Art imitates life

Bedrock Productions promise that their latest show – which follows last year’s critically acclaimed Pale Angel – will be “not quite like other shows”.

It’s called This Is Not A Life and is said to be “a fable about terror, a dream abut happiness, a dark comedy about idealism” and also purports to look at “what constitutes a good night at the theatre.” All very abstract. Should we expect a conventional play or something more improvised?
“It’s a little of both,” says Alex Johnston, who is both the literary manager of Bedrock and the writer of This Is Not A Life. Or part writer, as he explains: “I wrote a version which we then workshopped with the actors and I then went off and changed it quite a bit.”
In a break with tradition, the play draws on the casts’ own life experiences: “The actors don’t have any names apart from the names of the actors Kevin Hely, Megan Riordan, Joe Roch and Caitríona ní Mhurchu,” says Johnston. “And we draw on aspects of their personal histories to flesh out their characters. For example there is a discussion about witnessing a terrorist attack and two of the actors, Joe and Megan, are American and they happen to have been in Manhattan on September 11th, so we were able to achieve some verisimilitude about what it was like to be in New York that day.”
That said, Alex explains that his original focus of exploration for this play was wanting to write something about loss of faith in one’s work and a sense of failure.
“I was very interested in failure. I had this mental image of four people sitting around a table and being at an absolute standstill and I myself was at a bit of a hiatus in my writing life. I was wondering ‘Why do I write for the theatre?’ and ‘Why do people even go to the theatre?’ and ‘How can you write a play about this ill-defined state of flux that exists all around us?’ People often attempt to write state of the nation plays but they seem to be hung on a preposterous story that don't really make such sense.”
Did Alex therefore regard himself as a failure?
“Margaret Thatcher once said that anyone who is over 30 and still gets on a bus is a failure!” he responds. “But I am only 36. I tend to write the kind of plays I want to go and see and that, too is what led to This Is Not A Life. But it’s not that I want to make a big statement about all this, I just want to look at that state of flux.”
Fascinatingly, the play opens with a thank you to the audience and it will be a variation on this fragment of text included in the press release. “It means a lot to us that you’ve decided to come and listen to us/ Instead of staying in and watching TV/ Or going to the pub/Or any of the other things you could have done tonight/We realise that many of you will have/ had to make special arrangements/Organising babysitters and so on/And that’ll probably have meant a certain financial outlay/ Beyond just the cost of your ticket/Anyway that shows a real commitment to supporting what we’re trying do here/And we appreciate it/Thank you.”
“Part of the reason for that is that the play is, literally, in two parts” he explains. “I started with the idea of just saying, ‘Hi, thanks for coming’ spoken straight to the audience as that seemed, at least, a polite thing to do.”
Also, the way this play is staged the audience is a little more amongst the actors than sitting in a black box.”
As the first half of the play progresses, it becomes less about the actors talking to the audience and more about their personal problems. Then it all breaks down towards the end of the first half.
The second half, meanwhile, is more conventional: it is a five hour, alcohol-fuelled dinner party compressed into 40 minutes. Things gets more and more theatrical as they go on –the characters start to question their motives and their place in life. “In other words the play starts out not believing in theatre and gets more and more theatrical,” says the author. “So it isn’t like other shows!”