Blackwater Lightship: ‘The past still has an effect on us in the present’

There’s something innately theatrical about its journey. Back in 2019, the adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship was written, the funding was secured, and it was all set for the 2020 Dublin Theatre Festival, marking the novel’s 21st anniversary. “Then the rollershutters came down. We’ve been waiting for this for three years,” says producer Donal Shiels of Verdant Productions. “This is how long the return to work is taking. But we’re thrilled it’s finally happening.”

After its long wait in the wings, the big show, a world premiere with big meaty themes, big cast and lots of action and stage business, will open at the Gaiety Theatre as part of Dublin Theatre Festival. Dim the lights.

Shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize, Tóibín’s complex family drama sees three generations of women, Helen, her mother Lily and grandmother Dora, dealing with the illness and impending death of her brother, Declan, aged 29.

In a rehearsal space just north of Dublin city, the stage is set up with great verisimilitude: an actual fridge, range, cooker, lots of furniture; a lectern indicates the banisters-to-come. Director David Horan sits at a desk, watching the cast work through a substantial scene: lots of coming and going, moments of humour and pathos, a mix of intimacy and big drama. Rachel O’Byrne plays Helen and David Rawle Declan, Karen Ardiff their mother, and Ruth McCabe their grandmother, in whose coastal Co Wexford house they are all gathered, along with Declan’s friends Larry (Donncha O’Dea) and Paul (Will O’Connell). Billie Traynor is a nosy neighbour, both pointed and comic. “There’s an electricity that happens when they start really listening to each other and moving off each other, and they’re really well-rounded characters,” says Horan of his cast, chatting afterwards.

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He observes “You’ve seen the last scene which is the saddest. We really try and keep that at bay because people are too busy coping earlier in the play. And it’s also how you respond in a difficult moment. With humour, with stories.” As children they spent months in that house while their father was dying in hospital, the secrecy surrounding which has been an enduring source of family pain and dysfunction. Now they’re reunited, having learnt Declan has HIV/Aids.

“I think Colm Tóibín’s great insight is around shame, and an inability to talk about emotion,” says Horan. “The grief and the abandonment the young children felt in the past is in some way speaking to the shame and hushed whispers around being gay in Ireland at that time,” and their father’s death earlier. “There are things they can’t talk about.”

‘Instantly theatrical’

He loved the novel back in 1999. “I thought it was instantly theatrical because these characters are forced into space with each other for a finite amount of time. There’s a lot of dialogue. And I thought the presence of a young man with HIV/Aids on stage is really special for an audience. But I wouldn’t have known how to adapt it at that point myself.”

Horan has since adapted work from Carolanne Duffy’s poems to Jane Austen’s Lady Susan; Class, the 2017 play he wrote with Iseult Golden, has been acclaimed and successful (and translated into nine languages).

After the 2015 marriage referendum, Horan says, “I kept remembering the novel, thinking that was less than 20 years ago, and look at how much has changed. Gay marriage was a pipedream in the book. But then there’s understanding why we’d come so far. Why were things the way they were? Even though it was current and totally vital at the time, I think this book already had insight into how far we’d come, and where this inability to talk about emotion had come from in Irish society. The Blackwater Lightship is the lighthouse that’s not there anymore. On one level, that’s the father but, on another, that’s the old certainties drifting away on us, because secular Ireland was emerging. But to look back now, I don’t know if younger generations can understand why it was the way it was, what older generations went through, how far they’ve come. The past still has an effect on us in the present. Of course it does.

“That’s why it’s important now, because we’re all Helen. We’re all catching up with ourselves and yet still deeply affected, unable to talk about things, and not necessarily sure why. It has something to do with the generations. What’s happened before. There’d be a lot of people want to leave the past where it is.” The novel is set in a world that is just about to open up. “The mother and baby homes hasn’t quite come out. They don’t know about that stuff yet.”

In 2022, HIV/Aids is no longer a death sentence, and “there’s a job of awareness to be done in contemporary society. This isn’t a story about that. This is a story about struggling to speak about these things, and having open, honest conversations. And there’s the mad new irony that we all understand again what it’s like to be scared of a virus.”

Another irony of the play is you have “a house with three mothers and two gay friends, and the best mothers on stage are the two gay friends. They’ve been caring for him a couple of years, whereas the women have all been blindsided. By the end of the play, they’re beginning to get up to speed, but earlier on, they’re reeling and want to be helpful.”

When producer Shiels read Horan’s adaptation, “it just came off the page really clearly and really easily. It was just good theatre.”

‘Past as weapon’

For the stage version of The Blackwater Lightship, Horan jumps straight to the house by the sea and the heart of the action, bypassing earlier scenes including childhood flashbacks. This “lets the past come up as a weapon, and as a problem that needs to be addressed in the present”.

The novel has “quite dry prose” with “a lot of colour and complexity in the dialogue. And I thought, having Declan just be on stage would do the undercutting the clinical prose does in the book. It keeps the serious tone, even when there’s a lot of life and fun in the characters.

“It’s very simple and short and clear, the descriptive passages in the book, almost clinical, because of the gravity of the situation.” The dialogue is full of life, “actually, so much so I’ve had to pare that back, sometimes, to more active speech. Plays live on characters doing things to each other.” Here that involves all the characters having an effect on the lead character, Helen. ”Her dysfunctional relationship with her mother is so well-imagined that when the mother is nice to her it’s almost more upsetting. And that’s all really actable.

“Helen is the one who can’t get over the abandonment that she felt as a child. So the central story in the play is actually the mother and the daughter figuring out their estrangement, alongside the discovery of Declan’s illness, and learning to care for him. Helen knew he was gay, but the mother and grandmother didn’t acknowledge that.”

Adapting someone else’s work is “a different muscle” in writing. “What I needed at some point was to let myself free from the book and make it a play. I would still say 80 per cent of the words in the play are Colm’s but it was important at some point to let myself write new words as well. In the novel, you know everything all the time as you’re going along. Whereas in the play, there’s a release of information, to hopefully create questions for the audience that you will answer later on.”

Aside from permission to adapt from Tóibín, the production has had little contact with him. Horan thinks some friends of his saw a staged reading of scenes back in 2018. Otherwise, “he’s just left me to it”.

The novel was adapted into a film in 2004. “Angela Lansbury knows a good part, fair play to her,” says Horan. “But I think it’s difficult to take this uncompressed story and put it on screen. Screen wants to move through time and space. It gets restless if it’s trapped anywhere. And this story is actually is about confining and sticking people together and then they have to confront each other. I felt the play would be a better adaptation for the subject.

“I’ve actually turned it into a relatively well-made play, but hopefully a contemporary one with a lot of contemporary wit in it, and all the humour. Because the subject matter sounds really heavy, but [the humour] is in the novel, and hopefully it’s in the play. And of course, you laugh louder in the theatre than you would reading the book at home.”

The Blackwater Lightship, at the Gaiety Theatre, September 27-October 2. dublintheatrefestival.ie