got to meet when I was making a feature film called Saltwater in Dublin. Our casting director suggested we offer a role to Billy. I was like, ‘What? He acts as well?’

And indeed he did. Back in the late eighties he’d been forced to stand in for a few performances as Stapler in his own play, A Handful of Stars, in London and he’d intermittently continued acting both in his own work and the plays of others. And so we got to spend time together during Saltwater’s production, talking about writing and the lonely world of trying to make dreams come alive in the theatre. And I consider myself fortunate because our conversations since then have given me insights not only into Billy’s writing practice but the art of writing itself.

In a scene from his 1993 play The Cavalcaders, some amateur musicians are sucking their pencils, wondering what they might write a song about, when one of them springs up and proclaims in exasperation, ‘Take a look out the window any day of the week and you’ll find somethin’ to write about. A whole universe of stuff out there and he’s wonderin’ what we’re goin’ to write about.’ Talking with Billy I began to see that this is how he views his environment when he creates a play; he evokes a world. By ‘world’ I mean a place which has its own internal logic, where all hangs together cogently, even if that world is alien to us. This sense of completeness, of oneness, of rightness—even when what’s happening is ‘wrong’—is the bed of fertile drama, and creating it is not as easy as it may appear because its parameters are often beyond language. The theatre demands a world of feelings before even the simplest idea may be uttered. Billy insists however that this cannot happen unless the writer feels truly inspired at the moment of creation. This is perhaps the most salutary lesson any aspiring writer can take from a traveller who has been to the territory.

I got the opportunity to direct one of Billy’s greatest plays, Poor Beast in the Rain, at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 2005. I found that no matter how many times I read the play it pulled me into its spell, challenged and intrigued me. I must have read it about sixty times in preparation, but once I got into the rehearsal room with the cast, it opened up again, further, deeper, almost taunting the actors. Frighteningly, the play could take as much as they had to give and then would demand more. For the actor who is prepared to go to a place so emotionally bare, unadorned and open as to almost just be themselves on stage, Billy’s work is a dream to perform. For the actor who wants to rely on habits, tricks or let the audience do the work, his plays are a nightmare because there is nowhere to hide. You cannot fake the emotion in Billy’s plays. Try this exchange between Georgie and Eileen in the amazing long night of the second act: Georgie, so lost and in love with Eileen, unleashes his feelings for her in a way that can only destroy their relationship. I always found it impossible to be unmoved at the sudden loss of their whole future as close friends if nothing else.

EILEEN. … Jaysus, and I thought I could depend on you.

GEORGIE. Yeah well that was before I found out what you were made of wasn’t it? That was before I found out that you were just like your Ma – a real skeet goin’ round.

EILEEN. What are you tryin’ to do boy, scorch the ground from under us or somethin’?

GEORGIE. You’re the one who’s done all the scorchin’ Eileen, not me. For the past few days my heart’s been down in my shoes or somewhere over you girl … Yeh keep me hangin’ on all the time Eileen so that I don’t know whether I’m comin’ or goin’ with yeh. I mean I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. What am I supposed to do?

EILEEN. I’m sorry, Georgie. I didn’t know yeh felt like that. It was never supposed to be like that between you and me.

GEORGIE. Ah forget it. I don’t think you’ll be seein’ a whole lot of me around here any more anyway. I wouldn’t lower meself to tell yeh nothin’ but the truth.

It seems so simple, yet because Billy has painted their relationship so stealthily all the way through the play—a charming mixture of youthful innocence and flirtation—to witness its certain death is just one of the play’s devastating moments. And it’s impossible to ‘act’ this stuff. You either get to that place—and the play can take you to that place every night—or you might as well forget it. This is because Billy, like one of his playwriting heroes, Tom Murphy, can only write from a place of reality. If he can’t feel it, he won’t write it. And this is where the muse comes into it.

