DAVID Paraell is determined not to sound precious. "I have no respect for my own writing," he announces disarmingly. "In fact, I'm not interested in writing, just in putting on plays." For this 27-year-old actor-turned-director whose new play, Licking the Marmalade Spoon, opens this week at the Project Arts Centre, the script is just a blueprint to work from: it can be endlessly reworked and shaped during the rehearsal process. And since he has written the script himself, there is no danger of giving offence to the author.
With a contemporary Dublin setting, the play explores issues of love and loss, charting the emotional lives of two flatmates (Jennifer O'Dea and Catherine Walsh) and their relationships with two young men (Barry Barnes and Paul Meade), using dialogue that owes more to cinema and television than to theatre, Parnell says. "It is colloquial, realistic, immediate."
The relationship between the two friends is presented naturalistically, while the imagination of one of them is evoked by the theatrical device of having her ex-boyfriend appear on stage - on a tricycle. Addressing her thoughts to him, she tries to examine her own destructive impulses and to understand why she ended the relationship.
"She's not doing this in a very constructive way," Parnell says, "she's torturing herself. She is too intense about it all. Her flatmate, who is just beginning a new relationship, has a more healthy attitude to the whole thing. Throughout the play there are references to the images of love and sex that come from advertising culture including the Wonderbra ad and magazines, and the ways in which we try to measure up to all these stereotypes.
"But I'm not making any big statement here; I'm just exploring my own ideas," he adds hastily, lest he should be accused of taking himself too seriously.