The People's Champion

Back in 1979 the Abbey produced Bernard Farrell s first play I Do Not Like Thee Dr Fell, prompting him to give up his day-job at Sealink and dedicate his life full-time to writing plays. Twenty years later, a revival of Farrell s 1998 play Kevin s Bed is the summer hit at the Abbey while the Gate Theatre is preparing to open his new play The Spirit Of Annie Ross as its contribution to the 1999 Eircom Dublin Theatre Festival. By anyone s standards this is an unparalleled success story, or so you would think.
Yet, despite a succession of popular and critically acclaimed plays such as The Last Apache Reunion, Happy Birthday Dear Alice and Stella By Starlight, Bernard Farrell is still seen by some as too populist to be a true artist; which is, sadly, the kind of snobbery that still pollutes the world of theatre.
Fortunately, Farrell himself is not so much enraged as wise enough to see through such anachronistic nonsense. Indeed, he knows it is little more than a latter-day version of the disapproving glances cast in the direction of his theatre-loving family back in the 50s when they shattered social etiquette by daring to actually eat sandwiches while watching the latest productions at theatres like the Abbey!
Now living in Greystones in County Wicklow, Bernard Farrell was born in 1941 and raised in Glasthule on the southside of Dublin.

Joe Jackson: Not to put too fine a point on it Bernard, some critics have said Kevin s Bed reveals you to be xenophobic, homophobic and misogynistic!
Bernard Farrell: No, no and no. I reject all those accusations. Xenophobic, I certainly am not. Of all the countries in Europe I spent time in, I spent most in Italy and I love Italians. And if the accusation about my being misogynistic comes from my depiction of the Italian woman and I presume it does well, let s be clear about one thing. There are the characters in the play and there is me. I create those characters, sure, but they behave in a certain way because they are placed in a piece of fiction, in contrast and in conflict with other characters. Conflict is essential to drama, or to any type of fiction.
Therefore, yes, people may say things in my plays that are xenophobic, or whatever. But what I m doing is reflecting what is out there in Irish society. And I m saying there is xenophobia, there is misogyny, there is homophobia and these are featured in my plays.
And as for the Italian character, the part is actually played by an Italian. And I ve never had any complaint from the actors themselves. If they felt I was misrepresenting their people they would have said it, very quickly.
But then I don t think that character is anti-Italian. At all. She has her moment at which she explains herself. And, as such, the sympathy of the audience would, I hope, be with this poor, Italian girl who, by falling in love with this Irish guy, marries into this dysfunctional Irish family and is thrown into the mores of Irish society, with all its peculiarities and drawbacks. Indeed, the Italian is the mirror against which Irish society is judged in this play and, in many cases, found to be lacking, because she is the most balanced person.
In contrast with Kevin, who is your typically screwed-up Irish male, of a certain generation, who tried to become a priest, failed, made Marie pregnant and now seems to live in his own twilight zone.
Absolutely! Someone else said that because I draw on the legend of Saint Kevin who beat off women with nettles when they came to his cave to try and have sex with him and actually threw one off the mountain to her death! that I m saying Irish men haven t progressed much since those days.
In fact, this play is saying the exact opposite of that. Saint Kevin was saying I ve taken vows of celibacy, women get away from me. Kevin, in the play is saying I haven t taken vows of celibacy, I m going to get this woman pregnant. But, overall, he is very screwed up. Though, that said, I ve also got great sympathy for him and I can see where he s coming from.
So what about the accusation that Kevin s Bed is homophobic? For example, you don t specify what Kevin s brother s sex-crime is. It could be that he sexually abused a young boy, for example.
Or an under-age girl. But it s much more dramatic not to be specific, to leave it to the audience to decide for themselves. In fact, I never knew whether it was a boy or a girl. Or the exact age group. With two lines in the play I could have identified the sex but what was far more important was that this teacher committed a sex-crime with an under-age student and had to pay the price for that. For the rest of his life. So it s just a dramatic technique not, in any way, homophobic.
More than one critic has said that whereas you do touch on the subject of child abuse among clerics, by going for the broad comedy you miss a chance to make a point about something that is really relevant to Ireland right now.
But that s not what the play is about. And sure, someone watching Kevin s Bed may say we badly need a play about clerical child abuse, why didn t Farrell write it?
Maybe I will. But if I do, it probably also would be humorous and maybe even feature music, because that s the kind of play I write. And I ve no time at all for the snobby attitude you often encounter in terms of humour and the theatre. As in, it can t-be-great-theatre-if-humour-is-part-of-the-play. Kevin s Bed, to me irrespective of whether it s great, good, or terrible theatre is terribly sad, dark at its centre, but also, I think, very funny. And that s the balance I try to achieve.