Billy has a healthily old-fashioned, almost romantic view of writing. He truly believes that the muse comes to visit a writer and without it, try as you may, you are ploughing fallow ground. Yes, when one is re-writing a play, it’s possible to spend days on end in the ‘office’ crafting and redrafting, but without that initial electric current which only the muse can provide, you will have nothing worth redrafting. This is the shocking truth that many people who try to write will discover. Self-consciousness will kill you stone dead. You have to write from a place where you are not even aware of yourself. You must see the world of the play in your mind and observe what is happening there rather than ‘create’ it. This is the trance-like domain of true inspiration, a realm into which only the muse may admit you.

I plugged into the electric current of Billy’s muse and found I was powered enough for the five years it took us to adapt one of his short stories into a movie called The Eclipse. Although the struggle to get this film made was immense, I never got bored or gave up because every time I returned to the work I was invited into that world, to look around, to explore it, to live there even—because it actually existed.

This process began when Billy was writing his celebrated book of short stories, Tales from Rainwater Pond. I was lucky enough to see these stories as Billy completed them when he was looking for people to throw an objective eye across them. We decided that one of the stories, ‘Table Manners’, might make the basis for a screenplay and we began working on it. True to form, it took absolutely everything we had, and then some, but no matter how much we pulled and prodded and coerced the story, its heart never packed in because its mythical structure was so sound.

It’s the story of a frustrated male writer who falls for a female poet who comes to visit Wexford for a literary festival. What he doesn’t know is that she has only come at the behest of a successful novelist who is trying to reignite an affair they previously shared. This spine of the story never changed through twenty drafts of the screenplay and finally when I got to shoot the film, I remember looking down the lens of the camera and still truly believing I was looking into the world of the story.

From a fellow writer’s point of view I think it’s possible to view some of Billy’s work in recent years as precisely a reflection on the relationship between the artist and the muse. However, as with the hidden soul in all of his work, this reflection is secreted so deep beneath the surface it might hardly register on first glance.

This concern is perhaps most evident in ‘Table Manners’, because for the first time Billy actually writes about writers and writing. There are ostensibly three writers at the centre of the story, but it is also possible to view them as three sides of the divided self of any writer.

First we have Michael Farr, a teacher, festival volunteer and amateur writer, who has never managed to fulfil his potential. He feels like a failure. This is the dogging ghost every writer lives with. You wake in the morning (or in the middle of the night) with a dream which you know will compel you to face the blank page until somehow you have managed to recreate a facsimile of its feeling. But this task is fraught with danger. You now have to face your shortcomings on a level so personal you start to believe you must have been mad or stupid to commence this venture.

Tom Murphy once said that writing teaches a person true humility because you are forced to consider your failings over and over until you get to the point of giving up. It is then—and only then—when you have surrendered and walked away, beaten, from your desk, that somehow the work opens up in your mind again, and you are lured back to face down your worst opponent, yourself. It’s a fine line between humility and humiliation.

Michael Farr gave up twenty years ago, but the muse is calling him again and he is in turmoil over what this means for him. Kitty Shaw is the poet Michael has been assigned to drive around Wexford for the duration of the festival. She represents the hidden place in every artist that is unknowable even to artists themselves. She seems free and somehow in touch with something elemental, even childlike, yet she evinces a demonstrable darkness and Michael instinctively knows she may lead him to his doom. In that sense, she is the muse.

The third side of the writer is personified by Nicholas Holden. While he is nominally successful and his bestselling books clog up the stands at every airport he flies through, he suspects the price he has paid is that he cannot put any of his real feelings into his work. Like Michael, he longs for Kitty to release something inside him. For this is also the horror of the artist—their past successes will haunt them. While they seek to replicate the holy moment of creation, to repeat oneself in this pursuit is sad and undignified. And yet where does the writer turn when the muse has had what she wants of you?

Inevitably Michael and Nicholas end up on a collision course, and only a violent act by Michael can release him into a new understanding. In the conclusion of the story Billy Roche cannily delivers Michael not to a new world, but back into his old world with new eyes, suggesting artists cannot change the world. They can only change how we see it.

