TALK TIME:How did you get involved in writing 'Hunger'? My agent asked if I wanted to meet Steve McQueen and Robin Gutch. To be honest, I had reservations about the project. The notion of a visual artist tackling that kind of subject matter seemed risky. I thought it would be a total disaster, writes EOIN BUTLER.
So how did they sell you on the idea?
Steve's focus on the routine of prison life was a big factor. Because that's what I do, that's what my plays are about. Neither of us wanted to do a sort of historical drama. He gave me a copy of David Beresford's Ten Men Deadand I thought about how we might condense that. Early on we realised we were dealing with dysfunction. So the question was, how do you convey that oppressiveness, that claustrophobia?
The hunger strikes are obviously an emotive topic. Whatever about your artistic motives, were you ever worried that the DVD would end up for sale on the Sinn Féin website next to the Wolfe Tones? Not particularly. Balance wasn’t something we were concerned about. It wasn’t like “Someone whacks a prisoner here, so we have to show a prison warden getting whacked there.”
There was none of that. The idea was to portray Northern Ireland in that period – this quagmire of hatred – in microcosm, without getting into historical context.
In the end, both ' The Daily Telegraph'and ' An Phoblacht'praised the film. That would have been inconceivable five years ago. I think people appreciated the humanity of the story. But a lot has changed in recent years.
Your fellow playwright Martin McDonagh has just been nominated for an Oscar. Could you ever see yourself concentrating on film?
I know Martin well and he’s a much more accomplished storyteller than me. That’s his bag. I’ve never had that sort of populist touch. I always have to close things down and make them smaller and simpler. For me, theatre is a freer medium. You’ve got a clear vision and you follow it through. With film there’s much more diplomacy involved, which I’m just getting used to.
It has been reported that you’re interested in the Josef Fritzl case.
I really regret saying that now. That case involved people living dysfunctional lives, locked away from the world. So I read about it and I thought, "Oh God, this is really my territory." Unfortunately, I said it to a journalist and she made a big thing of it. So then people started seeing Josef Fritzl in my play The Walworth Farce– which is about a father who's keeping his sons in. And really that's not what that play is about. It's a much broader thing. My plays are about what it's like to be a human being. The characters just happen to be trapped in these cycles of behaviour.
But you have ve said that you’re interested in understanding what makes these sorts of monsters tick. That’s a very liberal impulse, isn’t it?
It may be. But that’s just the way I am. I give everyone a fair go. From a dramatic point of view, it’s a very old trajectory. That’s what King Kong is, for example.
Some people though – not just the George Bushes of the world, even people such as Christopher Hitchens – would say that we shouldn’t strive to understand evil, it should be cast out and annihilated. Well, Hitchens is ripe for this sort of analysis himself. I don’t know, I thought it was kind of a given that when you see something, you want to understand everything about it. Maybe you don’t. The point of view of my understanding would be completely different from yours. But that in itself is interesting.
Finally, you’re working on a film about Dusty Springfield. What’s your angle there?
Well, Film4 approached me about it, so they know I’m not going to write a traditional biopic sort of thing. There are many, many ways of telling a story. Would I be concerned about upsetting her fans? Well, if I wasn’t worried with Bobby Sands, I’m hardly worried about Dusty Springfield!
Hungeris out on DVD on February 23rd. Enda Walsh's latest play, The New Electric Ballroom, will tour Ireland in April.