Have you any other shock revelation to add to your I ve eaten sandwiches in the Abbey confession?
You know what I really remember from those days? We never left our seats during the interval. We stayed there, to talk about the play. My mother was a terrific woman for Shakespeare, my father was more O Casey and the arguments that went between them were wonderful. My mother would quote Shakespeare and, to my father, the characters in O Casey s plays were as real as our neighbours. He d talk about Joxer as if he lived down the road. It was a great grounding in theatre. I never saw theatre as elitist. Still don t. I see it as an absolutely normal part of life.
You got your first short stories published in the Stand literary magazine while you were still at school and wrote poetry. A bit soft for the era of early rock n roll Bernard, wasn t it?
It certainly wasn t a cool thing to do! But I probably balanced everything out by playing football too! I had a pretty typical adolescence, consumed by the normal stuff, y know, chasing girls.
But, you re right, back then you wouldn t go round telling people you wrote. Poems, plays, or anything. It was just something you did. And this just proved to me that writers are born, you don t go to some writing course to become one.
But people do have strange ideas about what we do. I remember I did something, once, for Glenroe, and my name was on the credits. And the next day a neighbour says, I was delighted to see your name there on the television last night. After all these years struggling with them oul plays you ve finally made it. You re on television. Congratulations! Talk about media validation!
But before we leave your formative years, where did Bernard Farrell get his first kiss, shag and so on?
I moved into the city, very quickly. Around 1958. That was my stalking ground. Rock n roll dances three times a week. And I was a very successful skirt-chaser in those days. Very good-looking, though you wouldn t know it to look at me now! But you wouldn t really get a shag in Ireland in those days. It was, did you get to court?
Meaning what, exactly? Like a good court is getting your hands above a woman s waist, a great court is getting your hands below?
If you were lucky enough to get that far! But, yeah, you could say that, which I know may sound strange to kids these days! I mean I m talking about that being the most that d happen, sexually, even in my late teens! It really was an age of innocence. But then this was a time before the pill, before that kind of sexual freedom.
But you weren t an innocent for long. From the age of 19, you went to a different European country every year, with Sea Link. So did you lose your virginity in Europe?
A million times! Women were a bit more loose outside this country and that did, eh, broaden out my horizons! I m not saying those women on the continent were totally uninhibited. They weren t. It was the 50s! And you did have to worry about getting someone pregnant. That was the worst thing that could happen in those days. Or, when you had sex with someone abroad there always were these horror stories at the back of your mind about VD. That was a killer in those days.
So, although you d go a bit crazy when you went abroad, in terms of women, the major thing was that you were abroad, away from home, no one knew you. Whereas, say, back in Glasthule, if you carried on like that everyone would know your business. So it was liberating, for me, at that level. And overall, those years were a terrific period in my life. Womanising. Drinking. Though I wasn t a great drinker. A couple of beers and that was enough for me.
So one day you decided to stop screwing around all over Europe, stepped off the Sealink ship, jotted down a little play called I Do Not Like Thee Dr. Fell and voila, you d arrived as a playwright?
That is how it seems! But the play didn t come out of nowhere! It was around 1977, I was 28 and went to the Lantern Theatre Workshop in Merrion Square, simply because a pal of mine wanted to go. He dropped out but I continued going there for a year. Then, at the end of all that I thought, to myself, I could actually write a play . That s where Dr Fell came from.
I was going to give it to whatever amateur dramatic society would do it because I didn t know what else to do with the play! But then, instead, I sent it into the Abbey and as luck would have it, Joe Dowling had just taken over, Tom Kilroy was the Script Editor and they said, this is great, we re going to put it on! And it went on in the Peacock, then transferred up to the Abbey, then to the Oscar in Ballsbridge where it stayed for six months and was an amazing success. That s how it all started for me.
That said, there is another, sadder side to all this. Your dad died before your first play was produced. Do you regret the fact that he never saw it staged, never knew how successful you became?
Yes. It is very sad. Mostly because I ll never know what he really thought was going to become of me. I got the Leaving, went to an Estate Agent, then worked for Sealink and I was still working there when he died. But I do look back and think he would have been really, really proud to think his son became a playwright.
Your mom, on the other hand, shared your success up to six years ago, when she died.
She definitely was proud of what I d become. Mind you, she never used to say it to me. But she d say it to the neighbours. And she liked the plays, certainly.
As to what level she reacted to them at, it s hard to say, because when she died she was ninety. So when she saw the first one she already was 70. And maybe as she got older the entertainment value was what she d take away, rather than, say, the attacks on social mores, or whatever. She d just say the play was really good, everybody was laughing their heads off .