This triangular relationship between the divided self and the muse is also arguably the heartbeat at the centre of Roche’s most recently performed play, Lay Me Down Softly. Theo Delaney is the ringmaster in a travelling boxing show where all-comers are invited to lay their money down and fight a few rounds with the resident has-beens who never were. The characters are thus caught in a meaningless spiral of inconsequential battles, roaming from town to town. ‘I’m good and lost wherever I am’, says one of them ruefully.

Theo Delaney is Roche’s Prospero, actively conjuring the drama around him yet fearing the emotional storms of parenthood and relishing perpetual exile. The other side of his divided self is the old boxing coach, Peader, who represents everything Theo isn’t. Where Theo is impetuous, boastful and angry, Peader is cautious, realistic and resigned. Theo may run the show but he cannot function without his old sidekick because Peader is his conscience, always there to fill the gaps in his psyche. Both men are confronted with their past in the shape of Theo’s abandoned daughter, Emer, who unexpectedly arrives looking for her father. And everything changes—because she is the muse, the agent of change or death.

In the sense that each person creates their reality, Theo and Peader are both artists. Theo is the inveterate dreamer who desperately builds the illusion of control while luring victims into his web of pain. Peader both sculpts, and keeps in check, the dreams of the boys who get in the boxing ring every night, enabling them to believe their cause is somehow more noble than fighting for pennies. Reflecting the division of the creative self, the audience are induced to suspect that Emer may in fact be Peader’s daughter rather than Theo’s.

Like the artist frightened of the pain of creation, Theo grapples to remain unchanged by her presence. He gamely stretches his war stories in an attempt to make himself seem more than a naked loser, but he is gradually revealed as the victim of a neglectful father, crippled by his own suffering and anger, doomed to repeat his past.

Peader on the other hand, is invited to face the all the agonising bad faith in his life and make peace with it. He has played second fiddle to Theo’s rousing cacophony, never having the courage to step into the sunlight. He abandoned his personal sovereignty by denying his one true love and his child. When Emer arrives he finds himself longing to do the right thing for the first time in his life and be a decent father to her. Yet the play asks the only pertinent question—to whom does the muse belong?

Like all real wisdom, the answer at the end of the play is both surprising yet obvious—she belongs to no one. Emer departs, taking their money and their best fighter. She takes, in fact, all that she is owed. As the muse always must, she has forced a brutal evolution in souls who are never ready.

Billy once told me that the true mark of a Wexford man is that he doesn’t believe he comes from a small town. He believes he is from a bustling metropolis where anything is possible. Billy may have been wryly referring to himself. In Wexford he sees a pantheon of colourful, sometimes heartbroken, characters milling around from the high ground at the back of the town, down through its tangle of streets, and on to the quay where the train track mingles with the street, whisking travellers to Rosslare Harbour and on to the wide world. And in between are all the stories a writer could need.

Many of Roche’s earlier characters are somehow caught between two worlds, unable to move into a place where their lives make sense, because they battling the very idea of mortality itself. Thus we find over-the-hill boxers still dreaming of the big time, betting shop boasters who are unable to grow up, hoping their charm will carry them along like lovable children until time inexorably catches up. The early plays are peopled by those who inhabit the cracks in the town’s walls, their daily paths so full of delusion that life-altering drama may suddenly descend upon them like thunderous fate itself—and it often does.

But while the early work, like the Cavalcaders looking out the window at the ‘universe’ of their town, laid bare the psychic structure of his place, his world, it is arguable that his more mature work has upped the ante and we are witnessing this most intriguing of writers explore an altogether darker landscape—his own artistic self.

Extract From: The Art of Billy Roche: Wexford as the World, edited by Kevin Kerrane (2012)

Cross Reference: Kevin Kerrane’s Essay and the Section on McPherson’s work

See Also: The Theatre of Conor McPherson: ‘Right beside the Beyond’, edited by Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan.