Joseph Long: Frank, let’s start with your most recent play, Mutabilitie. It was first performed at the National Theatre, London, in November 1997. You’d worked before at the National, with your adaptation of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm in 1987, and again in the spring of last year with Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle. Did the National commission Mutabilitie?
Frank McGuinness: No. It was not commissioned by the National. I’d been working on it for about ten years and had let it go. It had been commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and they were not happy with the drafts I’d done. I had to leave them behind and I did the play alone, for five years. And then I talked to Trevor Nunn, about 1989, about doing a play about Ireland and England. So when we met up again in ’96 — no, ’97 — he asked me about this and I told him about Mutabilitie, which I had actually finished. He had a look at it and he [10] decided that he’d like to direct it, and that he’d like to do it in the National.
Joseph Long: The play is a mixture of history and imagination. You set the play in Ireland in 1598. The character Edmund is the English poet Edmund Spenser, who did indeed spend many years of his life in Ireland, as Secretary to Lord Deputy Grey and as a high-ranking administrator, and who wrote a treatise about the Irish that we’d find very offensive today. You draw on these documents, you draw on history. And into that you bring the fantasy of William Shakespeare being in Ireland, with a band of travelling players, and the two of them meeting. What is the sense of that encounter, the meeting between Edmund and William?
Frank McGuinness: I think that they represent two very different types of the English imagination. I think that Spenser is, on the surface, an untroubled creative artist, very much in the service of the imperial power. When you go beneath that surface, you discover raging terrors and disturbances, which are very clearly present when you do start to probe beneath. I think he was a man who had a desperate struggle with his own psyche, with his own soul. But he had to keep a firm grip, he had to regulate his conscience in order to carry out the policies of the Crown that he served, the policies of Elizabeth’s government. Then with Shakespeare, I think you get a much more diverse, a much more liberated consciousness, a much more challenging, invigorating imagination, because he was in the process of inventing the theatre. And at the same time, in Shakespeare there are desperate contradictions, all the way through the work, and these contradictions resolve themselves quite helpfully in characters that he creates. But when I was trying to create him, I had, very deliberately, an idea that he would practically change character in every scene he was in. He moves from a man who was, through force of circumstances, absolutely helpless ...
Joseph Long: He’s fished out of the river early in the play and saved by Edmund, he has a fever ...
Frank McGuinness: He’s out of self-control by reason of his illness. He moves, in the end, to being a man absolutely in command of himself and of his destiny and of his art, in a way that Edmund in the end loses all that control. It’s a very basic medieval idea, the Wheel of Fortune, the man at the top, at the beginning, goes to the bottom, the man at the bottom, at the beginning, goes to the top. And that was, again, a recognition of how deeply the Middle Ages did influence the Renaissance, in England especially. It wasn’t a clean break by any means. They still had this idea of Fortuna.
Joseph Long: The third party, in the play, is the group of the native Irish, living in the woods. There’s Sweeney, the King, there’s Queen Maeve, there’s the [11] remnants of a court, and in the centre of all that, the woman-poet, the File ...
Frank McGuinness: She makes her journey as well. She makes her artistic journey. At the beginning of the play, when she starts to recite, when she starts to create poetry, it is very much a bardic tradition, a very fixed, inherited literature, and by the end of the play she has travelled a journey in her own literary aspirations, in her own literary achievement, where she is writing a personal poetry, she is becoming much more her own voice. It is William, it is the character of William who gives her a confidence to speak for herself, rather than for her tribe or for her tradition. She is now managing to articulate what she herself is, in artistic terms.
] : Do you see this as a symbol of the relationship between the two cultures, the Irish and the British?
Frank McGuinness: Yes, I do, actually. I do very much see it as an articulation, on the Irish part, in the English language, of their own Irish identity and of their own independence. While at the same time acknowledging the debt to both traditions and to both inheritances — the Gaelic and the Englishspeaking.
Joseph Long: The Gaelic group are represented by a strange mix. There are legendary figures of old, King Sweeney, Queen Maeve, and there are suggestions of historical leaders of the time, Hugh. It’s a composite, collective character. Theys’re living in the woods, and even that can be read either as an historical reference, a reference to the conditions of the Irish Rising and the wars in Munster at the end of the fifteenth century, or as a mythological space. Why did you choose such diverse sources for that group?
Frank McGuinness: Largely because I wanted them to have enormous resonance, enormous stories to tell about themselves, stories that were effectively censored both by the art form of the theatre and also by their own refusal to recognise any longer what they were. They know in the play that they run the threat of their own extinction and of their own silencing and they choose, Sweeney and Maeve, they choose at the end to extinguish themselves rather than have others do it for them.
Joseph Long: Queen Maeve orders her two sons, Hugh and Niall, to slay them, to slay their own parents.
Frank McGuinness: They choose their own to kill them. This is their act of defiance, and in doing that they will live forever. That’s what I was trying to get at there, that they are not put under by the occupying forces, they choose rather to go themselves and to believe in a new order that will come after them. New stories to be told.
Joseph Long: A new order that will come through the file ...? [12]
Frank McGuinness: Through the file and Hugh, that marriage.
Joseph Long: In the production at the National, the closing tableau was made optimistic. Spenser’s child has escaped from the burning castle and is taken in by the Irish. In the production, he became the centre of a gesture of giving, there is an exchange of food. But in the writing, the ending is ambiguous, even negative.
Frank McGuinness: More ambiguous than negative, I think. The weapons are still on stage. When the Irish lay down their weapons, they still remain there, on the stage. It’s up to the production to choose what way they want to view that reality.
Joseph Long: Would you think it acceptable to read that as a reference to the present-day situation in Northern Ireland?
Frank McGuinness: Yes. There is a flicker of hope, but that’s all. It can be very easily extinguished. But it’s still there. There is a flicker of hope.
Joseph Long: You’ve said on another occasion that you see this play as the third of three plays, a kind of trilogy, in which you articulate, in different ways, the relationship between the two cultures, the two islands. There was Mary and Lizzie (3), and there was Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me (4). Could you be a bit more explicit about that?
Frank McGuinness: I certainly didn’t set out with a conscious design to write three plays about the two cultures. It’s more a retrospective thing, that I see it now as fulfilling. But there was certainly a conscious design in terms of structural ambitions. I wanted to write a great, big folk play in Mary and Lizzie, which was deeply influenced by Peer Gynt (5), coming from the Norwegian folk tradition, as Ibsen drew on there. That gave it its — for want of a better term — its sprawling nature, its ability to cross continents, its ability to go anywhere that it wanted to go. Then with Someone Who‘lll Watch Over Me ...
Joseph Long: That’s the play set in Beirut, with three hostages in the same prison cell, the Englishman, the Irishman, the American ...
Frank McGuinness: I was very consciously writing a chamber piece, a very enclosed, extremely stark prison piece. I wanted to go into nothing there but character and the self, the explorations of the self. And at the same time, a very close examination of the three main dialects of the English language as I understand them to be, the Irish, the English and the American. Then in Mutabilitie, it was very much an epic, but I was setting out to write a five-act Elizabethan play which would contain within it, of course, the sense of disturbance, the sense of stretching itself to breaking point. There are two occasions in the play when the breaking point is reached and explodes. The first is at the end of the third act, when you have eleven voices speaking to you, which is deliberately doing ultimate violence to the consecutiveness of the English language ... [13]
Joseph Long: Yes, at the start of the third act, the discourse is perfectly consecutive, there is a sermon from Edmund and there are long, coherent speeches from him and from Elizabeth, his wife. The tone is analytical and rational. But after Edmund leaves, the discourse becomes fragmented, the lines are single, short sentences, and in the end there are four different locations represented simultaneously on stage, with four dialogues intercut. It creates the effect of a polyphonic chorus with, as you say, eleven voices. You did something similar at the end of the third part of Observe the Sons of Ulster ..., but there the effect was different, it suggested a coming together, a regrouping, a shared fate. Whereas here, you were setting out to do violence, as you say, to the rationality of the English language, the language of a governing class ...
Frank McGuinness: Deliberately setting out to upset an audience as to what the hell is happening, what is coming at it, to make the English language sound, particularly to English people, something foreign. Something that they don’t know what is coming next. Then the second breaking point comes in the play within the play, when the Irish appear and start their chant of Troy.
Joseph Long: That’s in the fourth act, where, as it seems to me, you do pull out all the stops. There’s a storm, William conjures spirits and the Irish appear and chant the story of Hecuba and Cassandra. You place your main theme, the change of Fortune, inevitable change, at the heart of it : Chaos of change that none can flee, This earth is Mutabilitie. Of course, the play within the play is clearly political, the British Empire will fall as Troy fell. But was that the only reason why you chose to place the story of Troy at this point of the play?
Frank McGuinness: Here you have a reduction of the whole basis of Western civilisation, the story of Troy, told by the Irish, who are taking control of it and presenting it in their own particular voice. That is why it had to be accompanied by music, belted out, sung. These are the two breaking points, two linguistic threats to an audience.
Joseph Long: Your theatre is very much a theatre of language, sometimes of language pushed to the limit, almost to excess, certainly pushed beyond its daily use. In almost every play, there is a central importance given to song.
Frank McGuinness: The thing about the songs is, especially in Mutabilitie, but also in Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me and in Sons of Ulster, when they sing, they say what they mean. If you want to understand where Mutabilitie is going, what is really at the heart of it, look at the songs, at the poems, that is where the cards are on the table, where the characters put their cards on the table, [14] anyway. In Mutabilitie, the file’s song about losing her child, which comes when she is singing to Annas, that is the heart of the woman, that is when she is coming to terms with herself.
Joseph Long: Women are often at the heart of your plays. Your very first play, The Factory Girls, was about the protest of women, their attempt to assert themselves in their working place, in the factory which they occupy, to move away from the margins of society, from the margins of history, to claim their place. Mary and Lizzie presents two very marginal women, who set out from Ireland on a picaresque kind of journey and wind up being housekeepers for Friedrich Engels, when he was in Manchester.
Frank McGuinness: They did more than keep house for him. Let’s not be polite ...
Joseph Long: How did you latch on to these two women, originally?
Frank McGuinness: There is a note in Edmond Wilson’s To the Finland Station (6), where he mentions that Engels lived with two Irish women, Mary and Lizzie Burns, and that they gave him safe passage through Manchester, when he was researching for the Conditions of the Working Class — which is a book that changed the world. I felt that they were ideal for my kind of investigations, because they were absolutely excluded, written out of history. There are very few references to them. Yet they were responsible, ultimately, for the writing of that book and they did allow him to tell the truth. Engelss’ idea of the truth does contain some deeply racial stereotypes about the Irish people, which can be excused by reason of his compassion for the suffering of the Irish in Manchester, and can be excused by saying that he did write it in the middle of the nineteenth century. But there are other truths in it that go beyond excuses, and I think that it has been a terrible failing, particularly of the socialist imagination. They share in a terrible condescension to the Irish people, a terrible predictability in what they think of the Irish. And that is basically what I was trying to attack in the play, in the scene — the Dinner Party scene — where Jenny Marx reads out the particularly offensive parts about the Irish, and Mary and Lizzie meet it by singing She Moved through the Fair, which is their absolute answer to any accusation of inferiority, cultural inferiority. They meet these attacks with their own art, which is song.
