"Thar He Blows"
I've been doing press. A couple of radio shows. A fair few phone interviews. Mainly Dublin based people as the play is heading there as the big finale to the tour and the theatre company are trying to get as many dub bums on seats as possible.
Its an interesting thing to do. It may come as a surprise to some of you but I'm not used to talking about myself. Complaining in a humorous manner about bus journeys and poor customer service for the benefit of the milling gannets of Facebook? Yes. Actually talking about my life, my feelings or my work? No, no, no - God no.
In many ways the content of the play is exactly that, its the puppet I'm venting through. Malachy says things about my life that I would never dare to. He's tidy too: sentences come out honed, lavishly tooled. There are jokes but there are also bits where he nakedly and unapologetically talks about grief and fear and loneliness. The play isn't directly autobiographical - very little of it is taken from events in my life. But the feeling: the misery, the deflection, the isolation, the bone-deep malignant sadness is very much a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man.
I'm a lot better now by the way.
Which actually makes it rather easier to talk about. I never thought I'd out-run those feelings, and I don't think I ever will and I don't think I want to. The pain is a part of me. Its what you get to have at my age: white hair, wrinkles and a bit of sadness. But its nothing like it was and part of the reason for that is this play, which was like casting out demons. It all bubbled up in the writing. People have asked me if it was hard to write but the truth is it was the easiest thing I've ever written. It was the hardest thing to edit. It came in waves like a drill had burst an endless seam, and grizzled men waved their hats and shouted "thar she blows" as the filthy black stuff spurted out, barrel after barrel, tanker after tanker, ecological disaster after ecological disaster. They'll be shampooing my misery out of birds wings for years to come.
And that is also sort of what it is like talking on the phone to the befuddled journalists who call me John Patrick throughout and who are noticeably confused by my English accent. They pointedly ask me where the play is set and what accent Simon will be using in it, to which I answer "His own, I think. I'm not sure where he's from." It seemed like a strange question initially, coming as I do from the cultureless, Empire-defining south of England, where the voices that you used to hear on television all sounded like mine and you never have to worry about being misunderstood. That has rather brilliantly changed in my life time, however.
I have very little loyalty to that colourless English accent. We had it too good for too long and no one wants to hear another posh southerner waffle on. Whereas people who have interesting accents who are demonstratively from a place want to hear themselves represented. They want their theatre to bear that imprint, to be stamped with their very definite identity. Theatre that wears colours, that waves its flags. I don't have that. My watery southern Englishness, the rootless child of two Irish immigrants, my identity isn't really about being from Portslade or Basingstoke. I'm not sure the Haymarket is ready for the great Basingstoke play!
And I want my plays to be rootless in a way. This play is not set anywhere except Malachy's head. There are no doors or windows, there's no escape. He's already on stage when the audience come in. By the end he has been consumed by darkness. We can leave, he always has to stay there. Its a universal story. Simon uses his own Irish accent but he could be French, American, German, there are under-developed lonely men all over the world. We hear about them when they turn out to be serial killers, of course. But the ones that don't kill people, that don't do anything in fact, that make no noise, that don't even seem sad. The ones that drift unnoticed through lives, barely touching the sides, people with no one to talk to to and without the tools to communicate.
Malachy has those tools. He can talk. There are farmyards of donkeys missing their hind-legs because of him. But he has no one to talk to. As he babbles his way through the show it is himself he is talking to. Shut in in his sealed room, he can only be talking to himself. He is talking himself down from a ledge.
Its an interesting thing to do. It may come as a surprise to some of you but I'm not used to talking about myself. Complaining in a humorous manner about bus journeys and poor customer service for the benefit of the milling gannets of Facebook? Yes. Actually talking about my life, my feelings or my work? No, no, no - God no.
In many ways the content of the play is exactly that, its the puppet I'm venting through. Malachy says things about my life that I would never dare to. He's tidy too: sentences come out honed, lavishly tooled. There are jokes but there are also bits where he nakedly and unapologetically talks about grief and fear and loneliness. The play isn't directly autobiographical - very little of it is taken from events in my life. But the feeling: the misery, the deflection, the isolation, the bone-deep malignant sadness is very much a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man.
I'm a lot better now by the way.
Which actually makes it rather easier to talk about. I never thought I'd out-run those feelings, and I don't think I ever will and I don't think I want to. The pain is a part of me. Its what you get to have at my age: white hair, wrinkles and a bit of sadness. But its nothing like it was and part of the reason for that is this play, which was like casting out demons. It all bubbled up in the writing. People have asked me if it was hard to write but the truth is it was the easiest thing I've ever written. It was the hardest thing to edit. It came in waves like a drill had burst an endless seam, and grizzled men waved their hats and shouted "thar she blows" as the filthy black stuff spurted out, barrel after barrel, tanker after tanker, ecological disaster after ecological disaster. They'll be shampooing my misery out of birds wings for years to come.
And that is also sort of what it is like talking on the phone to the befuddled journalists who call me John Patrick throughout and who are noticeably confused by my English accent. They pointedly ask me where the play is set and what accent Simon will be using in it, to which I answer "His own, I think. I'm not sure where he's from." It seemed like a strange question initially, coming as I do from the cultureless, Empire-defining south of England, where the voices that you used to hear on television all sounded like mine and you never have to worry about being misunderstood. That has rather brilliantly changed in my life time, however.
I have very little loyalty to that colourless English accent. We had it too good for too long and no one wants to hear another posh southerner waffle on. Whereas people who have interesting accents who are demonstratively from a place want to hear themselves represented. They want their theatre to bear that imprint, to be stamped with their very definite identity. Theatre that wears colours, that waves its flags. I don't have that. My watery southern Englishness, the rootless child of two Irish immigrants, my identity isn't really about being from Portslade or Basingstoke. I'm not sure the Haymarket is ready for the great Basingstoke play!
And I want my plays to be rootless in a way. This play is not set anywhere except Malachy's head. There are no doors or windows, there's no escape. He's already on stage when the audience come in. By the end he has been consumed by darkness. We can leave, he always has to stay there. Its a universal story. Simon uses his own Irish accent but he could be French, American, German, there are under-developed lonely men all over the world. We hear about them when they turn out to be serial killers, of course. But the ones that don't kill people, that don't do anything in fact, that make no noise, that don't even seem sad. The ones that drift unnoticed through lives, barely touching the sides, people with no one to talk to to and without the tools to communicate.
Malachy has those tools. He can talk. There are farmyards of donkeys missing their hind-legs because of him. But he has no one to talk to. As he babbles his way through the show it is himself he is talking to. Shut in in his sealed room, he can only be talking to himself. He is talking himself down from a ledge.
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