People thrust into sudden trauma are familiar characters in Deirdre Kinahan's plays and in 'Bogboy', writes Peter Crawley,she brings the audience face-to-face with a dark complicity
‘THERE IS a boy buried in the bog at the back of my house,” says Deirdre Kinahan, mid-conversation, putting so little stress on the point that it only leaps out when listening back to the interview. Kinahan speaks in the same unhesitant rhythms of many of her characters – quick, calm, engaging and unselfconscious – and she has a similar tendency to let extraordinary statements slip out in the middle of otherwise ordinary moments.
It is not unusual, in the scenes that Kinahan creates, to find high drama smuggled into the quotidian. In her 2007 play, Hue and Cry, a believable conversation between bereaved cousins, one sensitive the other emotionally inarticulate, finally erupts into a spectacular dance of grief. With last year's Moment, her most ambitious play to date, a large family's secrets and tensions are built up in real time, unleashed just before the interval with a literally emetic force: a mother vomits, all hell breaks loose. In both cases, the highpoints eventually subside: everything is changed, yet is somehow completely the same, like a false alarm.
Her new play, Bogboy, is again about secrets that won't stay buried. In 2001, when Kinahan was out walking by a bog near her home in Meath, her attention was caught by a flash of colour in the sombre surrounds. "Bog land is a beautiful place," she says, "a very mystical place. It's dark and earthy; grays and browns. To see these bright flowers there was quite extraordinary." Next to those flowers she found a small memorial with a photograph of a young man, perhaps seventeen or twenty, taken long ago.
“You know those 1970s Polaroid colours? A bit grim. And it just dawned on me. He’s one of them.” In time, a Garda presence grew as digs intensified to discover one of “the disappeared”; those abducted, killed and secretly buried during the Troubles, mainly by the IRA. But no body was unearthed from the Meath bog, and gradually the efforts diminished. Days later, Kinahan returned to the site again, and saw that the details of the boy’s face had been erased by the sun and the rain. “That’s bizarre,” she thought. “He’s starting to disappear all over again.”
Kinahan is not a playwright to waste an idea. Ten years ago, when a handful of bleary-eyed playwrights turned over the short plays they had written overnight for Semper Fi Ireland's Within 24 Hours project, Kinahan's tender comedy Momentwas the most fully realised. Five years later it was given a full production by her own company Tall Tales, with some tweaking. Her thoughts about the secret of the bog found some expression in Knocknashee, in 2002, but in 2008 she revisited two of its characters – Brigit, a recovering drug addict, and Hughie, a rural loner – for an RTÉ radio play, also called Bogboy. It is, she says, a play about stolen futures.
“You’ve got three individuals whose lives have been taken from them in different ways. It’s quite a political play at one level, because it’s about the disappeared. Those people were ordinary people taken from their beds, or the street, brutally murdered and then buried in the South. We are so complicit in the story of the North, but we keep it at a distance.”
Generally, Kinahan concentrates more on feeling than politics, her ideas beginning with a character, or an image. “I’m quite an emotional individual,” she says. “The theatre I like has an emotional impact on me. I can admire political, intellectual theatre for what it is. But if it doesn’t impact emotionally on me, it doesn’t grab me in the same way.”
Nonetheless, Bogboy lingered with her for its sense of national narrative. Kinahan did not find out the identity of the boy buried somewhere in Meath. “I will research so far, and then I’ll stop,” she says. “I imagine a person and I go through their emotional journey. That’s very much what I do as a writer.” She also considered her environment and its awkward inaccessibility as a metaphor for a darker complicity.
"You don't find your way down these roads unless somebody local brings you," she says of the Meath bog. "There's somebody else involved – in the way that we're involved." People thrust into sudden trauma are familiar characters in Kinahan's plays, and she speaks matter-of-factly of the "grief zone" that stimulated the writing of Hue and Cryand Moment.
In 2004, her mother died, and not long after Kinahan lost a child with whom she was six-months pregnant. “I know I write about very ordinary people lost in situations that are outside their remit,” she says. “And what saves you in those times is a lot of love and a lot of humour. That’s what keeps you sane. These loops of denial and patterns of pretending that we all fall into when we try to cope with great trauma, that’s at the centre of an awful lot of my plays.”
Bogboy, like most of Kinahan's work, is written in a deceptively easy style by a writer strikingly alive to the surge and hesitations, the irruptions and swallowed sentiments of everyday speech. "I suppose it comes from three things," Kinahan says of her talent for voices. "The first is a lifetime of gawking. My mother always said, I watch, listen and imagine all the time. It's just something I do. I also started off as an actress. My whole focus from childhood through dramsoc was performance, so when I'm writing, I'm playing out all the parts. Then, in terms of style, sometimes that naturalistic voice informs it. Sometimes, though, the style just comes."
She agrees that she writes comedy and tragedy in a minor key ( Hue and Cry,for instance, ends with a tiny, devastating, "Nah"). "I think that's what happens in life," she says. "It's the same at the end of Moment: 'I'll mark the chart'. They all just go back to the way they were."
Conversely, Tall Tales, the theatre company she founded in 1997 with Maureen Collender, has developed away from its origins as a platform for women's writing. For two years it has been the resident company with Solstice Arts Centre, a strategic partnership that has broadened its capacity ( Moment, with nine characters, couldn't have been staged without it) but has also altered its agenda – recently Tall Tales staged an Alan Bennett play for nursing home audiences. "We have moved away from the focus being very much on female writing," Kinahan says, admitting that the focus has shifted more keenly towards her own writing.
Next year, though, the company plans to stage a show devised by Mark O’Halloran and Muirne Bloomer. “In the theatre, no matter what your role is, you’re constantly evolving.” For a writer, though, evolution requires consistency. “You only learn by putting something onstage,” Kinahan reasons. “Otherwise it’s an academic exercise. I can understand it’s hard for companies – it costs a fortune to put on a new play. But you won’t get really good new writing unless there is an investment in it.”
It is also where we find the quiet jolts to a nation's system and, sometimes, its low-key resolutions. "Even though I write about dark things," says Kinahan. "I do try to have hope and humour. What am I saying in Bogboy? I suppose it's about the boy going home. I suppose it's asking when are we going to reconnect, when are we going to get through, when are we going to move on?"
Bogboy, directed by Jo Mangan, opens in Project Arts Centre on June 30 and runs until July 10. Moment will tour to London's Bush theatre in February