Joseph Long: It’s a song about love, about sorrow and innocence, an old folk song. The play is a play of serious intent, at the same time it’s a very playful piece. It plays with theatrical forms and is, at times, very funny. The dinner scene — Dinner with Karl and Jenny — is a caricature of Noel Coward, of a theatre of social manners. You parody a whole gamut of theatrical forms. The final scene is epic in its vision, a tableau outside of real time, where you evoke the collective experience of women through history, their marginalisation, their repression. [15]
Frank McGuinness: The intention there, with Mary and Lizzie, was to write a big play. It’s as simple as that. I think the expectation was that I would follow up the Sons of Ulster (7) with a big commercial success. I had no intention of doing that, actually. I wanted to write an extremely large play, with a very big cast. I still rememember with delight the look of shock on preview audiences when they were confronted, at the Royal Shakespeare Company, with six near-naked women up trees, singing in Gaelic. I think the words “this will not move to the West End” were immediately voiced.
Joseph Long: So the play was provocative in its form, in its themes and even in the circumstances of its presentation — because you were putting it on with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the most respectable institution of British theatre.
Frank McGuinness: It’s part of the pleasure of putting plays on in England that you do not give the English audience what they believe they’re going to get when they go to an Irish play. Even with Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, which was very successful, even there I think they were quite taken aback by something I personally do believe in, which is a very deep love of the English language, going right back to Old English, and the celebration of it and of their literature. Again, that didn’t give them what they wanted, but they liked that image of themselves. They don’t like the image of themselves in Mary and Lizzie and in Mutabilitie. I ’m not in the business of, all the time, flattering them.
Joseph Long: You mentioned Peer Gynt, which was a strong influence on Mary and Lizzie, a formal influence at any rate. Peer Gynt is one of a number of adaptations you’ve done. There is a whole part of your work, in the late eighties, which was translations or adaptations of European plays (8). You see this as an intrinsic part of your own writing, not just a service of translation.
Frank McGuinness: Absolutely. It’s also a liberation. Irish literature has always been far too much defined in terms of its relationship with English literature. It’s been a part of the taming of the Irish by the English to do that. But in fact if you look at our major authors of this century, Os’Casey has much more in common with Brecht than he would with any other playwright, particularly in English. Joyce and Beckett looked to the continent. Joyce was deeply in touch with Dante and the Greeks, and Beckett with both French and Italian literature. I remain at home and try to make these great European playwrights part of our vocabulary. That is definitely a cultural ambition. But the private ambition is there too, which is to learn more about writing plays, really. Because these authors, Ibsen more than anybody, and Lorca, Strindberg, Chekhov, they teach you more about your craft. We are dealing with an art form, unapologetically dealing with an art form, and we need to know more about it. A painter has to go and look at [16] other traditions, you have to go and look at other theatres and know at least what you’re rejecting.
Joseph Long: So it’s partly an apprenticeship to your own craft ...
Frank McGuinness: Absolutely.
Joseph Long: ... and then there is the wider agenda that both Tom Kilroy and Brian Friel seem to be pursuing, consciously pursuing, through the eighties and which has to do with giving an Irish voice to these plays, which were certainly not written in English, but which have been, in a way, appropriated and are treated in Britain almost as part of the canon of British theatre, of a British theatre tradition, Chekhov and Ibsen especially. Both Kilroy and Friel have been quite explicit about their ambition to reclaim these authors from that anglicised tradition, to restate them in an Irish voice. That was part of your ambition too, wasn’t it?
Frank McGuinness: That is certainly the case for Three Sisters and for Peer Gynt. But what is significant is that I am now being invited by companies outside Ireland to do versions. And I do them as I hear them, and they do them as they want to speak them. That was the case with The Caucasian Chalk Circle, with Brecht, which was a multi-cultural cast ...
Joseph Long: That was the Theatre de Complicité, wasn’t it, who performed it last year at the National ...
Frank McGuinness: They have a policy of working with actors from all over the world. They’re an English company, but they’re multi-national. We had actors from France, from Vietnam, from Spain, from Bosnia, Sarajevo, from Ireland, from Scotland, from England, and they took my text as their multi-language. They spoke English with this text. Which was a great liberation for me. A Doll’s House was done with Celtic speakers, Scots, Irish, Welsh, and English. Miss Julie, which is going on in London next year, will probably be done with American speakers. I think it is the mark of a new confidence in Irish theatre that we are not frightened of that. We no longer need to assert that we have a right to do these plays, we take it for granted, of course we do it. And this is because, especially, of Tom Kilroy’s The Seagull (9). That was the beginning.
