Paul Meade and David Parnell of Gúna Nua tell Arminta Wallace about writing plays that even football fanatics appreciate.
In a tiny, but disarmingly bright, room several floors above the stage of Temple Bar's Project, Paul Meade and David Parnell are trying to describe their new play without plunging up to their necks in weirdness. It isn't easy, though.
"I'd been looking at stories in the paper about - well, about organ donation," begins Meade, author of Skin Deep. "It sounds a bit gruesome, but I was fascinated by the idea of your body being worth something, even though you might be absolutely penniless. And I was thinking about - oh, God, I shouldn't really be saying this - about body snatching and that sort of thing."
His researches led him to the tale of an artist in London in the late 1990s who, not content with sketching body parts in the Royal Medical School, took his macabre models home, made casts of them, and put the resulting works of "art" on public exhibit.
"So the play starts with an artist who is so excited about his own work that he'll do something illegal in order to create art," says Meade. "It looks at the intersection between art and commerce - and also about the body and art, and the body and commerce. It takes four characters in contemporary Dublin to see how they bounce off each other, and what questions they can ask about these topics."
"It's a comedy,"¨ says director Parnell. "About dead bodies."
Meade and Parnell, aka Gúna Nua Theatre, have been making a name for themselves over the past couple of years in precisely this sort of theatrical territory - cool, black comedy of the contemporary urban kind, the result of a process of close collaboration and extensive improvisation.
The company's most recent outing, last year's Taste, was written by Parnell and directed by Meade, while Scenes From A Water Cooler, which they co-wrote and co-directed, won the Best Production award at the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2001.
But why - given that they were both well into more-than-respectable acting careers - did they set up Guna Nua in the first place? "Well, we felt guilty about being successful actors," says Parnell. "Not. No. I mean, we both enjoy acting, and get a lot of satisfaction from it - but running your own company gives you opportunities that being a freelance actor wouldn't necessarily give you, to create the kind of work that you're interested in and believe in."
One of the most striking aspects of the new play is likely to be its use of cinematic techniques such as a soundtrack and video footage. Do the pair regard technological innovation as central to what Guna Nua is about?
Parnell shakes his head. "We used a tiny bit of video footage at the end of a production we did at the fringe festival about three years ago, and we asked Tom Hopkins, the video artist, from One Productions, if he'd help us to create it - so that's where the idea came from. It worked well, it's something we're both interested in, and for the purposes of this story we thought it was appropriate to do it again - but it's not necessarily the policy of the company."
Still, Skin Deep will have an original score, composed by Paul McDonnell, a former percussionist with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, and Hopkins will use sound design to help create atmosphere - street sounds, café sounds and so on. All of which, combined with a set which looks as if it might have come out of a Habitat catalogue and wickedly inventive lighting by Sinéad McKenna, adds to the easy contemporary vibe of the piece - which definitely is, as Meade explains, what Guna Nua is about.
"We both play in a football team at weekends and we try and get the guys we play football with to come and see plays - because they never would, normally. And they'll say things like, 'I don't usually enjoy going to the theatre, but I do enjoy your plays because they're about now'." He grins. "Actually I think it's because a lot of our characters are based on them. But it's like that sort of thing, you know - society having a conversation with itself. Which a lot of our work is about."
After a moment of silence Parnell says, in hushed tones, "That's very good, Paul." "It is, isn't it?" Meade beams. "I worked it out in my last interview."
You begin to see how these guys create comedy - and the influences on their creative juices. Meade says he's a League of Gentlemen ( kind of guy, while Parnell confesses to a weakness for ( Seinfeld. Both are major David Mamet fans, and both are up to speed with the generation of Irish playwrights which is struggling to put contemporary urban Irish society on the stage.
Guna Nua, says Parnell, aims to create "something that feels modern but doesn't feel overly literary, or take itself terribly seriously - although it has a serious intention".
But don't the money-grabbing, cynical, ruthless young things in their plays portray contemporary urban society at its absolute worst?
"Well," says Meade, "we try and see the humour in people being at their worst. The absurdity of urban living, you know? People sitting in traffic for hours - it's kind of funny. OK, people get exasperated about it. But come on, it is kind of funny that people spend their lives in a queue of cars on the N11. When you think about it; it's hilarious."
Skin Deep runs at Project, Temple Bar, Dublin, until August 2nd