'We're haunted by the lives we didn't lead'

Declan Hughes’s new play featuring teenagers in south Dublin in 1977 – and the same people 30 years later – takes a snapshot of an irretrievable past and digs up midlife thoughts of roads not taken

Some years ago, as Declan Hughes grappled with the doubts and anxieties that so often beset men in their 40s, the Dublin-born writer did something he once would have considered unthinkable. He went out and bought a clutch of albums by Rush, the Canadian progressive rock band.

As midlife crises go, it was a minor one, “an economical alternative to the blonde or the sports car”, but listening to portentous concept albums was still out of character for someone who, as a punk-loving teenager, had looked down on such music. And like many deeds committed in the midst of middle-aged uncertainty, Hughes’s rash act had wider repercussions.

“I always thought that kind of music was ridiculous, but there was also the sense that it was the path not taken,” he says. “So I was listening to them on the iPod and I got this very strong image of these teenage guys in a lane, in Dalkey or Glenageary, thinking they’re in a band. And that’s all it was for a long time.

“But it was that sense of what music means, expressing your longing and yearning as well as your sense of identity and belonging. It was also about that poignant point at the end of school, when you know your friendships are about to change but they’re also quite precious. Certainly I can remember that.”

This elegiac snapshot of an irretrievable past lies at the heart of Hughes’s new play, The Last Summer, which opens at the Gate tomorrow as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Directed by Toby Frow, the play follows the febrile summer experiences of southside Dublin teenagers in 1977. It also catches with their older, if not necessarily wiser, selves as the boom years end 30 years later, with returning émigré Paul (Declan Conlon) reuniting with his old girlfriend (Cathy Belton), now married to his friend Tom (Gary Lydon). “I had a gestalt: that you needed a time change to see what happened to these guys.”

Having spent the past few years establishing himself as one of Ireland’s most successful crime-fiction writers – his Ed Loy novels have earned him acclaim and sales – The Last Summer is Hughes’s first stage play since 2003’s Shiver. It harks back to his past in another way, drawing on the evocative atmosphere of his own adolescence. “Through your 30s you can still feel like you’re the same person, that it’s an unbroken cord, but then something happens,” he says. “To me it was the birth of my children and the death of my parents. By the time the ashes settled on that I thought, it’s a long way back to that time, the bridge is gone now. I really had a strong sense of that. And you write plays out of that.”

The Last Summer may inhabit the same topography of Hughes’s upbringing. Growing up in Dalkey, the youngest offspring and only son of his Scottish father – who was frequently away working in the shipyards of Glasgow – and Irish mother, he had “a free-range childhood”, roaming the neighbourhood at will.

As a secondary student in Marian College, he took his first steps on the creative path, writing poetry and acting in school plays, as well as being the “class agnostic”. He then attended Trinity, devoting much of his energies to the Players drama society.

There he started directing, the “prelude” to his writing career – “it was the first thing that made me feel I was finding a ledge on this” – and met Lynne Parker, with whom he established Rough Magic theatre company in 1984.

Although Hughes quips that Rough Magic was “a semi-glamorous way of being unemployed”, the company established itself as a vibrant alternative to the city’s theatrical establishment. “We were probably pretty obnoxious but we had an energy that pushed us through,” he recalls. “And there was also a cultural thing, the sense that the Irish tradition just didn’t mean anything to us.”

Amid productions of modern English and American playwrights, Hughes began to write himself, starting with a stage adaptation of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. “After the opening night I had a sense of satisfaction that was much greater than for anything I had directed. I thought, I have to do more of this.”

He grew in confidence as a dramatist, hitting his stride with Digging For Fire in 1991: “The first play which was my voice, my people, so to speak.” Over the next decade, Hughes carved out a reputation as an acclaimed, if slightly cultish, playwright. He also increasingly wrote for film and television, a lucrative but ultimately frustrating move that precipitated a creative blip. “Things weren’t getting made and eventually your identity begins to blur a little,” he says. “It’s just soul-destroying, you think, who am I, what am I doing?”

The turning point came at a meeting about a detective series for ITV, when he found himself keeping his best plot ideas for himself. “I thought, that’s for the book. That’s the mysterious way things form in your head, you don’t have a linear plan.”

Thus began Hughes’s second incarnation, as a crime thriller writer. Beginning with 2006’s award-winning The Wrong Kind of Blood, his five novels about Dublin-based, Los Angeles-trained private investigator Ed Loy have won him a following on both sides of the Atlantic. Tapping into his long-time love of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, his books also deal with contentious issues, such as republican violence in 2009’s All The Dead Voices, but are marked by a keen control of scene and plot.

Like other practitioners of crime fiction, he bemoans those who “turn their nose up” at the genre but is philosophical on the matter. “People can be too thin-skinned. The reason there isn’t more bad literary fiction is because no one has figured out a way to sell it, whereas there’s lots of trashy crime fiction because it can sell. It’s a bit like classical music and rock music, there’s one end and the other.”

For all the success of his fiction, he eventually found himself yearning to escape the “cabin” of the novelist’s solitary existence and write for the stage again. (His experience of being targeted by an anonymous negative reviewer, later alleged by fellow novelist Stuart Neville to be thriller writer Sam Millar, has not soured his love of the crime-fiction world.)

He is excited by his return to drama, even if his desire to write about current events has waned, as the setting of his play suggests. “My antennae as a writer, perhaps because I’m slightly older, are not up to the minute,” he says. He is not bothered by this; it is too late to change anyhow. “I’ve forgotten, in a way, what it’s like to be anything else. I’m married [to costume designer Kathy Strachan] with kids, have a nice house and do a job I love. I’m happy. Though if I read me saying that, I’d want to kill me.”

Such contentment is rarely the stuff of compelling drama. But as a writer, he knows there are always two sides to a story. “However happy we are we can always imagine another life,” he says. “After my mother died I went through her stuff and she had two or three clippings from the newspaper about a guy she didn’t marry. And I just thought, oh my god. Now it’s not as if she didn’t love my dad. But we’re all haunted by the lives we didn’t lead. And that’s the stew that this comes from.”

The Last Summer opens tomorrow.

Hughes's hat-trick: three key plays

I Can’t Get Started (1990)

Despite the title, this was only the beginning for Hughes. His first original play drew on his passion for hard-boiled fiction, recreating novelist Dashiell Hammett’s relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman, while trying to solve the mystery of his crippling writer’s block.

Digging For Fire (1991)

Hughes’s breakthrough work follows a boozy reunion of old friends which goes badly awry as the patina of nostalgia is gradually eroded, in the process catching the mood of his generation on the eve of the Celtic Tiger. “At a certain stage, your timing is right,” is the writer’s verdict today.

Twenty Grand (1998)

The Abbey commissioned this crime drama set in contemporary Dublin, following the struggle for power in family-run gang. Not his most successful play – he later said the stage was “the wrong medium for the genre” – but a hint of the novels to come.