Joseph Long: Frank, you’ve moved into film now, you’ve written the screen play of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, which is to be released as a film in the next few months. There seems to me to be a very close kinship of imagination between the two of you, between the two writers there, for this particular play at least.
Frank McGuinness: I’d read the play so often, I knew it off by heart when I was starting work on the screen play. Brian was kind enough to tell me that he didn’t want anything to do with it, he trusted me with it. And of course the great heart of that play is the five women. I wanted to do, in the film, what I think Brian wanted to do in writing the play, which was to do them justice, [17] to serve them well. That is why the story of the film is exactly the same as the story of the play, in that it’s the story of these five women.
Joseph Long: It’s the story of five sisters who maintain a sense of homestead, a sense of place, for a single child, the love-child Michael, who is the narrative voice, the voice-over in the film. But at the same time, the action is set in a specific period and place, in 1936, in Donegal. It’s a period of change, there is the presence of the radio set, which signals a new world coming in, there are economic problems, there are changes, people are losing their jobs.
Frank McGuinness: The heart of the play is that these women are poor. It’s a play about poverty, about what is done to poor people because they do not have the money to implement their own will, to achieve their own ambitions. That is the great tragedy of the play, their poverty. Brian really does emphasise how hard they have to work, to keep a living together, and how very, very difficult it is to survive. And they don ‘t, at all. As a family, they don’t survive.
Joseph Long: Where is the future for you now, Frank? In the cinema or in the theatre?
Frank McGuinness: When I was starting off writing plays, I said yes to a lot of things. I have no regrets about them. But I said yes too often. With film I ’m saying no to a lot of things, and Is’ve no regrets about that as well. I ’ll wait for the right thing to come along. Dancing at Lughnasa was absolutely the right way to begin. Noel Pearson, who had produced Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, wanted me to do it, Brian Friel said it was OK to do it, so that was the go-ahead, but I ’ll be very, very careful about what I ’ll do next in film. Is’ve got The Wild Duck and Miss Julie for next year, and I ’m finishing my new play for the Abbey as well. So the theatre is still the main occupation.
Joseph Long: You’ve a full year ahead of you then, with a new version of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, with your version of Strindberg’s Miss Julie opening in London, and with the new play that you’re currently writing, also for the Abbey Theatre. What can you tell us about the new play?
Frank McGuinness: It’s called Dolly West’s Kitchen. It’s set in Donegal, during the Second World War. It’s about neutrality. And about the Gods arriving ...
Joseph Long: The Gods?
Frank McGuinness: The Americans. It’s about how the people cope with this arrival. The Americans were in Deny, in Northern Ireland, fourteen miles away. They used to come across the border, into Donegal. They were handsome and healthy and had money — and they were welcomed with open legs. That’s the new play. [18]
Joseph Long: Frank, where do you see Irish theatre going now? I know you follow very closely the work of younger writers, and there are many new, young writers now, over the past ten years. Where are they going? Where are younger writers now finding their own apprenticeships?
Frank McGuinness: There are so many voices coming through now, actually, that it’s very hard, in fact it’s impossible, to predict. And that’s good. It’s wrong to predict. They have to tell me where it’s going. I have to tell myself were I ’m going. They can’t be influenced entirely by my generation, by the generation before me, they’re going their own way. I think they’re seriously influenced by film. But they have absorbed the influences, and they’re tackling a lot of tough subjects. The good thing is the diversity. I do think Tom Murphy is a major influence on them, more than anybody else, he is. I think they will all admit that, if they’re honest. The one that I particularly have a great admiration for is Marina Carrol. I find hers a very disturbing, very liberating authenticity. And I have immense regard for her use of language. [19; End.]