`Here we go again, another play set in a pub. But where else would I have got all these people together?" Jimmy Murphy laughs self-deprecatingly.
Appropriately enough, as we discuss the setting for his new play, The Muesli Belt, we are sitting in a pub across the road from the Peacock Theatre, where The Muesli Belt is in rehearsal.
"The pub is the only place where people from different backgrounds mix together," he explains. "Look at this place" - he gestures at the mid-afternoon clientele in the Flowing Tide - "there's a man who works for the Lottery, a couple of bums: a real mixture."
The pub which is the setting for the action in the play, the Black Pool, is, as the name suggests, "an emblem of Dublin". A microcosm of the city, it contains culchies and Dubs; characters who span the age spectrum; and, as we discover, it has a price. This is the new Dublin where everything is grist to the developers' mill. The Black Pool, scene of a crucial shootout during the Civil War, repository of an inner city community's smaller histories and disappointments, will be pulled down to make way for a faceless new bistro, coffee shop and apartment block: fodder for the burgeoning middle-class "muesli belt".
Murphy's own background is originally inner city: he comes from Islandbridge, but moved to Ballyfermot in his teens when his parents broke up. He failed the Inter Cert. and left school to pursue an apprenticeship in painting and decorating, taking his City and Guilds exams in Bolton Street. He spent years working on building sites, which provided the inspiration for his first, hard-hitting play, Brothers of the Brush, about a group of painters decorating a house. He now works full-time as a playwright and lives in Inchicore with his wife and two children (Chloe, 6, and Oisin, 3).
Murphy wrote Brothers of the Brush in 1991, and in 1993 it won the Dublin Theatre Festival Best New Irish Play Award. The following year it won the Stewart Parker Award. It has been translated into German, French and Welsh, and performed all over the world: "It was a huge success in Canada last year. You hope the work survives beyond its own locale."
He is no overnight sensation, however: now 38, it took years for him to receive his lucky break. He started sending plays to the Abbey in the mid-1980s: "My friends were mostly poets, and they were starting to get published. I was the laughing stock: still sending plays to the Abbey with nothing to show for it. I was at risk of disappearing back into a pair of overalls."
Then the Royal Court expressed an interest in giving Brothers a rehearsed reading, and the Abbey's dramaturg, David Byrne, whipped it back. After some work-shopping, it was ready for the Peacock.
Full of savage, sarcastic repartee, and alternating waves of solidarity, camaraderie and despair, the play portrays a world Murphy knows well, but had not seen depicted on the Irish stage: "I started going to the theatre when I was about 16. My family weren't interested, so I went on my own. I was aware that it was very middle class, but that didn't bother me." Nevertheless, he could not relate what he saw on the stage to his own experience of the world: "Back then it was all about emigration, unemployment and broken homes, but that's not what I saw at the theatre. I felt theatre had an obligation to portray the world I was living in."
In 1984 he did a course run by the Irish Society of Playwrights and AnCo, where he discovered Brian Friel and Tom Murphy and realised "theatre meant more than just the classics. I saw that you could write plays about the world you came from."
We talk for a while about the strong early tradition of working-class Irish theatre by playwrights such as Sean O'Casey and Brendan Behan. "Working-class playwrights are still producing good work," says Murphy, citing Heno Magee as an important role model ("although I was never sure how he made the transition to the Abbey"). He doesn't want to be put in that box for long himself: "I'm aware you can be pigeon-holed as the working-class Dub of your generation." His kind, dark eyes grow troubled. "I suppose it's irresistible for the press to put a spin on your shows, but I want to be seen as a writer first."
His second play, A Picture of Paradise, was about homelessness in Dublin, but he is now working on a new play for Red Kettle which will break out of the "Dub" mould: "It's about people from the west of Ireland who emigrated to England in the 1960s. I used to meet them on the sites when I was working over there myself in the 1980s. They'd go to work and then the pub. They never came home to Ireland with the pot of gold they had gone over with the dream of making. There's a whole generation stuck in a rut over there."
On a related theme, he is also adapting Tim O'Brien's novel about migrant Irish labourers in Britain, I Could Read the Sky, for a theatre company in England, Stray Dogs: "I loved the book. Adapting it for the stage isn't easy, though - trying to make it theatrical rather than narrative driven."
Although the huge success of Brothers was exhilarating, he began to get worried that he'd be seen as "a one-hit wonder": "Luckily Paradise was well-received critically, which gave me more confidence." Enough to be more sure of his writing and less prepared to do rewrites during rehearsals: "Initially I was very nervous, especially being around people who had been in theatre since before I was born. But now, although I know I'm not God, I'm not going to rewrite the play just because an actor doesn't like the line. When you change one line, it's a domino effect, you're into a free-fall and you don't know where to stop."
The thought that some of the quick-fire Dub-speak and occasionally poetic language of The Muesli Belt might have been axed is sobering. Lines jump out, such as when Nora the local hairdresser is hurt that Sinead, the barmaid, hasn't been frequenting her salon for a hairdo: "There's a look in those eyes that'd cut glass." Then there's Tommy, the retired bin-man, who learns he has lost his chance to buy the house he has rented for years: "Now it's like I'm being lifted up and emptied out, dumped with the rest of the junk this big wave has washed up."
Murphy does not offer easy solutions in the play. By selling his run-down establishment Mick, the Mayo-born bar-owner, gets a cool £750,000. "If it was offered to me, I'd like to think I'd say no," muses Murphy. "But when you have a family to support . . . it's hard to resist." And yet by giving in to human temptation, Mick contributes to the loss of a whole way of Dublin life: "The Dublin pub culture is ruined," says Murphy. "The pubs in town are now full of the young set. The local pub on the corner is gone. Where does the old guy go now for his bottle of Guinness and few cigarettes? The pub can be a central part of people's lives. When that's gone, they have nowhere else to go."
He catches himself being too serious, and laughs: "I'm not a tragic bastard, really! But when you stroll through Dublin now, it's a less beautiful place. All these bland, horrible redbrick apartment blocks, like the one beside St Patrick's Cathedral. Those kind of buildings are only going to become the tenements of the future. I just wonder if my son and daughter will live their whole lives in apartments like that because they won't be able to afford a house."
Murphy would like to move out of his house in Inchicore, and buy somewhere with a bigger garden for the children to play in, but "we can't afford to move. Like so many people in Dublin now, I have this feeling that I'm stuck there for the rest of my life. And my situation isn't the worst. What's going to happen when the people who can only afford a tiny apartment want to have children?"
I can't let him go without referring to the mention of this paper in The Muesli Belt. He smiles: "People expect Dubs to read the News of the World, the Star or the Sun. The fact is that Nora, a hard-core drinker, has good taste, so she reads The Irish Times."
Murphy recalls reading it during his break when he was working on the building sites: "It was bad enough being caught by the other lads reading a volume of Ibsen's plays over your sandwiches, but when they pulled out their copy of the Sun and looked over at me with my Irish Times, they'd say `Who do you think you are, the boss?'
"The boss used to appear with The Irish Times stuck in his pocket, as a status thing. Whereas for me, it was my paper. It was in The Irish Times that I saw the ad for the National Writers' Workshop at UCG, where I got a place with five other writers, including Rita Ann Higgins and Niall Williams, and did a drama workshop with Garry Hynes. I wouldn't have seen that in the Sun."
The Muesli Belt is previewing at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin. It opens on Wednesday.