CHARACTERS have a way of taking you where they want you to go - these characters stepped on stage and gave a shrill whistle and I followed."
That is how Philip Davison, writer of three novels and screenplays for TV and film, wrote his first stage play, The Invisible Mending Company, which opens at the Peacock on Wednesday, directed by Ben Barnes with a cast including Barry Barnes and Elizabeth Bracken. It tells the story of a family split by the discovery of a whole new shoot from the tree, an unknown half sister living in England. Through this event, Davison explores the idea of family, pitching from the dynastic fascism of Mr Ed, the criminal contractor ruining the roofing business of the central character, Gabriel, to the possibility of inclusiveness and creativity.
The weave of the play is complicated by the fact that Gabriel's mother in law, who gave birth to this secret half sister, moved from Belfast to Dublin to escape the Luftwaffe's bombs. Davison's next film script, Party Town, which is being made by David Collins of Samson Films, also focuses on the second World War era, which is little explored by Irish writers: "Somehow we have very few stories about the war, perhaps because we isolated ourselves very particularly," he says. "How can you live in that kind of a vacuum, when the whole world is engulfed in the major conflict of the 20th century?"
Davison stretches his canvas to include the North, the war, and through the English half sister, Britain, showing how arbitrarily we draw lines around us for security - just as Gabriel's wife's nuclear family has drawn a line around itself which excludes one member. Davison accepts readings of his play, but disclaims any prior consciousness of them: "Maybe if you've done your job right, what you've put in the foreground has resonances.
He speaks about the play in visual rather than narrative terms, as you would perhaps expect of someone who began adult life as an apprentice film editor: "I see it as a kind of prism, with light reflected through it." Aged 40 next year, he turned to fiction early and his three novels, The Book Thiefs Heart Beat, Twist and Shout and The Illustrator have different Irish publishers. His next novel, The Crooked Man, which will be published by Jonathan Cape in January, is about a petty criminal lured into the world of major crime. The character is puzzled by life, as is Gabriel in The Invisible Mending Company, to whose character Davison always returns.
Gabriel is distant, but threatened, by the family crisis the women are brewing. He is building a roof which may collapse, on a house of cards. He lives on the hinge between real and unreal - like a writer who responds to the shrill whistles of imaginary characters, as I suggested to an amused Davison - except that a writer knows where to put his fiction.