Conor McPherson's characters could have walked straight out of Lucian Freud's paintings. That's why his plays are like nothing else on the stage, writes Dominic Dromgoole
In the theatre, as elsewhere, a new flavour can be intimidating. If we don't like it we spit it out and forget about it. But if it appeals, and seduces us into wanting more, then its newness arouses insecurities. How do we describe it? Usually, we look for similar work within the same form.
A new writer is described as an inheritor of Beckett's formalism or as showing signs of Stoppard's verbal pyrotechnics. Drawing on tradition is a safety blanket that mutes the rawness of the new. But with the work of Conor McPherson it is hard to see where it's coming from at all. Critics and theatre-goers have puzzled over the nature of his dramatic achievement. They are enthralled but not quite sure how.
McPherson writes monologues, or interwoven monologues or monologues with bursts of natter. Basically, monologues. After his first few plays critics started asking whether he could write dialogue, which seemed a tad unnecessary. After all, we don't ask Pinter to do fart jokes or Ray Cooney to do tragic. They do what they do. McPherson has grated a little chat over his plays, but they still revolve around the story emerging from a single figure. And his plays still seem starkly original.
The template for McPherson's work was set with his first show, This Lime Tree Bower, which he directed at the Bush Theatre in west London. When he was asked what he might need for a set he said: "Nothing." Then, imperturbably calm, he changed his mind. He told the technical staff that halfway through evacuating the previous show they should stop: that would be the set. It proved the perfect environment for his three solitary figures. Some companies make theatre theatrical by excruciating mime or remorseless reinforcement of their own presence; McPherson just presented a wrecked theatre. It's a style he has developed in collaboration with designers since: The Weir was a pub on fragile stilts adrift in a dark swirl, while Shining City, which is the Gate Theatre's contribution to Dublin Theatre Festival, is a window and some furniture in bleak isolation against the back walls. The theatre is the place where McPherson and his actors will do their thing, where they will spin stories, while an audience joins them to study that spun world.
If there is a route map at all for McPherson's theatre it is necessary to step outside his form and look at the work of the great artist Lucian Freud. The artist's studio is another room where true reality is observed and fake reality created.
As with McPherson, Freud's imaginative environment is his workplace. He doesn't need the endless flourishes, interventions and showy concepts of other artists to establish his presence. He just sets everything in his own studio. We know the perennial props of Freud's world: the red armchair past its best, the scrubbed pale floorboards, the skeletal brass bed with the white sheets. Our familiarity with these, our comfort with them, makes it easier to see past them and get to the main event: the flesh and the stories within it.
Within the framework of his theatre McPherson has developed an aesthetic as austere and dead-eyed as Freud's. Watching an early run of This Lime Tree Bower, I mentioned to McPherson that it seemed a tad plain. Three men speaking with little colour, little humour and less drive. It didn't worry him. He knew the audience would supply their own. He was right. The delivery was cool and clean, and the audience splashed colour all over it, laughing like drains all the while. McPherson understood the nature of an audience's transference. They listened to the stories and they watched the faces. The more still and held the faces, the more intrigued the spectators; the less expression, the deeper the mystery; the fewer clues, the harder audiences dug.
In directing his own work, and with his regular collaborator Ian Rickson, McPherson has finessed the art of the deadpan. His characters are capable of great animation: Stanley Townsend is giving a virtuoso display at moments in Shining City, just as Jim Norton did in The Weir. But they have their greatest weight and gravity when they are doing nothing: witness Brian Cox's tragic blend of childish mischief and exhausted life in St Nicholas or Dublin Carol and Michael McElhatton's Roman profile creased in confusion in Shining City. McPherson is a connoisseur of the human face.
His skill at portraiture is an inverse reflection of Freud's great genius at dramatic monologue. It's never hard to hear whispered monologues floating around Freud's greatest pictures. The many melancholic figures often seem to leak phrases of exhaustion from between the folds of flesh: "Why go on?" "How the bloody hell did I end up here?" "Go on, bog off." Happiness hardly ever seems to rear its head, although an occasional "What a great shag that was" murmurs softly out of the oil. Occasionally, a more complicated and lengthy monologue is spoken. In a tight close-up of an old friend of mine, Michael Tree, Freud saw beyond the clubbable English gent to the sensitive spirit and fierce romantic who spent much of his life recovering from what he saw at the liberation of Belsen. Those and other ghosts haunt the picture.
In his portrait of Andrew Parker Bowles (as in Camilla Parker Bowles) in full military regalia, Freud dramatises the struggle for dignity of the world's number one cuckold. He observes the loss yet graciously allows Bowles to win the battle. In his absurdist head shot of Queen Elizabeth, ill-fitting crown perched precariously, we can hear the muttering of a humourless frump: "Why the bloody hell have I got this silly bloody thing on my head? I'm too old for all this, I really am. Why can't this silly bloody man get on with it?"
Ghosts are another common feature: explicit in McPherson, implicit in Freud. Ghosts are everywhere around the faces and stories of their characters: the ghosts of recent sensations, of lost memories, of griefs and guilts. They flush and quicken the complexions. The dynamic of Shining City is one shared by much of Freud's work. It is the difficulty, sometimes the impossibility, of clearing pain or rage from the soul.
McPherson, with his philosophic clarity, posits a logical problem. If great pain or rage is an energy, and if, as physics inescapably instructs us, such energy cannot disappear, but only transform, then, when we are healed of our problems, when we get better, where does that pain or rage go?
Shining City delineates the transfer of such energies from patient to therapist. In this play, as in The Weir, ghosts are used as the clearest theatrical emblem of this energy. In Freud's work it often seems that such pain or rage never escapes: it just impacts into the flesh, where it is absorbed, never to escape, like an infinite number of twisted genies trapped in the wreckage of each burst blood vessel.
The comparison to Freud is fallible but a pointer. McPherson, it seems, is attempting a new form of dramatic portraiture. The pleasure, as with Freud, is in looking at the face and listening to the story. Then looking harder and listening harder. And, if we're lucky, catching that brief, hair-raising moment when the face we're inspecting disappears and is replaced, for an instant, by our own.
Shining City opens at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, tomorrow as part of Dublin Theatre Festival
