Lines in the strand

Playwright Abby Spallen writes complex, interesting roles for women, not for ideological reasons, but simply because she wants to do goood work, writes SARA KEATING

'THE MAKE-UP of a town is . . . not heroes and not villains, not grand gestures nor that but just . . . people trying to get by," one of the vitriolic women in Abby Spallen's new play, Strandline, explains. "Whatever the ones in a town's been up to, they're just all trying to scratch on . . . trying to survive these times and maybe have a bit of craic. With weddings and drinking and fights and feuds. And sometimes bad things get done. Sometimes bad things get done . . . Terrible, shockin' things done if you take yourself back. But there comes a time when you have to turn a blind eye." However, there also comes a time when you have to open your eyes and acknowledge all the spite and pride and sin that has poisoned a place. That time has come for the women in Strandline; not that that means repentance is the order of the day.

Strandlineis Spallen's second full-length play, her first, Pumpgirl, having been produced to great acclaim in 2006 at the Bush Theatre in London and in 2007 at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York, before being finally produced in Ireland last year. Written in a refreshingly original Northern Irish dialect, Pumpgirldetailed the exploitation of an intellectually challenged young woman by an older man, revealing an unsettling and startlingly acerbic new voice in Irish theatre. Shrugging off the simple storytelling device of the earlier monologue play, Strandlineis a more ambitious work, but it remains faithful to the uncompromising brutality of character and humanity that Pumpgirlrevealed.

Opening on the night of a wedding, the setting of the play suddenly transforms into a wake, which its four female characters spend together, having a bit of craic: the carnivalesque kind, where the fun is always threatening to spill over into feuding. However, as the play progresses, all the blind eyes turned over the years are slowly moved back in, to focus on the layers of hurt and hatred that have been festering under the surface .

Meeting Spallen face to face, I am surprised by how guarded she is. I have read interviews with her where she has seemed as fierce and forthright as some of her characters about a variety of subjects: the rejection of Pumpgirlby Irish theatres; the status of female playwrights in the contemporary landscape of Irish theatre production; the low status and ill-treatment of actors (as she spent "more than 10 years jobbing" in Dublin, the latter is an issue she is especially passionate about). She is thoroughly pleasant, indeed quietly charming, but I can't really get her to bite on any of these subjects, especially not the subject of "women's writing", which she resists as a label for her own work and in general, and about which she seems to feel she was mis-represented in earlier interviews she has given.

“People want you to be a spokeperson for some sort of feminist movement in Irish theatre”, she says. “You participate in a series of plays by women and they think it’s ideological. It’s not. It’s work. We are all grown adults, us playwrights — whether we’re men or women — making decisions about what offers to take. Outside of Ireland, you can be seen as as a woman writing, not a woman’s writer; your gender is secondary. But here, they see you as a woman first and a writer second, and that’s reductive.” As Spallen explains, she didn’t start writing from any political position. She started writing, quite simply, because of “unemployment; sometimes you have to get your hands dirty in order to find work. And I’m not alone in that. There are so many actors writing these days, and if they are mostly women, it’s about women wanting to write good parts for women. At the end of the day, character is about complexity, and there aren’t enough good roles for women, characters that are not just feeders for, mostly, blokes. Actors get used to making a lot out of not a huge amount, and I thought wouldn’t it be nice to have that complexity from the start – in the text itself. That’s not ideological, that’s just wanting to do good work.”

For Spallen, writing about women was, on another level, "just practical. I mean one of the reasons I wrote Strandlinefor four women actors is that I know the pool of talent that is out there that is rarely exploited, and I knew I could have incredible women starring in the play. It was very selfish on my part. I mean, I remember writing to Eleanor Methven when she was part of Charabanc Theatre Company and asking the company to come and see a play I was in. And they did come, and then I went working with them, on their very last show. And now to think she's in a play of mine! It's humbling. But it's not a crusade for women's writing or women's drama."

Spallen feels the same about the criticism of the monologue play that has dominated discourse about contemporary Irish theatre since writers such as Mark O'Rowe and Conor McPherson began experimenting with the form in the mid-1990s. "[ Pumpgirl] isn't part of any movement or anything. Probably the most significant reason it's made up of three monologues is that it makes it cheap. You can do it without a set, and that's important. There is a certain dignity to the monologue play: if no-one else wants it at least you can put it on yourself, and I was prepared to do that, if I couldn't get interest from anyone else. But it also makes things like structure a bit easier, and it allows you to showcase the most important thing for a new writer: your writing."

She pleasantly bats off questions about Irish theatre, the dearth of infrastructural supports for new writing, and the difficulties facing both writers and actors in these precarious economic times. So I ask, finally, clutching at straws, about the difficulty of the transition from acting to writing, from centre stage to the wings. "Sometimes when I'm sitting in the rehearsal room with the cast at the start of a run, I think, 'God, I wish I was up there', because the big challenge for me has been moving from what is essentially a really sociable life to sitting in a room on my own all day. And reading as an actor and reading as a playwright are two entirely different things too. As an actor you are immersed in the role, the character. But as a writer, you have structure, language, subtext, to consider as well. But I've always loved text in that way, whereas most actors hate it; they want to learn their part, do their thing. But I've always loved the language, the energy of plays in their entirety, picking them apart. So, yes, watching everyone have a laugh on the first day of rehearsal, I miss it, but I get the same buzz from writing. And they are not that different as 'careers', you know. Either way you are always on the poor mouth. And I suppose if you try and struggle in two careers you might just end up with one." The impulse behind the complex characters in Strandlinemight be different, might be darker, but Spallen, like the "ones" in every town and city around the country is just "trying to scratch on . . . trying to survive these times, and maybe have a bit of craic" while she's at it.

Strandlineis previewing, opens tomorrow, and runs until Dec 5 at Project Arts Centre, Dublin