Conor McPherson is celebrated as the king of the ghost story, thanks to spine-tingling and critically acclaimed plays such as The Weir and The Seafarer. But it would be fair to say that he has remained a writer for the cognoscenti without ever becoming a mainstream favourite. Until now that is.
The Irish playwright’s particular blend of dark realism and haunting unease is set to be the talk of the summer, thanks to a eagerly awaited new play centred on the music of Bob Dylan and the broadcast of a first original television series.
The latter production, Paula, begins on BBC2 on 25 May and is as unsettling a piece of drama as McPherson has created. It is the story of an outwardly respectable young chemistry teacher (Denise Gough) who finds her life spiralling rapidly out of control after she comes into contact with James, a charismatic drifter (Tom Hughes, who played Prince Albert in the ITV drama Victoria). Paula is a dark and addictive tale of desire, obsession and madness, notable for the excellence of its performances and the expertly sustained sense of menace that seeps through even the most straightforward of encounters.
“There is something very dark about it,” agrees McPherson. “The thing about Paula as a character is that her life has no guiding framework. On the outside it looks as though it does because she is surrounded by all the trappings of her status, but she’s existentially a very free person and that’s incredibly dangerous because once she feels threatened then all bets are off. That was one of the most exciting parts of the story, that sense that she and James are on a collision course.”
As always with McPherson, there is a strong supernatural undertow running through every action. James is haunted, possibly literally, by events in his past while Paula’s basement reverberates with strange noises. Rats? Or something more sinister? McPherson isn’t saying.
“I know this sounds a bit ironic but I think ultimately having a supernatural element makes things feel more real,” he says. “We’ve all felt spooked in our own houses late at night or heard a noise and thought what if I walk into that room and there’s someone there? That’s part of being alive and I think by introducing that element you round out the characters and add another layer of uncertainty, which makes the game more fun.”
Does he feel that such tricks of tone are more common in Irish storytelling, where the veil between the living and the dead is more permeable? “Absolutely – Ireland is still a country where 80% or 90% of the population describe themselves as Catholic, and Catholicism is a very superstitious religion,” he says.
“Irish culture has always been very in touch with the mystery of what lies beyond and as a writer or artist in Ireland you are bound to consider these things – I choose to let them all in.”
That said there are rules to his deployment of such elements. “Supernatural things and stories need to be treated with a shrug of indifference,” he says. “If you start playing music or trying too hard then you enter someone else’s garden – your story becomes part of the horror genre and then you have to start playing by those rules.”
In the past McPherson has been accused of populating his plays almost entirely with male characters, a fact he acknowledges somewhat ruefully. “I can’t help but be aware that as a male writer I’ve drifted towards an expression of maleness in my work. But maybe as I’ve got older I’ve become a little bit more confident and able to tell stories from a female point of view.” There’s a pause. “One of the hang-ups I’ve had is that the characters at the centre of my stories are usually messy.
“I understand how men’s lives are messy and finally I allowed myself to say, ‘well, so are women’s lives’. There’s a tendency in Ireland especially to see women as sensible, the idea that it’s the women who clean up the mess that men make, so it was nicely liberating to say, ‘no, actually we’re all equally messy’ and we should acknowledge that, which I think Paula does.”
His latest play, Girl From The North Country, which will open at the Old Vic in London in July, is something else again: a chance to experiment with form and tone. It uses Dylan’s songbook as a jumping off point for a story about a couple running a guesthouse in Duluth, Minnesota, in the 1930s.
“It’s about a week in their lives with the guests passing through, and we have this beautiful opportunity to use Dylan’s songs as part of that. There’s no musical instruments used that wouldn’t have been there in the 30s and that allows us to reveal the prehistory, as it were, of those songs from before Dylan was born, almost as though that music flowed from the airwaves and into his DNA.”
The project came about when the singer’s record company approached McPherson, “and I came up with a few pages of a possible story”, he says. “They showed that to Bob Dylan and his manager and they said we could use whatever music we wanted and in whatever way, which was a great privilege. In the end we’ve used about 16 to 18 songs.”
McPherson’s keen to stress, however, that this is no greatest hits jukebox musical. “Not at all – there’s no real concession here to ‘commerciality’ or sense that you have to use the greatest hits. There are five that everyone will definitely have heard but a lot of them, I think, would be new to everyone except Dylan buffs. I think those fans will get a lot of enjoyment out of seeing how they’re used.”
Was he a Dylan buff himself? “I’m a big music fan and was always aware of Dylan but only got deeply into his music recently,” McPherson says. “I think that is a good place to come from because you end up digging through a lot of albums and going on this fascinating journey, which is lovely way of allowing his music to meet what I’m doing and vice versa.
I see it as a great opportunity to try something I’ve never done before and hopefully the audience will care about the characters and be moved and transported by the experience.”
Whatever the result, McPherson admits that it will be far more nerve-racking than his experience of writing for television. “Working on Paula was really absorbing and the freedom I was given to tell the story was wonderful but it’s easy to move on. I don’t have to watch it if I don’t want to and I won’t be able to tell who else watches it or how they respond to it.
“But with the Dylan thing I’ll be directing it as well which means I’ll be in the audience every night and that is nerve-racking. In some ways it’s great because you get to see how an audience connects with the work but I’ll still be shaking under my baseball cap.”
Paula starts on BBC2 at 9pm on 25 May. Girl from the North Country opens at the Old Vic in July.
GHOSTS AND DEVILS: MCPHERSON’S BIG HITS
The Weir (1997) The play that made McPherson’s name – starring Dervla Kirwan and Brian Cox, right – a blend of Irish folklore and ghost stories that also serves as a melancholy examination of connections missed and relationships lost.
Shining City (2004) Another ghost story in which a widower, haunted by his dead wife, seeks answers from his therapist, a former priest.
The Seafarer (2006) On Christmas Eve in a coastal suburb north of Dublin the devil plays poker for a man’s soul in one of McPherson’s funniest and bleakest works. The play is named after an Anglo-Saxon poem.
The Night Alive (2013) McPherson abandons the supernatural in this sad, affecting story of male loneliness and how small acts of kindness can destroy as much as save.
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