Call it millenarian hindsight, or simply hitting the big Four-Oh - which Dermot Bolger did last Saturday - but the man talks a lot these days in terms of decades. At the beginning of his 30s, he tells me, he got married and had the first of his two sons. The 1990s largely coincided with his deliberate folding of his Raven Arts press which he, and two business partners, replaced with New Island Books. It is also a decade since his first award-winning work for the stage, The Lament for Arthur Cleary, beautifully brought to the stage by director David Byrne for Wet Paint.
Although Bolger has another one-act play already written for Fishamble next year, he is reunited with Byrne for The Passion of Jerome, his fourth play for the Peacock, which opens next week. It's a spooky piece of anguished transcendence, set in one of the Ballymun towers. The Jerome of the title, a successful businessman, is a generous guy, shoring up his layabout brother and family in a flat he's doing up himself. It is also the venue for Jerome's gutsy extra-marital affair with his smart young receptionist from Dalkey.
The piece hinges on a kind of folk-religious ghost story. The flat is haunted by the poltergeist of a young suicided boy, who inflicts the stigmata of Christ into the hands of the apostate Jerome. The wounds, which keep opening up in his hands, blow Jerome's life apart, and sets the scene for a peculiar meditation on faith and morality. When I remark that the historical Jerome, author of the Vulgates, came long before the wave of stigmatics that began in the 12th century, Bolger waxes evasive: "Life is generally much simpler than people imagine. When I was a kid, I met a Jerome who was quite posh, so I always regarded it as a posh name. So it's just that I like the name, the historical St Jerome doesn't really relate to the play . . .
"This isn't a Catholic play, but when I began to write plays about 10 years ago, my idea was to look at things that made people uncomfortable. Looking at Dublin theatre 80 or 90 years ago, tastes and standards were set by a horse-Protestant elite. Forty years ago, it had shifted to a horse-Catholic elite, and now it's a horse-atheist elite. It seems that if you deal with Catholicism in this day and age, you have to be sneering and post-modern. There is this notion that people are afraid to explore religion because there's a sense that it's a cliched part of the past.
"God in the play isn't even a particularly nice character. He's this Big Brother presence who disrupts the life of those around him because they haven't bargained for his existence. Through the boy, he strips away everything in Jerome's life, makes him confront his past."
Where does Bolger himself stand on stigmata, or eh, even God? "Brian Moore once said he personally wasn't convinced by the existence of God, but he was fascinated by people who were, and my own stance would be the same. I never had an upbringing where I had to rebel against the Catholic Church, but it's quite interesting to go back and examine this material from a fresh point of view.
So why is it set in Ballymun? "Well, I know Ballymun, I live a mile from it, if I set it in Glenageary I wouldn't know my territory. When I was a kid, you'd walk up and half of Finglas were having picnics, watching the flats going up, and I was in school with kids from the flats. It's just a background area, and now they're being demolished.
"This is a very dark Ballymun in the play. These people from outside the area go in and talk about it in very ingrained, prejudicial terms, as if they're on safari. I'm dealing with prejudice: the way Jerome calls travellers `knackers', and so on. And although Ballymun is only three miles from Dublin, it might as well be in Siberia - this extraordinary mental thing in terms of geography on the north side, people get hazy after the Gate theatre."
"There is an interesting background portrait of Dublin at the end of the millennium in there, but there's a danger that the play - which is basically about an interior journey, as well as the possibility of spirituality in a secular world - can get read as some kind of commentary on the Celtic Tiger, which is very simplistic.
"People are often inclined to confuse the locale of my work with the themes, and reviews often come filtered by prejudices and political views. I started as a poet and used the landscape to get across intellectual and spiritual themes, notions of time and everything else, but most of the work isn't primarily a social commentary."
Despite his success - published by Penguin and Flamingo, translated into several languages, while the plays have a life of their own, with 28 productions of Arthur Cleary, and counting - Bolger is surprisingly modest. "I'll never make the big money like Roddy (Doyle) or Joe (O'Connor) who are good friends - but I'll never starve or be totally obscure either. I have a very nice network of serious readers in Ireland, Sweden, Portugal, and France and that's very sustaining." And of course he is a publisher himself in another life. Between 1977 and 1992, Raven produced about 140 titles: mainly poetry, also first novels and stories by Pat McCabe, Michael O'Loughlin, Paul Durcan, Sarah Berkeley and Eoin MacNamee. "After that, there was no need for Raven to exist with this huge explosion of interest in Irish writers, whereas when we started, we had a sense of living in an invisible place that wasn't being written about.
"Also, after the success of The Journey Home, which was extremely controversial, it caused a lot of anger in certain literary and academic quarters. It didn't affect me, but sometimes the Raven debut of some young poet would get hammered, and reading between the lines, it was an attack on me, and I didn't want this shite to come back on other people.
"When I'd finished with Raven, I was broke, and trying to buy a house and establish my family. As a result, looking back over my 30s, there have been gaps: an adaptation of Ulysses which couldn't be done for copyright reasons. A play linked into the X case which, because of a danger of contempt of court, Garry Hynes correctly decided not to stage."
There were also a number of film scripts which, for one Byzantine reason or another, never happened. The only film that got made, The Disappearance of Finbar, Bolger now utterly disowns. "I wrote scenes, of which lines would exist without context. It was supposed to be an adaptation of a futuristic novel set halfway between Havana and Dublin, and when I saw it, they had set it in Tallaght in the year now, and it was like a parody of Roddy's Family.
"I remember one fax from the director: `Everything's going fine, but there's a small problem: the Germans want more philosophy, the Swedes want more scenery, the English want the grammar corrected, and the Americans want more sex.' In film, you're not a screenwriter, you're a screen facilitator. The nice thing about the Abbey is, the playwright's vision is central."
Father's Music - his last novel, a queasy thriller about a young English girl, who gets involved with the complex character of a Dublin thug - was written over nine months in a small room in All Hallows seminary. "After it, I had lost two stone and was hospitalised for heart tests. It was written to a deadline and it grew into a big book, so I ran into health problems, but it was just a bit of a scare. Now I get certain hours of sleep, I need certain conditions to work. To me now, excitement is having two digestive biscuits with my Horlicks in the evening."
The scare led to his devising Finbar's Hotel - "the simplest way to write novels: get other people to write them for you!" The result was the cheeky conceit of Finbar's Hotel, a multi-authored novel with chapters relay-written by himself and O'Connor, Doyle, Hugo Hamilton, Colm Toibin, Anne Enright and Jennifer Johnston. It was an enormously successful book, now translated into seven languages - including Serbian - and a sequel is due out in September, with chapters written by Maeve Binchy, Clare Boylan and Deirdre Purcell, amongst others. It's just one of a series of runanaway successes for New Island, which now has about 50 titles to its credit: playscripts like Bolger's or Donal O Kelly's Catal- pa; political memoirs from Fergus Finlay and Phillis Brown, wife of Noel; almost all of Fintan O'Toole's books, and best-sellers such as Nuala O Faolain's Are you Somebody? and O'Connor's Secret Life of the Irish Male.
"I'm half-way through another novel, so as soon as Jerome is up and running, there are three novels I want to get back to. One is a very soft, love story. One is a controversial political novel, and the new one is a stranger sort of ghosty novel, which I don't want to talk about.
"Maybe there are only X numbers of years left to write them in. But definitely, the next decade is for me, the things I want to do."
The Passion Of Jerome opens at The Peacock next Wednesday.
