The Dubliner Magazine: Conor McPherson: What's All The Fuss About?

Conor McPherson is hailed as the greatest young dramatist of his generation... why?

Ireland once produced the world's greatest dramatists. Whatever happened to that glorious reputation? Most young playwrights wouldn't know a plot point if a curtain fell on them, and their stock-in-trade is drink-fuelled cliche. Look at the work of Conor McPherson, whose obsessions are "isolation and silence." His enormous success is a mystery to people who like plays with incident and original humour.

McPherson grew up in Dublin. His father was an accountant and his mother ran a shoe shop. The seminal experience of his childhood was hanging out with his grandfather in Leitrim: it "gave me a chance to see what it must be like to spend all your time alone." (McPherson has a post-graduate degree in philosophy, which allows him to conflate ideas like being alone and being in company.) He started out by copying David Mamet, but soon found inspiration closer to home. You can see the influence of Brian Friel's Faith Healer in McPherson's early plays – indeed, an obsession with monologue still plagues his work. But the critics are oblivious to this flaw, or unwilling to call the emperor naked.

McPherson's first play, The Lime Tree Bower, was hailed as a masterpiece when he was only 23. His first film, I Went Down, was the most successful independent movie ever produced in this country - thanks to wonderful performances by Brendan Gleeson and Peter McDonald. But it was The Weir's success in London and New York that really made the Dubliner's reputation.

Pity the hack who wonders why.

When his directorial debut did not leave critics ejaculating, McPherson moaned to the Observer, "The response to Saltwater in Ireland was very muted, which I thought was strange really. In other countries the response was very, very strong and we won awards in Spanish speaking countries. In German speaking countries, where the thing was sub-titled, it was sort of feted as a very important Irish film, whereas in Ireland everybody was like 'It's just another Irish movie.'"

That's not quite true. Saltwater is just another bad Irish movie.

The low point of McPherson's career was late last year, after Saltwater opened and his short play Come on Over ran alongside new work by Neil Jordan and Brian Friel at the Gate, where Michael Colgan has long championed McPherson. The work by Jordan (White Horses) and Friel (The Yalta Game) was mediocre, but it did keep punters awake. McPherson put paper bags on the heads of his actors.

At the time, Fintan O'Toole noted that "engagement with the audience is largely shunned in favour of a stark appraisal of the impossibility of communication." Or to put it another way: will the person who put this self-indulgent crap on a professional stage please stop mugging the Irish public?

Michael Colgan has done a lot for Irish theatre. But he has failed to find a young writer with the sort of talent that deserves a charismatic champion. And all the commentary on Colgan's battle with the Arts Council missed the real point: to continue getting Arts Council funding, the Gate is obliged to nurture new talent. If you can't find new talent, what are you going to do? Invent it? There may be another explanation.

A veteran director - who insists on anonymity for obvious reasons - remembers "crowds booing and hissing at a Pinter play in the Gate. They just didn't buy into it. Today's Gate audiences nod in homage to the theatre's history, and sink back into the lovely seats that came all the way from France. But they never say what they think anymore. Look at the gushing reviews for the theatre, and you'll hardly find a bad word said. But my, how the lemons have come and gone. The whooping and cheering for Conor has as much to do with inviolability as the desperation to find new talent."

These days Conor McPherson is off the drink, after a massive alcohol-related organ shutdown. He's directing the American premiere of Dublin Carol in New York next January, and in the meantime the early monologue Rum and Vodka has been revived for Irish-American audiences. True to form, McPherson has been mouthing off about the Irish to foreign publications. In the process he has exposed his work for what it is: hackneyed, monotonous and misanthropic.

"In Ireland everything revolves around drinking," McPherson told the Village Voice last week. "Drinking to the point where it alters your state. It's the fuel behind everything that happens. But I found that drink as a device made it easy to write characters. If they're drinking, you can have them do and say things that they ordinarily wouldn't. You don't have to spend two hours getting them to frankness: 'You know, you're a fucking asshole!'"

That's one of the most acclaimed Irish dramatists, admitting the reason why his characters are often shit-faced. Later in the same interview, McPherson said he is "interested" in "how sad drink makes people and they don't even know if you don't drink, it's sort of weird and unusual in Ireland. Interestingly, since I stopped drinking I don't have the urge to write about drunk people. Now I find them quite boring."

McPherson's characters resemble real people in the same way that a bellicose drunk says things that sound almost reasonable. Behind the booze-fuelled rant is the hollow sound of a man with little to say.

One day, Conor McPherson may emerge as a writer worthy of his reputation. Admitting that his own characters are boring is part of that process, and you have to admire him for having the courage to confront the problem. In the meantime, the question remains: how did the plays of Conor McPherson fool so many people for such a long time?

Published in the November 2002 edition of The Dubliner magazine