Happy Birthday, Dear Alice, was inspired by what you ve said was the terrible moment that must be faced by many families, when they have to confront the question of whether or not to put a parent in a nursing home.
That is where it came from, yeah. And it is a dreadful, painful moment. We were going along great until she had her first fall. She had about four falls, the first was ten years before she died. She had various pins in her hips. And she would leave these little mats all over the house and fall over them. We d say, would you for Christ s sake take up the mats and she d go, no, the mats are okay. But at the end my mother wasn t falling over mats, she was getting little turns.
I remember one Christmas we were at home and she said, it s a terrible thing to put anyone in a nursing home, don t ever do that to me. That s exactly the moment the play came about. And we all went, you must be joking, ma. We wouldn t even think of it. Here, have a piece of cake. And we believed we wouldn t. But then the moment came where we had to ask ourselves: how are we going to handle this? and it became an issue.
Then she got ill and went into St. Michael s and then to Our Lady s Manor in Dalkey and died two weeks later, so it never came to pass. But the play is about an old woman who is faced with this possibility and, strangely, when I wrote it, I decided not to tell it from the point of view of the children, but from the point of view of the person herself. And the kind of worries, fears and feelings she may have had.
You have said that it is your anger at the attitude of the nouveau riche that, fundamentally, fires many of your plays. As in what, exactly?
Well, one reason I love working in theatre is that playwrights, directors and actors usually are just a little crazy! And I actually love that craziness because it is the exact opposite of the attitude of the the nouveau riche. For example, the corporate types that buy up blocks of seats in theatre or at concerts. Or football matches. You can t get a ticket to see Ireland play because the suits have bought them all up! Or they look at a place and don t see the beauty, they just think, what can we put here that would turn out a greater profit? It s their lack of vision. They drive around in fast cars, mobile phones to their ears, holidays in the Caribbean, go to work, come from work, play tennis and never take the time to smell the roses. And this, to me, sadly, is what many people are now calling the new Irelander. These are the kind of people that frequent pubs that I now avoid because of that.
So your plays are your attempt to remind people of what we are in danger of losing?
Really what I m trying to do is remind people what used to exist and that you shouldn t change everything just for the sake of change. I m not against change but there is such a thing as core values in this country, a soul to this country, an essence that I honestly feel we re losing as we allow ourselves to become just another nameless state in this new Europe.
So how does your new play, The Spirit Of Annie Ross, fit into this equation?
It s about a group of people who spend an overnight in this old house that is allegedly haunted. They re trapped in it for the night and they each are haunted by things in the past, so this haunted thing is a motif of the play. Maybe this is a sign of me growing old but there is a discussion about what is beyond life, what do hauntings mean? As in Is This All There Is? , to quote Peggy Lee. There is a Peggy Lee song in it but I don t want to say, in advance, what it is. Same thing in terms of the play. I don t want to give too much away. Small cast. Five actors.
So, to end, let me run by you a critical quote designed apparently to sum up your life s work in theatre. There are no myths, no agendas, few heroics and little poetry. It is theatre of real life, nothing fancy, unabashedly commercial it fills seats and Farrell lives on the royalties.
I m delighted to say I can make a living out of writing! That s good, surely? Because I can remember when I left Sealink my boss said: okay, so you ve written one play, it s been a success and you think you re going to be able to make a living out there in the world of theatre! How many full-time Irish playwrights can you name that make a living out of it? You can name them on one hand, right? And you really think you re going to be one of those?
Now, to me, the point is that I have been making a living as a playwright for twenty years. Then again, if it was only a matter of making a living out of writing I d write for television. But I don t because I still love theatre. As for the critical comments you read there: what were they, again?
Essentially, that you are a useless, superficial shit as a writer, creating plays that contain no myths, no agendas, few heroics and no poetry.
(laughs) Oh right! So if there s none of that going on in my work, in other words, what is going on? Nothing at all! But take one of those points. No heroes? That s okay by me. There are no heroes in my work. People in my plays go through life, get over obstacles, survive, but they are not heroes, in any great, classical sense. In fact, I m probably anti-heroic. So, fine, I accept that criticism.
And as I say, I don t have agendas. So I m not going to sit down and think to myself there s got to be heroes, myths and poetry in this play. There may be. There may not be. But having said that there are no heroes in my play, there are heroic gestures made by ordinary people.
The plays, as I say, are about survival. Not against the major obstacles but just getting through the small traumas we all face every day. That, to me, can be heroic, in the same sense that I look at both my parents and I see them as my heroes. Because of what they got through in life, what they passed on to us. About what really matters. Those core values. Like maybe even a love of theatre.
If I can pass on even a tiny measure of that through my plays, that s as heroic and poetic as I d want to be. That s more than enough
for me. n