Nancy Harris: ‘There’s something about other people’s weddings that tell us where we’re at in our lives’

Cynthia, who’s a TV presenter, receives a visit from her less successful sister – and is surprised to see her step into a winning new light: Casey has brought home an impressive boyfriend who seems impossibly attentive to her every whim.

Somewhere Out There You, Nancy Harris’s new play for the Abbey Theatre, may play to the rhythms of a romantic comedy, but it’s just as interested in family dynamics. Isn’t Casey’s role in the family to be a failure?

“You know when you go to a wedding and it’s suddenly about, ‘Why haven’t I got anybody?’” Harris says with a laugh. “It’s not at all about the people getting married. There’s something about weddings that tell us where we’re at in our lives.”

In No Romance, her last play for the Abbey Theatre, in 2011, Harris wrote an extraordinary scene in which a woman approached a photographer to take nude pictures of her. She confided that she had breast cancer and wanted to have images of her body, unscarred before treatment, to give to her boyfriend. “It’s about wanting to be bigger than the life that you’re in,” Harris says. “We somehow feel that we’ll be elevated through a love story, but is that true? Are we elevated by love or is it just another trap?”

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Such questions didn’t always seem weighty enough for a play. Back in 2011, Harris told Irish Theatre Magazine it was taboo to admit you wanted to write about sex and relationships.

Nearly every play I’ve written has had children in it, and I didn’t know why that is

It had nothing to do with the subjects themselves. “Look at the Royal Court in the 1990s,” she says, flagging a period when sex was seen warped into cold transactions or cruel revenge, in plays like Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan, Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking. Instead it was the building that made the endeavour feel forbidden. The Abbey probably struck many people at the time as more a prestige producer of the theatrical canon, where only “big” national plays were considered ambitious.

“There was a lot of talk that women write plays about relationships, and there was a sense that relationships were kind of small. I was nervous having my first original play look at society after the economic crash through sex and relationships. In the context of a play at the national theatre, are relationships a worthy subject or would I be criticised?” she says. (At one point in No Romance, a character made the darkly comic suggestion that an Irish airline would lose business if abortion were legalised. The play may have been more in tune with national anxieties than people realised.)

Harris is aware of the way such career moves can become potential pitfalls. At the time of the Waking the Feminists outcry, in the mid-2010s, her play Baddies, a fairy-tale-flipping musical for young audiences that she created with the composer Marc Teitler, was being produced by the Unicorn Theatre in London. The play had a worrying correlation with a much-criticised programme recently announced by the Abbey: the only scheduled work written by a woman was a play for young audiences. “One of the arguments at the time was that women were allowed only to write plays for children. This was one of the few ways that women’s work was considered valuable,” she says.

During a public meeting at the Abbey, Harris spoke eloquently about the danger of the industry derailing women’s playwriting careers. It looked as if she had established good connections abroad: aside from Baddies, her ingenious psychological thriller Our New Girl had premiered at the Bush Theatre in London and received a New York production by the prestigious off-Broadway company Atlantic. Did she feel she could speak out about theatre in Ireland without risking too much?

There was a lot of talk that women write plays about relationships, and there was a sense that relationships were kind of small

“No, I was terrified,” she says. “It had been a few years since Our New Girl had been on. I didn’t have another project lined up. I had plays turned down. I felt, ‘I might as well speak, because the play isn’t being put on anyway’.”

After Selina Cartmell took over at Dublin’s other main theatre, the Gate, Harris became something like a writer-in-residence, with three of her plays produced there in four years – impressive numbers for an institution whose recent programming model had been overwhelmingly classical in focus. Harris was arguably the first living playwright to have a regular association with the Gate Theatre since Brian Friel’s engagement there between the late 1990s and late 2000s.

There is a real victim at the end of this, so should we be making entertainment out of it?

Friel used that period to dive deep into the repertoire of Anton Chekhov. Harris gave the Gate a visually arresting dance-play adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Red Shoes plus the Irish premieres of Our New Girl and a second pyschological thriller, The Beacon, about a famous artist suspected of murdering her husband. (A lot of Harris’s work has featured characters who are artists. In Somewhere Out There You, Casey’s boyfriend is described as a poet.)

“Nearly every play I’ve written has had children in it too, and I didn’t know why that is,” she says. The bold, unsettling idea for Our New Girl, a play where a cheating husband takes advantage of his wife’s insecurities about parenthood, came from teasing what would happen to a woman who discovered too late that motherhood wasn’t for her.

“I wanted to go in with the horror tropes and then slightly wrongfoot us: we’ve all been looking at the child, but then realising there is something going on with the mother, and realising the mother just doesn’t like her child. Motherhood is not a position she’s equipped for, and how do you get out of that situation? That’s the ultimate horror.”

Harris knows that, as a genre, psychological thrillers aren’t considered nearly as high an artform as the family sagas of modern European masterpieces. “I definitely was aware that thrillers were looked down as popular culture in a way that a Chekhov play might not be. I was trying to see if you can write something really serious in a psychological thriller, such as a mother not liking her child. Can you use the constructs of a thing like a psychological thriller and say something really serious?” she says.

We somehow feel that we’ll be elevated through a love story, but is that true? Are we elevated by love or is it just another trap?

With the romantic comedy of Somewhere Out There You, Harris is again aiming to use an “unserious” genre to say something serious, just as Nora Ephron’s films might stand out for their wisdom, or characters such as Bridget Jones (whom the playwright points out is “loved for being goofy and herself”) show a relatable desire to be embraced for their imperfections.

Harris was also interested in writing about the way families work, and what happens when people step outside what’s expected of them. Cynthia is played by Danielle Galligan, who appears in the Netflix fantasy drama Shadow and Bone. Casey’s sense of romance is left to the newcomer Eimear Keating to portray. “Eimear can embody a desire for life to be bigger than what people see for her, a desire to step out from what everybody has decided for her,” Harris says. “She has this incredible ability to make you believe that.”

The arrival of her attentive, attractive new boyfriend – played by Cameron Cuffe, last seen among a race of extraterrestrially strong aliens in the television science-fiction series Krypton – “destabilises Cynthia’s place in the world: ‘How can my sister, who is not meant to be happy, be successful? What does that say about me?’”

Harris plays are like a series of searching questions that ask whether taking popular narratives at face value – be they about family relationships, love or crime, or even about the world as we imagine it through fairy tales – could be a toxic impulse. “I’m interrogating my slightly worst instincts,” Harris says of the stories she enjoys. “There is a real victim at the end of this, so should we be making entertainment out of it?”

Somewhere Out There You is at the Abbey Theatre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, from Tuesday, October 3rd, until Saturday, November 4th, with previews from Wednesday, September 27th